Although until recently no study had been undertaken to investigate the poetry included in Ibn Isḥāq's Sīra with a view to establishing on internal evidence the authenticity of such of it as may be genuine and revealing the spurious character of the forgeries, doubts as to the authenticity of this poetry in general or of certain poems in particular have been expressed by various writers, critics or other persons, since the time of Ibn Ishaq himself. Internal evidence attesting to the spurious character of the different poems varies widely from the immediately obvious, such as ascribing to a Himyarite king lines in simple plain Arabic or ascribing to a polytheist a poem allegedly attacking the Prophet and the Muslims which yet speaks of him in reverential terms and of his companions with respect, to the more subtle. The purpose of this article, however, is to survey and comment on some of the opinions which directly or indirectly stigmatize the poetry of the Sira in whole or in part as spurious.

A ‘Mirror for magistrates’ entitled ‘The manners of kings and advice to them’ (adab al-mulūk'iḥhum) precedes in MS Or. 9446 of the British Museum the suḥbat al-mulūk (commonly called kitāb al-tāj) which is ascribed to Jāḥiຓ. As the former names Saladin, the ascription to Jāḥiຓ, if meant to apply to it, is wrong. Each section begins with a line or two, ‘The prudent king will do this, will not do that’, followed by one or more examples from history.

The land of the Ahiank‘ or Caucasian Albania, whose geography and customs already attracted the attention of Strabo and Pliny, represents the easternmost part of the Armenian sphere of influence. The historical events which took place in this region were described by the ancient Armenian historians P'awstos Biwzandai, Lazar P'arpei, Elišē Vardapet, Movsēs Xorenai, etc., and their works were subsequently drawn upon by Movsēs Kalankatuai or Dasxuranci for the compilation called the History of the Aluank' which remains our principal source of information on the country down to the tenth century.

In view of the scarcity of publications on the Turkic languages of the Soviet Union, especially the Turkic languages of Siberia, every contribution to this subject is highly welcome. One of these is C. G. Simpson's Some features of the morphology of the Oirot (Gorno-Altai) language (issued by the Central Asian Research Centre in association with St. Antony's College (Oxford) Soviet Affairs Study Group), 1955, which, in 68 pp. of typescript, tries to give the essentials of Oyrot morphology, being based, as the author says, mainly on Dyrenkova's Oyrot grammar (Γpaмматика ОЙротского ЯзьІ,ка Moscow, 1940, 302 pp.) and Baskakov's grammatical sketch of the Oyrot language in the little Oyrot dictionary, published by himself and T. M. Toščakova.

In the following 15 condensed analyses are published some of the many problems arising when the full Indo-Iranian field is considered. Only when all the Iranian evidence is studied together with the Old Indian will it be possible to survey Indo-Iranian as a whole, an indispensable preliminary to the history of the Indo-Iranian vocabulary, and the texts behind. The constant necessity of quoting elementary data indicates how little has yet been garnered into convenient reference books. The workers (and they, too, usually distracted by other tasks) have hitherto been very few.

The belief in immortality and the immeasurable life-span of a single existence is found in the earliest records of the Indian religions. The general trend of the Vedas, the epics, and the Purāṇas is towards immortalizing their devatās and deities. The avatāras of the Hindu Godhead, in spite of their earthly existence, were considered free from the laws of birth and death. In their case these incidents were spoken of as mere appearances, since such beings were but devices of the immortal God to work among mortals.

These remarks on the verb complex are based on the speech system of one informant. The informant was born in Tientsin but was brought up in Peking, and lived in both Peking and Tientsin until 1948. She does not wish her name to be divulged, but I should nevertheless like to place on record here my very great indebtedness to her for her great patience and conscientiousness.

Three details of the background ought to be explained before we come to discuss the subject itself: (1) the bimetallism of the Ch'ing currency; (2) the rigidity of the Ch'ing fiscal system; and (3) the financial stringency at the end of the Tao-kuang period.

In this essay an attempt will be made, with the assistance of Chinese sources, to define the political status of Tāmbraliṅga in South East Asian history from the end of the tenth century until the early thirteenth century. This subject has been bedevilled by a textual error in the Sung shih in connexion with an embassy from Tāmbraliṅga to China in 1001, with the name for Tāmbraliṅga rendered as ‘Tan-mei-liu ’; the transliteration should have been ‘Tan-liu-mei ’ The error was a minor one, but unfortunately it has had consequences out of proportion to its size. In particular, it seems to have been indirectly responsible for an exaggerated estimate of the extent of Śrīvijayan influence in the Malay Peninsula during a considerable part of that empire's history.

For a definition of the term huong-hỏa, we can do no better than give two quotations, one from a Frenchman, the other from a Vietnamese. ‘Le huong-hỏa’, says Professor M. R. Deloustal ‘est une institution trop connue pour qu'il soit nécessaire de s'appesantir longuement sur sa description. En principe, c'est une portion de patrimoine, quelquefois une certaine somme d'argent, dont les revenus servent à entretenir l'encens ( huong) et le luminaire (hỏa) sur l'autel des ancêtres, c'est-à-dire à subvenir aux frais de leur culte et à l'entretien de leurs tombeaux.’1 Mr. Le Van Dinh tells us ‘La masse de biens créée pour le service du culte ancestral, c'est le huong-hoa, biens de “l'encens et du feu”, biens susceptibles d'assurer au culte qu'ils desservent tout l'éclat, toute la splendeur désirables, ainsi qu'une pérennité temporelle et spatiale’.2