My attention was first focused on the relation of the labial F (P) to the aspirated dental mute when I was translating Ibn Ishaq's Biography of the Prophet Muhammad.There I came across the following statement made by his editor, Ibn Hisham, who died in the year of the Hijra 218, i.e. A.D. 834: ‘ The Arabs say taḥannuth and taḥannuf, meaning the Ḥanafī religion. They change the TH into F as, for example, when they say jadath and jadaf when they mean a grave.’ Though the word that gave rise to the editor's comment does not belong to the TH-F class the principle that TH and F interchange is sound and unassailable. The indefatigable Brockelmann noted this important observation and gave a list of early Arabian authorities for the usage, together with a number of references to dialects in which it existed, or still exists to-day, from which it is clear that the phenomenon is to be met with all over Arabia and in North Africa. Landberg had drawn attention to its prevalence in Hadramaut and ‘Umān, and had often met with it in al-Shahr and Dathīna.

The inscriptions described in this article were discovered in the course of a short journey which I made in the vilayet of Urfa, Turkey, in May–June, 1952. It is my pleasant duty to thank those who made this journey possible— the School of Oriental and African Studies, who granted me leave to travel to Turkey, and the officials of the Turkish Department of Antiquities, who accorded me facilities to operate in that remote area of the country. I am especially grateful to Mr. Seton Lloyd, Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, for his generous encouragement and help; Mr. Lloyd had visited Sumatar Harabesi during the previous year, and it was he who drew my attention to the monuments there.

Whereas during the earlier part of South Arabian history dating is effected only by reference to the year of office of an eponymous magistrate, from about the 1st century A.D. we begin to find texts dated by a fixed era. The earliest inscriptions so dated are R.3958 of ‘ the year 144 ’, and R.4197b of ‘ the year 172 ’. Although these two texts are in Sabæan dialect, both have associations with the Beiḥān area, and Albright is probably right in suggesting that they do not refer to a ‘ Sabæan ’ era. The majority of the dated texts which are unquestionably Sabæan belong to the 6th and 7th centuries of that era.

Office-holders in the Mamluk kingdom were, as is well known, divided into three categories: those who belonged to the Mamluk caste and were called ‘ men of the sword ’ (arbāb as-suyūf), those who were civilians and were known as ‘ holders of administrative offices ’ or as ‘ men of the pen ’ (arbāb al-waẓā' if ad-dīwānīya, or arbāb or ḥamalat al-aqlām), and those who belonged to the clerical class and were called ‘ holders of religious offices ’ or ‘ men of the turban ’ (arbāb al-waẓā'if ad-dīnīya, or al-muta'ammimūn). We list below some of those offices which had a direct connexion with the army; some have been discussed elsewhere in our work on the Mamluk army, and will therefore be accorded but the briefest attention. We shall in addition outline the evolution of the offices of the Mamluk kingdom as well as the transformations which they underwent in the various periods.

In my articles on Fakhr al-dīn Gurgānl's poem Vīs-u-Rāmīn 1 I made a point of its realistic geographical and historical background which, in my opinion, connects it with the Arsacid tradition. One of the important places in the story is the castle of Gūrāb in which the heroine Vis was kept and which belonged to the family of her future rival Gul. Muslim geographers still referred to this place lying at the junction of the roads from Hamadān and Nihāvand to Karaj, and Gūrāb is mentioned in the course of the military operations of the Seljuk Sulḍān Mas'ūd (towards 541/1146), see Rāḥal al-ṣudūr, 242. In more recent times its titles to distinction had been forgotten.

It is well known that the Almohades instituted a politico-social system or hierarchy. In it the subjects of the Almohade state were divided into ranks or grades of aristocracy which do not appear to be closely connected with their administrative arrangements but may originally have been a battle-array. The broad lines of this system are fairly clear; it is the details that are often obscure. The Mahdī's, later the Caliph's, advisers, the ‘ cabinet’ of his government, were ten men known simply as ‘ the Ten’ or Ahl al-jamā'a. Below them came a council called ‘ the Fifty ’ {Ahl Khamsīn or Ayt Khamsīn). The mass of the people were divided thus in descending order (I follow here Ibn al-Qaṭṭān, later copied by the anonymous author of the Ḥulal al-mawshiyya): the Talaba, the Ḥuffāẓ, the Ahl al-dār, Hargha, Ahl Tīnmāl, Gadmīwa, Ganfīsa, Hintāta, the Jund, the Ghuzāt, and Rumāt. Other writers have additional categories and put them in a slightly different order. Gaudefroy-Demombynes has used the Kitāb al-ansāb for the light it throws on the description of Hafsid institutions given in his partial edition of ‘Umarl's Masālik al-abṣār, and more recently Terrasse has summarized its information in his Histoire du Maroc.

On several occasions in the Nara period, the Takahasi and the Azumi families quarrelled over the precedence to be observed at religious ceremonies. These petty struggles for preference are in themselves of little historical significance, but they are of interest in that certain family records with which the Takahasi family attempted to justify their claims have been preserved and constitute what is known as the Takahasi Uzibumi (The corresponding Azumi records have unfortunately been lost.) Though the exact date of its composition is unknown, the Takahasi Uzibumi belongs undoubtedly to the 8th century and is the oldest extant document of its kind; yet it appears to have been neglected by commentators, for I have been unable to find any commentary on it save that of the kokugakusya Ban-Nobutomo (1773–1846)1 Certainly, these fragmentary records do not have as great a value as, say, the records of the Imibe family, the Kogo Syuui

This article is based on a study of selected utterances in ‘ Lhasa Tibetan’ (LT) as spoken by Mr. Rigẖdzin dBaṅpo (R.) in a particular style (‘ speaking style ’). The term LT is used for the class-dialect spoken by members of the sku-drag class in Lhasa and elsewhere, and also by other Tibetans who associate with members of this class. R.'s utterances may be considered in terms of three styles, ‘ spelling style ’, ‘ reading style ’, and ‘ speaking style ’, each requiring a separate statement at phonetic, grammatical, and lexical levels alike. The material presented below is drawn from utterances in the ‘ speaking style ’; all utterances appropriate to the reading and quoting of written texts, ‘ reading-style ’ utterances, have been excluded from it.

This paper deals with certain features of the Bantu dialect spoken at Machame on the western slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanganyika Territory. It arises very largely as the result of work done in London with the help of Mr. S. J. Ntiro, whose home is in Machame, but in part from observations made in the field during study-leave in Africa. The subject-matter of what follows is narrowly circumscribed, but the treatment is relevant to problems of more general interest in linguistic analysis, especially those involved in the analysis of so-called ‘ tone languages ’.

The material to be considered consists of disyllabic words of which the syntactical function is identical except in so far as they are sub-categorized by features of grammatical concord: it is by reference to this function that these words are here called ‘ nouns ’. They are all equally analysable in terms of a single prefix and a stem.

Every history book describes the system of registration and pensions (dīwān) set up by 'Umar I and the reform attempted by 'Umar II. Wellhausen set out the causes of dissatisfaction with it, the larger sums given to the Syrians, the desire of converts to share equally with the Arabs, and the resentment of the Arabs at the government keeping much of the money instead of handing it all over to the fighters who had earned it. These notes do not claim to be exhaustive but throw some light on the working and intricacies of the system.