A difficulty has arisen in exegesis of the gospels. Allowing for variations, scholars figure in two main classes, the first largely introverted, the specialists, and the second “outsiders” who attempt to collaborate with them. The first, far the more numerous, comprises those who examine internally the New Testament, using Qumran and other intertestamental material, and Old Testament texts where they are cited or quoted in the New Testament, to enable the gospels to comment upon themselves and each other, employing in this procedure skills adequately described as “literary-historical”. One may refer to these scholars as “the critics”. Fashion gives great credence to “redaction-criticism”, heir to “source-criticism” and “form-criticism”. National traits tend to emerge, as is not surprising since subjective criteria are bound to operate in an estimate of what the evangelists were about, and national traits easily escape notice amongst their victims. In fact no one knows who the evangelists were or how they worked. Internal evidence alone leads to unending contradictions. Scepticism continues to play a role, and passages (such as one to which we come) which are not internally “corroborated” are more or less confidently dismissed as fabrications. The history, the archaeology of the New Testament is, at its most sensitive and useful point, at the mercy of skills that are principally literary and unashamedly academic. What is literary is of enormous value, but in no other field would it claim to exclude parallel sources of information.

There are many stories connected with the decipherment of ancient writings and the recovery of forgotten languages, but these stories need not be retold here. Furthermore, they usually deal only with the discovery of the key, that brief moment of insight when some datum is arrived at, which when inserted causes the rest of the puzzle to fall into place. But what we are interested in here is the tremendous amount of work, routine but necessary, which precedes that moment and makes the decipherment possible, and the even more tremendous amount of work which follows that moment and results in the recovery of the language.

It will not have escaped the notice of anyone reading the Aśokan inscriptions that the emperor's attitude towards the killing of animals, including human beings, was not entirely consistent. In RE I(B) we read hiddā no kichi jive ālabhitu pajohitaviye (in the version at K), “Here no living being must be killed and sacrificed.” In RE III(D) we find pānānaṃ anālaṃbhe sādhu, “Abstention from killing animals is meritorious.” In RE IV(C) we read vaḍhite … anālaṃbhe pānānaṃ avihisā bhūtānaṃ, “There are now promoted … abstention from killing animals, abstention from hurting living beings.” In RE XI(C) pānānaṃ anālaṃbhe occurs again. PE V contains a long list of animals which Aśoka had made inviolable (avadhiyāni) and not to be killed (no haṃtaviyāni). In PE VII(NN) we read dhaṃmavaḍhi vaḍhitā avihiṃsāye bhūtānaṃ anālaṃbhāye pānānaṃ, “The progress of morality has been promoted (because it leads) to abstention from hurting living beings (and) to abstention from killing animals.” With specific regard to men, Aśoka expresses his regret about the number of persons killed in, or as a consequence of, the war in Kaliṅga (RE XIII(E)), and states his hope that the forest dwellers will repent so that they may not be killed (avatrapeyu na ca haṃñeyasu, in the reading of Sh at RE XIII(N)). It appears, however, from PE IV that men could be sentenced to death in Aśoka's empire.

Die proto-elamische Schrift bietet sich uns in zwei Abarten dar: A, die Schrift der Rechnungstäfelchen; B, die monumentale oder lapidäre, auf Stein und einigen anderen Gegenständen. Der Aufbau der Rechnungen in der Schrift A kann durch zwei Beispiele einfacher, wohl primitiver Art gezeigt werden. Damit kann man als ganz ähnlich zwei Beispiele aus den sumerischen “Archaischen Texten aus Uruk” vergleichen. Sehr weitgehend ist die Ähnlichkeit der beiden Zahlsysteme, besonders was die komplizierten Bruchzahlzeichen angeht. Aber im übrigen weichen beide Schriften vollständig voneinander ab, sodass vom Sumerischen keine Hilfe fürs Proto-elamische zu erwarten ist.

The aim of this article is to present a complete bibliography of the works of Cuvāmi Vētācalam (popularly known as Maṟaimalai Aṭikaḷ, 1876–1950) which are available at the British Museum (Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts), the India Office Library, and the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. This may be of some help to students of Tamil language and literature and also to persons dealing with the history of the Madras Presidency in the first half of this century. Also included at the end is a list of works of Aṭikaḷ that are not available in London.

The system of writing which we call Linear Elamite was fully developed in the 23rd century B.C., but it seems that it did not survive the last of the 12 rulers of the dynasty of Awan. The name of this king was, in Babylonian, Puzur-Inshushinak. He reigned, according to the middle chronology, from c. 2260 to c. 2225 B.C. From c. 2200 B.C. the Elamites used only the Akkadian cuneiform script which they formerly had employed alongside their own Elamite script.

In a chapter on “loanwords” in his book The Japanese language, Roy Andrew Miller quotes the following poem composed by H.I.H. the Crown Prince of Japan on the occasion of the New Year's Poetry Ceremony at the Imperial Palace in 1965:

This can be translated as follows: “The conveyor-belt which brings in the feed revolves and thousands of young birds cluster about it to eat.” I quote the poem not as a gem of literature, but as in a sense symbolic of modern Japan, a country which loves and clings to tradition, but is very ready to adapt it. The poem is a modern example of the ancient traditional form called tanka, or “short song”, consisting of five unrhymed lines containing 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables respectively—a form which has existed and been practised for over twelve hundred years. This tanka, though, is one which must surely have ancient tanka poets turning in their graves, not simply because the syllable count of the last two lines is all wrong, but because—horror of horrors!—it admits words of foreign origin among native Japanese words. This is obvious enough in the case of the ultra-modern word which drew Miller's attention to the poem, beruto konbea. But it applies equally to another type of word which the poem uses, namely words of Chinese origin. Words like these were available to poets in the hey-day of tanka poetry, from say 900—1300, but they were shunned like the plague. At that time, they would have stuck out like a sore thumb just as beruto konbea does today.

The great and important Armenian colony of New Julfa in Iṣfahān, Iran, was in existence from the very beginning of the seventeenth century, when Shāh ‘Abbās I deported large groups of Armenians from their homeland to the districts of Chahār Maḥāl and Iṣfahān, the capital, and to Perria (Aleppo). In a very short time, expatriate Armenians made New Julfa a great suburb of the city, gaining universal recognition as an important eastern centre of trade and commerce and glowingly described by all European travellers who visited Iṣfahān in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In detail, the following is the situation regarding the languages of ancient Asia Minor and Mesopotamia:

Non-Indo-European language

Apart from the Semitic languages and Egyptian, at least five isolated languages are ascribable to that period in which the Sumerians and Egyptians had already invented their script. All five languages are recorded in the so-called Akkadian cuneiform, a syllabic script which the Sumerians had developed from their picture-writing.

This paper is concerned with the phonetic values of four important Hieroglyphic signs: ↑ (HH, Nos. 376, 377) and (HH, Nos. 209, 210). To ↑ and the values i and a were ascribed long before the discovery of the Karatepe bilingual in 1948. On the other hand the differentiation of the second sign of each pair, viz. and , by the double stroke has never been fully explained. Conventionally the signs were transcribed as ī and ā, and this transcription has now become canonical, though there is no reason to believe that the distinction between, e.g., ↑ and is one of length.

Das Lydische ist uns hauptsächlich durch eine Reihe von Inschriften bekannt, die fast alle auf dem Gebiet des klassischen Lydien (insbesondere in der Hauptstadt Sardis) gefunden wurden. Sieht man von einigen kleineren Schriftzeugnissen ab (wie Münzen und Siegel), deren Herkunft nicht feststeht, so beschränkt sich die Anzahl der Inschriften, die ausserhalb des lydischen Gebiets ans Licht gekommen sind und wohl nur von der vorübergehenden Anwesenheit von einzelnen lydischen Sprechern zeugen, auf drei: eine Weihinschrift aus Pergamon, ein Steinfragment mit Resten von drei Wörtern aus Aphrodisias in Karien und ein altertümliches Graffito aus Oberägypten. Inwieweit die als lydisch bezeichneten Glossen tatsächlich von dieser Sprache Zeugnis ablegen, ist in vielen Fällen fraglich: bezeichnenderweise findet nur eine solche Glosse eine sichere Übereinstimmung in der Sprache der uns bekannten Inschriften, was indessen auch auf Zufall beruhen könnte; es handelt sich um πλμυς “König”, dem das qaλmλuś unserer Texte entspricht, doch muss man bei diesem als Name eines kleinasiatischen Häuptlings schon bei Homer belegten Wort einschränkend hinzufügen, dass es wahrscheinlich ein altes Lehnwort im Griechischen darstellt. Hinzu kommt noch τασας, das sicher mit lyd. tavśaś “mächtig” zu identifizieren ist und als Glosse ohne Angabe der Herkunftsprache überliefert wurde.

Crete is a large off-shore island, and whether it belongs primarily to Europe or to Asia is a moot point—it is equidistant from the European and Asiatic mainlands of the Aegean. Inevitably it has served as an intermediate link in the transmission of influences in either direction. Hence I am pleased to see its indigenous script accorded a place in this Symposium, alongside many other famous problems.

Two categories of non-Greek inscriptions from Crete, known as Minoan and Eteocretan, are from different periods. Minoan documents stem from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages (particularly c. 1850–1400 B.C.), whereas the extant Eteocretan texts were inscribed during Early Iron III (c. 600–300 B.C.). In assigning both categories to North-west Semitic, we shall base our conclusions on the inscriptions themselves, rather than on secondary considerations. Proper names will not be used as primary evidence, because people (including ourselves) often bear names derived from languages other than the one they speak. The same goes for the names of the places they inhabit and of the gods they worship. We shall not reiterate the evidence of history and tradition. Since our problem is linguistic, we shall concentrate on the direct linguistic data in the Minoan and Eteocretan inscriptions.

C'est au cours du IIe millénaire avant notre ére, plus exactement vers la fin du XVIe siècle, que l'île de Chypre a connu sa première écriture. L'aspect et la nature des plus anciens documents indiquent que cette écriture est très probablement issue du “linéaire A” crétois, et pour cette raison, Arthur Evans l'avait dénommée “chypro-minoenne”. Cette branche la plus orientale des écritures linéaires égéennes va connaître assez rapidement un développement autonome et donner naissance à des répertoires nouveaux, soit à Chypre même, sur le site d'Enkomi, soit, hors de l'île, à Ras Shamra-Ougarit, sur la côte syrienne. En effet, si la documentation encore insuffisante ne permet pas de retracer toutes les étapes de son développement, il est possible de déceler les phases essentielles. II y a tout d'abord une période archaïque, représentée par de rares témoignages datant du XVIe et du XVe siècle, lesquels, aussi bien par leur présentation matérielle que par le dessin précis des signes, apparaissent encore comme des reflets fidèles de ceux des documents crétois. Ensuite, vers le XIVe siècle, on voit apparaître un répertoire chypro-minoen bien établi, qui a pris son caractère propre et ne montre plus qu'une ressemblance lointaine avec l'écriture “mère” de la Crète.