For over a hundred years, scholars of medieval Jewish history have been interested in the history of the headship of the Jews in Egypt. The first among them, relying mostly on literary documents, believed that the ancient accounts about the establishment of the office of the head of the Jews (Nagid) could be traced back to the Fātimid occupation of Egypt (A.D. 969), while recent scholars—having at their disposal a growing stream of historical data from the Cairo Geniza—have ruled out the early establishment of the headship of the Jews (Negidut) because of the silence about this function in the Geniza documents of the first half of the eleventh century.

With the rejection of the early establishment of the headship of the Jews in Egypt, an approach developed which attempted to view the Gaon, head of the Palestinian academy, as the head of the Jews in the Fātimid empire. Now, the rise of the headship of the Jews in Egypt was seen in conjunction with the decline of the Yeshiva of Eretz Israel, at the close of the eleventh century. Lately, scholarship has been enriched by the deciphering of two new Geniza documents related to the office of the headship of the Jews which provide an opportunity for a renewed discussion of two central problems. The first touches upon the old question of putting a date to the establishment of the headship of the Jews in Egypt, and the second, following on from the first, concerns the issue of the status of the Gaon of Eretz Israel during the Fatimid administration.

Firstly, I accept Beeston's proposal to refer ‘to linguistic data as Minaic, Sabaic, Qatabanic and Hadramitic, leaving Minaean etc. for non-linguistic contexts’ (Beeston, 1987a: 13). His argument (at least with respect to the distinction between the ‘Sabaean’ and the ‘Sabaic’) looks entirely convincing:

The Sabaeans were the inhabitants of the area around Ma'rib. But they shared a common language(no doubt with dialectal varieties) with the peoples of the desert fringes between Ma'rib and Wadial-Jawf, of a considerable part of Wadi al-Jawf itself, and of the high plateaux lying in the angle of those two areas—Arḥab, Qā‘ al-Bawn, Qā‘ Ṣany‘ā’ etc. It is dubious whether these other peoples would have called themselves Sabaeans,1 and it might be preferable therefore to term the language Sabaic rather than Sabaean’ (Beeston, 1979: 115).

Given the dependence on aural transmission in the pre-modern musical traditions of the Islamic Middle East it is not at all surprising to find that compositions were hardly ever notated. If there is a typical method of recording the repertoire it is to be identified, rather, in the song-text anthology, which may provide quite detailed indications of formal structure but contains no melodic specification beyond identifying the principal mode of the piece and serves, therefore, as a textual prompt. Indeed, if we disregard as wholly exceptional the rich documentation of the Ottoman repertoire provided by the extensive collections of notated pieces made by ‘Alī Ufḳī and Cantemir, we find for the seventeenth and earlier centuries just one or two not very informative craps recorded by European observers and the occasional samples provided in theoretical treatises.

Abū Ḥafṣ al-Kirmānī is known mainly from al-Ṭabarī as a rāwī for events in the caliphates of Mūsā al-Hādī and Hārūn al-Rashīd; from al-Jahshiyārī as a rāwī for an anecdote concerning al-Faḍl b. Yaḥyā al-Barmakī (and probably for other, unattributed items of information); and from the mention of him as 'Umar [b.] al-Azraq al-Kirmānī, author of a book called the Akhbār al-Barāmika wa-faḍā'iluhum (‘Historical accounts of the Barmakid family and their merits’) by Ibn ‘Asākir in his great biographical dictionary of the leading figures and scholars associated with his native city of Damascus, citing him as an authority on Khālid b. Barmak's early close connexions with the ‘Abbāsid Imāms Muḥammad b. ‘Alī b. ‘Abd Allāh b. al-'Abbās and his son Ibrāhīm.

Tughluqabad is the first of many sultanate and Mughul towns which were purposely planned and constructed on previously uninhabited sites. Built early in the fourteenth century, Tughluqabad was to serve as the capital of the newly established Tughluq dynasty. There were, of course, three earlier Muslim capitals in the vicinity, the first the Delhi of Rāi Pithūrā, converted to an Islamic town after the Ghurid conquest in 588/1192–3; the second Jalāl al-dīn Khahīs Shahr-i naw, which was founded by Muՙiẓẓ al-dīn Kai Qubād (685–8/1286–9) at Kīlukharī (or Kīlugharī) but left incomplete at the time of his death, and the third Sīrī, built by Alՙ al-dīn Khaljī between 698/1298–9 and 700/1300–1 in the fields outside the walls of the older Delhi, but nothing has remained from these towns except parts of the fortification walls and some isolated monuments. The ruins of Tughluqabad, on the other hand, are enshrined in a time capsule. Built between 1320 and 1325 by Ghiyāth al-dīn Tughluq, the town had a brief life, and within a generation was abandoned and its population reduced to the size of a small village. As a result, most of its remains are datable to the short period of its duration in the first half of the fourteenth century. The only exception, as we shall see, are the remains of a small settlement which continued to exist around the old town centre, and in the late Mughal period also occupied the citadel.

After the Islamic conquest, the Greek Orthodox, so-called Melkite ( = Royalist), church fairly early adopted Arabic as its literary language. Their intellectual centres in Syria/Palestine were Jerusalem, along with the monaster ies of Mar Sabas and Mar Chariton in Judea, Edessa and Damascus. A great many Arabic manuscripts stemming from the first millennium, some of them dated, copied at the monastery of Mar Chariton and especially at that of Mar Saba, have been discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the only monastery that has not been pillaged and set on fire by the bedouin. These manuscripts are of great importance for the history of the Arabic language. Because Christians were less devoted to the ideal of the ‘arabiyya than their Muslim contemporaries, their writings contain a great many devi ations from classical Arabic, thus enabling us to reconstruct early Neo-Arabic, the predecessor of the modern Arabic dialects, and bridge a gap of over one thousand years in the history of the Arabic language.

The occasion for the present article was the appearance for sale in a London auction of the portrait, apparently by the Scottish painter Sir William Allan 1782–1850), reproduced here on p1. I. It represented a young Persian gentleman in mid-nineteenth-century dress. On the back was a label in a later hand, which read:

‘Muzjd [read Mirza?] Mohammed AH Bey / Professor of Oriental Languages / University of Hazan / Painted by Sir William All…’.

On 26 March 1987 the present writer received an inquiry from the cataloguer, Karen Taylor, seeking help with the identification of the sitter and his place of residence. Some rapid inquiries were made at the time, from which it appeared that the university was probably that of Kazan in eastern Russia, and that the sitter may have had some connexion with a teacher of Persian known to the celebrated Russian Orientalist V. V. Bartol'd. However, records relating to Kazan then available in London were insufficient to support a definite identification. The portrait was sold as Lot no. 352 in the auction held on 4th November 1987, and was reproduced in the catalogue of the sale.Subsequent research, and inquiries in Russia, have brought forth fuller information about the sitter, a person whose career was unusual and distinguished, and who may be considered one of the founders of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg. In spite of the time which has passed since the sale, it seems worth while to put the resulting information on record.

The expression pramāṇabhūta is attested in a number of Indian grammaticaland philosophical texts, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, its existence in texts no longer accessible inSanskrit being inferable from their translations in Tibetan where we find its standard equivalent tshad mar gyur pa. But the grammatical correctness and the interpretation of the term have given rise to a good deal of discussion and exegesis. Some commentators have taken up the grammatical question as to why we have the form pramāṇabhūta rather than the at first sight perhaps more normal form pramāṇībhūta. And in the Buddhist Pramāṇa-school a problem arises as to the precise meaning of the expression pramāṇabhūta employed as an epithet of a person. For by Dignāga and Dharmakirti pramāṇa has been exhaustively divided into pratyakṣa ‘(direct) perceptual knowledge’ and anumāna ‘inferential knowledge’, so that in the usage of their school at least a person (puruṣa, pudgala)—as opposed to knowledge or a cognition (jñāna = šes pa, or dhi/buddhi = blo)— would not strictly speaking be considered in the first instance as a pramāṇa.

The Arabic geographical literature of the Middle Ages used several terms to indicate limits and frontiers, including āfāq, ḥudūd and tukhūm. For the external frontiers of Islam itself the term most commonly used was thughūr (sg. thaghr). And among these it was the Arab-Byzantine frontier, which to some was the frontier par excellence, which came closest to having a nomenclature peculiar to itself. In this essay I wish to demonstrate that this nomenclature, and the picture which we have of this region, do not derive from administrative history so much as from a series of superimpositions made by medieval writers on geography and related subjects. I intend to follow Professor Wansbrough's lead, by showing the consequences of the ‘use by many of the same (limited) sources of information’. I also wish to emphasize that differences over how things are to be named reflect conflicts over who is to have power over them.

The main subject of this paper is the influence of Western science on the philosophy of the young scholar Tan Sitong (1865–98) who was active in the reform movement of the late Qing dynasty. It seeks to show that his understanding of Western science was not as confused and superficial as some commentators have claimed, and that in fact his conception of yitai drew on views of the ether and electricity which were held by some at least of the most eminent Western scientists of his time. It also demonstrates that yitai is the direct descendant of the qi of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhang Zai (1020–77), and shows how Tan developed the views of Kang Youwei (1858–1927) on the relationship of qi to consciousness.

Among the Tibetan texts in the Sven Hedin Collection now preserved in the Ethnographical Museum (Folkens Museum), Stockholm, there are three documents which are considered to belong to the Old Tibetan period. Their photos were first published in Bailey (1973), together with comments on a few Khotanese-related words, the texts being numbered Hedin 1, 2 and 3. But since then, they have not been paid due attention. In May 1990, I was able to examine these three manuscripts by courtesy of the Folkens Museum and Professor Staffan Rosén, secretary of the Hedin Collection.

On examination, I realized that all three texts are contracts, but of different kinds: that is, Hedin 1 is a sale contract, Hedin 2 a loan contract, and Hedin 3 a contract of hiring. Each exemplifies one of the three major types of Old Tibetan contract. Although different in kind, they show a close resemblance in both form and content: they are written on paper of similar size and quality. The left edge of each document is torn off in a similar way, but my attempts to join them together showed that they were not likely to have formed one piece. Paleographically, the three texts are written in similar styles, though apparently by different hands. They also have in common somenames of the persons concerned (cf. §IV). All these shared features clearly suggest that these three texts, even though they were not originally one, belong to the same period and location.

The ՙAlbāުiyya are the followers of al-ՙAlbā՚ b. Dhira՚ al-Dawsī, who set ՙAlī above the Prophet, saying that Muḥammad had been sent by ՙAlī, whom he called a divine being. … Some believe in the divinity of both ՙAlī and Muḣammad, but still think ՙAlī superior; these are called the ՙAyniyya. Others who think them both divine put Muḣammad first; these are called the Mīmiyya. Yet others believe in the divinity of all five Companions of the Cloak, Muḣammad, ՙAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, as equally imbued with the spirit of God.

Immediately after finishing his Kurzgefaβtes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen (KEWA), M. Mayrhofer had the very commendable courage to start work on an Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (EWA), of which the first 11 fascicles now (Autumn 1992) lie before us. It is not, as the author rightly insists,‘a new (and improved) edition’ of KEWA, but a renewed attempt in its own rights. It is an attempt to produce ‘an etymological dictionary of’ a big corpus language (i.e. of Sanskrit)’ in ‘a practicable and finishable form’, that is: an etymological dictionary such as could be brought to completion ‘by a single scholar within his life time’,—provided this scholar would have the industry and tenacious dedication of a Mayrhofer, we should like to add. Even in the close atmosphere of such a somewhat constraining qualification, Mayrhofer aims high: he thinks of –an etymological dictionary approaching the fulfilment of demands of an ideal order–. The differences between the former work and the one recently begun, already clearly recognizable, are many and conspicuous. The changes introduced are mostly—not always, as is only to be expected—distinct improvements. One of the most important changes is highly welcome: the conscientious- reference to the first occurrence of each word in Sanskrit literature. The attribute ‘kurzgefaβt’ does not appear in the title. Even the KEWA was not actually ‘conciseမ: it was so in comparison only with the planned Vergleichendes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen by W. Wüst

John Wansbrough's rebukes to historians find their wittiest expression in his ‘Res ipsa loquitur’, an essay in which the nub of the problem seems to be this, that he thinks historians are writing novels and they think they are presenting the facts. Accused of engaging with language games, narrative structures and creative mimesis, a wise historian might decide to be flattered, and stick to his last. Wansbrough, after all, is also a historian: a typological assessment of his work will not (yet) find that he has slipped into the genre of novel, or theology. Even his extensive exercises in literary criticism are part of an effort to tell the history of a community. His objections are to the arbitrarily privileged position of ‘reality’, the tyranny of some narrative structures, the eschewal of interpretative versatility, and a lack of methodological and literary self-consciousness. Significant criticisms, but presented in a context which implies not only serious concern with but enjoyment of the achievement of these historians, novelists malgré eux.

Students of traditional Chinese political institutions cannot afford to disregard the importance of the Ch'ing confidential memorial system. Essentially, this dynastic institution had existed for centuries, but it reached maturity only in the Ch'ing dynasty. Under this system, government officials in various positions from many regions outside the capital submitted confidential memorials which reached the imperial desk through special channels. After reading and commenting on them in vermilion ink, the ruler returned the memorials to their authors confidentially via the same channels. This system resulted in direct communication between ruler and officials, and under the vigilant Ch'ing emperors, it enhanced imperial autocratic power in several ways

In the traditional Chinese state the ruler, however enlightened or benevolent, was an autocrat. His words were law; his decisions final. Without his sanction, no state affairs or government plans could proceed. His authority could only be circumvented or manipulated within the bureaucratic procedure and for this reason he worked hard to safeguard his authority by keeping a close eye on his officials throughout the empire.

This preliminary study is intended to analyse the Muslim exegesis of the term ՙālamīn in the Qur՚ānic expression rabb al-ՙālamīn (‘Lord of the Worlds’), with reference to Sūrat al-Fātiḥa, verse 2: ‘Praise be to Allāh, Lord of the ‘ālamīn’. The relevance of the tafsīr of ՙālamīn is multifaceted: it indicates the awareness among medieval, as well as modern, exegetes of the need to explain a term which was felt, at least grammatically, to be anomalous; it provides the opportunity to discuss the interpretations of a formula often repeated in Muslim prayer but rarely examined in theological context; finally, it leads through these interpretations—as is often the case with the tafsīr genre—into wider elaborations arising from the text (or imposed on it?).

The data and analyses of Tangut verbal morphology which I have presented (1979b, 1981, 1982, 1985) represent the cumulative result of more than twenty years of research of Tangut texts. It is with great regret that I saw my analyses misunderstood (LaPolla, 1992). In order to clarify my view on the Tangut verbal agreement, I feel compelled to give a succinct account of the phenomena causing so much controversy in the Tibeto-Burman linguistic literature.

The Tangut verb shows agreement for person and number of actant. The three overt agreement morphemes are <-ŋa2> (first person singular), <-na2> (second person singular) and <-ni2> (first and second person plural). The Tangut verb shows overt agreement only with first and second person actant. Third person involvement is marked by zero. A Tangut intransitive verb agrees with the subject, i.e. the ‘intransitive subject’. The two rules for the distribution of the overt agreement markers in the transitive verb as formulated in my Tangut grammar (Kepping, 1985: 233–4) are: (1) If one and no more than one of the actants is a first or second person, then the verb will overtly agree with that actant regardless of its syntactic role, and (2) if a transitive verb has two non-third person actants, the verb will agree with the grammatical patient or ‘transitive object’.