It would seem that the genealogy given in the fragment of the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy might be more authentic than the one given in the Ghallāwiyya. While the importance given to ancestresses in the text of Sīdī Aḥmad al-Bakkāy and its attempt to explain an individual's origins in terms of diversity rather than by a single patriline descending from one important ancestor certainly set it apart from later western Saharan genealogies and from Arab and Muslim genealogies in general, it is obviously a more realistic picture of origins, as a person's ancestors double with each earlier generation rather than becoming fewer. Also, the text of Sīdī Ahmad al-Bakkāy, which is older than the Ghallāwiyya, does not take the genealogies back as far as the later work which, however, is not convincing because of many apparent errors and illogicalities.

The problem of the Iranian hindu- in the mountain name Us.hәndava and Old Indian síndhu- has already been subjected to frequent investigation. Up to 1972 these earlier interpretations are listed in M. Mayrhofer, Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Worterbuch des Altindischen, Lief. 23, 1972, s.v. síndhu-. Accepting a basic meaning ‘flowing water’, connexions have been offered with syandate ‘it flows’ from the time of Yāska till today, assumed as a variant to *syandh-: sindh-, which could be classed as a case of incremental variant -d-with-dh-to syan-, but it has also provoked a doubtful laryngal explanation of -d- with -H-; or assuming a connexion with Old Indian sedh-: sidh-‘to repel’ a doubtful meaning ‘boundary’ has been offered.

This poem by a Macassar Malay describes the successful war of the Dutch against Macassar from 1666 to 1669. It was edited by Dr. C. Skinner for a London Ph.D. and published in 1963. The manuscript of the original poem is no longer available, but it is deduced that it must have been written between July 1669 and June 1670. The name of the author is recorded, an Enci' Amin; we learn from a comment in the poem itself that it was recorded on Chinese paper. It is unusual to know even this much about the original manuscripts of works in traditional Malay literature. Of the two extant manuscripts the earlier, preserved in Leiden, contains only part of the. poem. Although the name of the copyist is not given Dr. Skinner, continuing a fascinating piece of investigation by the Dutch scholar H. T. Damstè, is able to demonstrate with reasonable certainty that it was a Dutch lady, Cornelia Valentijn, wife of the famous Franςis; furthermore, that it would have been copied c. 1710 in Ambon.

The Syriac document recently published by I. Shahîd in The martyrs of Najrân: new documents (Bruxelles, 1971) opens with the following passage:

When surveying the examples listed below it will be noticed that there are no examples of iotized dental s(tem) i(nitial)s, the likely reason being that after dental s. i.s an original y was absorbed in the ensuing process of (full) palatalization. In the case of guttural s. i.s, however, we witness in some cases both the retention of y and its absorption by palatalization. This can be illustrated by the presence of such doublets as skyon-pa ‘to put astride ~ gśon-pa (IIA, ex. 4) or skyuṅ-ka (<*sklyuṅ-ka) ‘jackdaw’ ~ lćuṅ-ka (IIA, ex. 2).

This volume of Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic fragments was acquired from M. Shapira in July 1882 along with many Karaite MSS, but unlike them has not been catalogued. From the ‘Descriptive list of acquisitions’ (in MS) at the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts, it may be gathered that MSS Or. 2581–2 constituted, when acquired, two volumes, while at a later date 2581 had been divided into two volumes (A and B, described in Margoliouth's Catalogue Nos. 329–30), which fact apparently caused Or. 2582 to be overlooked. However, 10 folios of the MS had already been described by S. Poznański (Festschrift Steinschneider, Leipzig, 1896, 207–8) as being part of maqāla iv of al-Qirqisāni's al-Anwār. This identification was subsequently copied by M. Steinschneider, Die arabische Literatur der Juden, Frankfurt a. M., 1902, 79, and also in the index to Margoliouth's Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan MSS in the BM.

The death of Marcel Cohen on 5 November 1974 was a grievous loss to linguistic scholarship, and to the study of Hamito-Semitic, above all of Ethiopian languages. Indeed, Hamito-Semitic studies owe to him their ‘ennoblement’ during the first half of this century. In Ethiopian studies Marcel Cohen acquired a pre-eminent position and became one of our masters along with Ludolf and Dillmann, Praetorius, Mittwoch and Littmann, Guidi and Conti Rossini, who had preceded him since the seventeenth century.

It has long been recognized that the letters n and z, whose initial and medial forms had already fallen together by the date of the ‘Ancient letters’, remained distinct in final position, -n being provided with a long horizontal or vertical tail. At a slightly later period in the history of the Sogdian script two more pairs of letters—still distinguished in all positions in the ‘Ancient letters’— fell together: ‘ain with r,1 and x (ḥīth) with γ (gimel). The rare letter ‘ain does not occur in final position; but both x and γ are comparatively common in all positions. It is therefore remarkable that it should never have been noticed that final x and y are regularly distinguished in exactly the same way as -n and -z. The distinction is clearest in the Buddhist manuscripts,2 in which final x has a long horizontal or vertical tail: — (= ‘horizontal -x’) or L (= ‘vertical -x’), while final γ has only a rudimentary tail pointing down-wards. There is some variation in the distribution of the two forms of -x. In some manuscripts, e.g. Vim. and P 2, both are used interchangeably. In most ‘horizontal -x’ is preferred: it is the only form found in VJ, SCE, Dhu., P 5, and P 6, while in Dhy. and P 3 ‘vertical -x’ is also occasionally employed

Professor R. C. Zaehner, who died suddenly on 24 November 1974, was, at the time of his death, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls. He was born on 8 April 1913 of Swiss parents who had emigrated to England. He was educated at Tonbridge School and won a classical scholarship to Christ Church. After taking a second class in Classical Moderations, he transferred to Oriental Studies, specializing in Persian, and took a first class in 1936. In the years prior to the outbreak of the second World War, he continued his study of Old and Middle Persian under Professor (later Sir Harold) Bailey. As part of his war service he spent the years 1943–1947 at the British Embassy in Tehran, where his knowledge of Persian and understanding of Persia were of immense value. He made a large number of Persian friends, by whom he was regarded with enormous respect and affection. He returned to Oxford, where in 1950 he became University lecturer in Persian.

Although a substantial amount of information is available about Sheikh Hussein of Bale,1 even an approximate dating of his life has so far presented considerable difficulties. An important clue is provided by the genealogy of Sayyid Mahdi [′mæhdi] 2 of Merca in Anonymous 1927, discussed in Ceriilli, 1938, 20–1.3 This genealogy gives 25 intermediate ancestors between Sheikh Hussein and Sayyid Mahdi, but does not indicate when the latter lived.