For the hisory of religions the rise of Marduk, city god of Babylon, is one of the most striking phenomena known from ancient Mesopotamia. From being an utterly insignificant god in third-millennium Sumer, he had risen to be head of the Babylonian pantheon by the first millennium. The Münster thesis of Walter Sommerfeld, written under W. von Soden, is the first book-length treatment of this topic. As the subtitle indicates, it is largely restricted to the second millennium, the significant period because the rise took place within it. In fact third millennium evidence is dealt with briefly, but the first millennium is omitted. This is unfortunate because most of the religious literature dealing with Marduk is known from first-millennium copies only, though much of it was presumably composed during the second. In view of this uncertainty most of the religious texts about Marduk cannot be used within precise chronological frameworks.

The study of Muslim rule and its vestiges in medieval Sicily has a long and distinguished pedigree. In the nineteenth century the impetus was both scholarly and political, to which the monumental works of Amari and De Mas Latrie bear eloquent witness. In more recent times the motive has been simple and straightforward curiosity about a remarkable instance of cultural symbiosis. The parameters are now either linguistic or historical or both, and the gain is substantial. With the reprint exactly a century after its original publication in Palermo of Salvatore Cusa's I Diplomi greci ed Arabi di Sicilia one might be permitted to suppose that a reassessment of the earlier scholarship is underway. But the commemoration is itself curiously unhelpful: we are offered a typographically reduced replica of the original innocent of comment save for two pages of very general observations by Albrecht Noth on the significance of Cusa's compilation for students of Islamic history. Neither reference to subsequent work nor indication of a present project is included, a circumstance that only with generosity could be regarded as tantalizing.

While interest in early exegetical works concerned with the Qur'ān has certainly increased in the last few decades, no clear consensus seems to have emerged concerning how to establish the genesis of a supposedly early text. The basic problem to be faced is whether the texts we have today are compilations extracted from later works and then put in the name of a single, early authority or whether they are genuinely transmitted works from early teachers and writers, albeit with the definite possibility of some reformulation and intrusion from a later date by editors and copyists. The question to be discussed is one of both the date and method of composition.

The book under review here is to be compared with the volume published over ten years ago under the editorship of Michael Cook, Studies in the economic history of the Middle East (London, 1970). It covers essentially the same subject over the same period of time in the same fashion, by a series of papers contributed to a major international conference. It differs first of all in the length of time it has taken to produce the work, seven years from the original conference at Princeton in 1974, compared with three from the conference at S.O.A.S. in 1967 to the publication of the earlier collection. It is in fact much longer, with more space and time allowed to the contributors to rewrite their papers and annotate them, in great and often discursive detail. The editor is to be complimented on the very high standard of the production of the mammoth tome which results. The weight is heavily on the countryside and the agricultural economy; neither trade, nor industry, nor urban life make much of an appearance except as their adjuncts. Only historical demography (4 articles) stands in any way as a separate subject. More usual is the emphasis upon Egypt, which once again receives the greatest attention, in ten or eleven out of the total twenty-four contributions. Atypical as the Nile valley may seem, its source materials continue to influence the pattern of research in the much wider field of the book's title. Elsewhere it is something of a shock to find, in the papers of Morony on seventh-century Iraq, Talbi on ninth-century Ifrīqiya, Burns on fourteenth-century Valencia, and Rafeq on eighteenth-century Syria, the wealth of detail that comes from a legal literature, an archive or court records, and to realize how few and far between such studies are outside Egypt.

‘Apocalyptic’, it has been pointed out, ‘is only another word for “revelation”, and apocalyptist for “revealer”. Essentially, therefore, prophecy and apocalyptic [are] identical.’ Prophecy in its turn has been defined as ‘the declaration of knowledge which cannot be apprehended through the ordinary faculties, but is acquired either by revelation from a deity or by some other mantic power inherent in te seer himself’. Through the accidents of history a distinction came to be drawn by students of Jewish sacred literature between ancient prophecy and later apocalyptic, the latter flourishing in the intertestamental period; and in the Jewish tradition it is apocalyptic which, it has been said, ‘was the first to grasp the great idea that all history, alike human, cosmological and spiritual, is unity. … Apocalyptic sketched in outline the history of the world and of mankind, the origin of evil, its course, and inevitable overthrow, and the final consummation of all things’.

Althouth the Ādi Granth (AG) is rightly renowned for the number and the variety of its contributors, the great bulk of its contents is in fact formed by the compositions of Gurū Nānak (d. 1539), and those of his successors Gurū Amar Dās (d. 1574), Gurū Rām Dās (d. 1581), and Gurū Arjan (d. 1606).

Judged in the context of the 18 Purāṇas, or even the 180 Upa-, or Subsidiary Purāṇas, the title, Pāṇḍava-Purāṇa, must seem unusual, since the Pāṇḍavas are neither gods nor avatāras, nor sages; for it is the exploits of these divine or semi-divine figures that form the subject matter of the traditional Purāṇas. The Jainas' choice of this title would therefore appear to be a deliberate effort to present a Jaina version of the Mahābhārata story, a version which would show how the virtuous Pāṇḍavas and the rather harmless Balarāma are reborn in heaven, whereas Kṛṣṇa, the ‘nārāyana’, and Jarāsandha, the ‘pratinārāyaṇa’, are consigned to hell.