MS Or. 2529 in the British Museum contains three Karaite Judaeo-Arabic fragments written in Hebrew script. The first two fragments (folios 1–95) are, according to the catalogue, ‘copies of Mahommedan philosophical works in defence of Mu'tazilite doctrines’. No author's name is given. It appears that the only reference to one of these two fragments, in an attempt to identify their author, was made by A. Ya. Borisov in his article on the Mu'tazilite MSS in the State Public Library, Leningrad. In that article Borisov described in detail 13 fragments which constitute part of the Firkovich collection. The contents of all 13 fragments are of a distinct Mu'tazilite character, but in only two of them (nos. 2 and 11 in Borisov's list) are the titles and the authors' names explicitly stated: al-Muḥīṭ, by 'Abd al-Jabbāar, and Dhakhīrat al-'ālim wa-baṣīrat al-muta'allim by al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā. Contrary to Borisov's expectations, his article has apparently not attracted the attention of scholars, except for some short bibliographical references.

While acknowledging the complexity of fourteenth-century Persian painting, it would be fair to state that one of the things that makes the painting of 1400 so visibly and obviously different from that of 1300 is the introduction in the course of that century of a number of technical developments which increased, quite dramatically, the area of picture-space available to the artist. Undoubtedly the most important of these was ‘the development of the “high horizon” technique, whereby the ground is seen, as it were, from above so that the figures can be spaced out in various planes without interfering with one another, thus allowing the composition to be conceived on a larger scale with the corresponding diminution in scale of the human figures in proportion to the whole’. To this one might add the expansion of the composition beyond the confines of the frame in a manner more ambitious than hitherto, and, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the appearance of the double-page miniature which is perhaps the logical conclusion of these developments.

The Shāhsevan tribes of Persia are a heterogeneous collection of groups brought together in a confederation of that name some time between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The question of how and when this confederation was formed is something of a riddle, which arises from the following considerations.

In 1883 Hervey de Saint-Denys translated a passage from Ma Tuan-lin's Wên-hsien t'ung-k'ao, which mentions missions to China from Sêng-kaoWu-ling, Chia-chaand Chiu-mi. Ma Tuan-lin states that these countries were conquered by Chên-la (Cambodia) after the yung-hui reign period (650–6).

The most northerly section of the African Rift Valley is inhabited by a pastoral people who call themselves 'Afar. Their present territory extends eastward from the scarp of the Ethiopian plateau and as far north and east as the Red Sea. The railway line between Addis Ababa and Jibuti appears to coincide with the southernmost fringes of 'Afar population. The area is mainly desert or semi-desert, and contains numerous tokens of its geological past in the form of volcanoes, lava fields, and hot springs. Survival is not easy in this harsh environment, so that to some extent most 'Afars are obliged to live a seasonally nomadic existence. Certain areas do have permanent habitations, but 'Afars have never taken seriously to agriculture and those who live in villages along the coast and engage in fishing probably exemplify the most radical departure from pastoralism. Most of the terrain described lies within Ethiopia, but there are a great many 'Afars in the contiguous Territoire Français des Afars et des Issas. As far as the 'Afar are concerned this political boundary does not underscore any tribal divisions of note and there is a good deal of contact between folk occupying areas on different sides of the border.

There is very little published material of the Galab (Geleba, Dasenech, Dathanaik, or Marille) language which is spoken around the northern shore of Lake Rudolf in the Gamu Gofa Province of south-western Ethiopia and in the adjacent areas of northern Kenya. Several attempts to determine the linguistic position of this language have been made, nevertheless no generally accepted classification exists as yet. This is, of course, due to lack of adequate descriptive data. I would therefore like to present in this paper a preliminary analysis of my own field data on Galab in the hope that it will at least provide a somewhat sounder basis for future work on the classification of the language.

The occurrence of -k- in the conjugation of the verb in the perfect, instead of the expected -t- which marks the 2s., 2 pl., and 1s. in other Arabic dialects, was noted and discussed in two studies by Ettore Rossi. His aim was to offer a general classification of the Yemeni dialects, and he treated the occurrence of the personal suffixes in -k- in terms of their geographical extent. He found these suffixes in the area of the western slope of the Yemen plateau, and the parts stretching southward to Aden. As an illustration he gave for the dialect of Raymah:

This type of suffixation, as Rossi noted, falls into line with that of Ethiopic, and the Modern South Arabian languages, such as Mahri and Socotri.