This paper outlines the centrality of the Late Roman period in the settlement history of Palestine, and the marginal contribution of the Christian establishment to the development of the land. Settlement momentum during these periods resulted from the fact that Palestine was part of the Roman Empire. The historical trends in Palestine should be regarded as part of a broader political settlement drive that characterized the eastern parts of the Roman realm during the period under discussion. The argument that the process of expansion was unique and stemmed from Palestine's holiness in the eyes of the Christian world is unfounded.

The student who approaches the study of the turbulent life of Ibn Taymiyya will soon realize that Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, his renowned shāfi‘ī disciple, is indeed one of the main sources for the Hanbalī scholar's biographers. Al-Dhahabī wrote many biographical notices of Ibn Taymiyya and one of these has been identified with the manuscript source presented in this article. The article briefly introduces the source, discusses its content and its importance in relation to the early biographies of Ibn Taymiyya as is evident from the text, and raises some questions about the state of consensus towards the Hanbalī jurist among his traditionalist Damascene fellows. An edition and annotated translation of the Arabic text are appended to the introduction.

This paper looks at the professional alternatives that Buddhism offered to women by analysing the important role played by a female master in the as yet little studied Dhūta movement, a form of ‘heretical’ Chan Buddhism that flourished during the final years of the Jin dynasty and afterwards in the Yuan dynasty. By examining the descriptions of female master Jizhao and male master Puguang, as seen in epitaphs composed by officers-literati and preserved in a Bejing gazetteer dating back to the mid-fourteenth century, this paper aims to highlight some features of the Dhūtaists' discourse of femininity and also to point out the differences vis-à-vis orthodox Chan constructs, in order finally to evaluate whether such a discourse could have an influence on the general definitions and content of gender roles.

The historical development of Vedic exegesis, as attested in the Rgvedic and Sāmavedic commentaries, remains virtually unexplored, although those that survive have long been available in print, those of the Sāmaveda since the 1870s (the Sāmavedic Sāyana) and 1941 (the relatively early Mādhava and the later Bharatasvāmin). A new edition of the Ārcika or recitation text of the chanted Sāmaveda, currently appearing in the Harvard Oriental Series, combines some improved readings for its commentaries with several disappointing features, notably the failure (so far) to provide either the crucial melodic transcriptions (Gāna) of chanted texts or the bracketing of spurious passages in Sāyana, both of which are valuable assets of the Bibliotheca Indica edition. In this article, an attempt is made to show that the Ārcika commentators Mādhava and Bharatasvāmin have no independent value, being wholly dependent upon Skandasvāmin's Nirukta commentary and the Vedārthaprakāśa that subsists in Sāyana's Sāmavedic and Rgvedic adaptations; and that they were themselves responsible for the unhappy compromise between Gāna performance and Rgvedic poetry that the Ārcika corpus actually represents, and hence ultimately also for the two recensions of Vedārthaprakāśa that are ascribed to Sāyana in the fourteenth century.