In has long been known that the chronological scheme commonly transmitted by the early Arabic sources for events of the latter half of the sixth century A.D. poses a number of major problems. These are sufficiently important to raise serious doubts about the reliability of the traditional chronological framework for the last years of the Jāhilīya in general. A key problem is that of the date for 'Ām al-fīl, the ‘Year of the Elephant’, so called after the expedition of Abraha into the Hijāz in that year. The early Arabic literary tradition does not specifically date this event: it simply maintains, first, that Muammad was born in the Year of the Elephant, and second, that he was summoned to act as God's Prophet at the age of forty. Considered together, the many reports to this effect imply―based on the prevailing view that the mab'ath is to be dated to approximately A.D. 610―that both the expedition of Abraha and the birth of Muhammad occurred in about A.D. 570.

It is now a century since the publication of Reinisch’s Chamirsprache, which has remained irtually the only source of information we have on this Agaw lanhuage to date. As a result of his acquaintance with a native speaker from Soqota(Säk’wät ’a), whist working in Massawa on his study of Bilin, the northernmost agaw language, Reinisch was able to collect enough information to mproduce a reasonable descripiton of the language. He himself neer had the opporunity to work on chamir in its home environment and was forced to curtail his studies of the language when his informant was obliged to leave Massawa. After the publication of Die Chamirsprache in 1884, no new information on the language until Conti Rossini’s brief description of Khamta was published in 1904, twenty years later. The dialect he recorded is material, though scanty, contains a number of very interesting features, both phonemis and morphological: for example, he cites the only known instance of prefix conjugating erds in Agaw outside Awngi, the southernmost and most divergent mermber of the group. Unfortunately his morphological description is all too cursory and does not permit a proper analysis of this highly idiosyncratic dialect. It may well be that Conti Rossini’s Khamta should be regarded as a separate language from Reinisch’ Chamie, or the Khamtanga dialect presented here. I shall have occasion to return briefly to this question below.

The elders of North-East Africa have long been renowned for their powers of memory on which their compatriots relied for genealogical lineages, rights of ownership, Procedures of law, marrige customs and the like. Literate of otherwise, they all for the most part imparted their accumulated knowledge by word of mouth. Unlike the griots of West Africa, however, quite a few made use of written documents, at least in the form of notes. These documents are different from and independent of the royal and ecclesiastical records which are well known to scholars. These are private papers intended for personal use and as such contain valuable, Uncensored, historical information. I realized how ubiquitous the practice was during my research travels in the various regions of the Ethiopian Empire during the years 1965–75. Whenever such an informant failed to recall a particular name, date of fact during an interview, of doubted the accuracy of the sequence of his narrative, he would quickly pull out his mnemonic aid from a box under his bed or would call for a family member to hand him the desired item. The mnemonic aid often consisted of scribbled scraps of paper, letters, Photographs, invitation cards to weddings of com memorative feasts. Some possessed thin school notebooks comprising sketches in Amareña, Tegreña of Arabic, sufficient to prompt the memory to produce a fluent narrative. The contents of such a notebook, and indeed a typical one of its kind, consitute the boby of the present article.

The name Tahkā is today remembered by archaeologists only as the provenance of the famous Gandhāra statue of Kuvera in the Lahore Museum (fig. 1:Lahore 3/G101). Little is now known concerning the site itself, its precise location, or whether any architecural remains are still visible on the ground. Yet a hundred years age, the area around Tahkāl contained the most prominent Gandhāra ruins in the immediate neighbourhood of Peshawar, attracting the attention of all interested visitors who came to the city. It is moreover possible to construct a clear picture of the remains from their contemporary descriptions and from the forgotten archaeological record of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the recent rediscovery of Punjab Public works Department reports of the 1870s, printed in the Punjab Government Gazette, provides many details concerning the precise nature of two of the three major Buddhist structures in this area.

Burushaski consists of two dialects spoken respectively in the Hunza and Nagir valleys (the dialect most usually called Burushaski; henceforward Bu.) and the Yasin valley (Wershikwar, henceforward Wk.) in the Northern Areas of Pakistani Kashmir. Although the language is genetically an isolate, it contains a considerable number of loans from the unrelated languages with which it is in contact, chiefly Indo-European (IE) Shina, Khowar and Dumaki, and Tibeto-Burman (TB) Balti. The chief sources for Burushaski have no difficulty in identifying loans from the former, but TB ones have by and large escaped notice or been disregarded. It is only Lorimer who deals with this question at any length, and even he relegates the data to an appendix in his dictionary because, he says (III, pp. vii-viii), of his limited knowledge of Tibetan. Therefore, the bulk of this article will discuss all the identifiable instances of TB loans in Burushaski in one particular area of vocabulary, namely, kin terms, as well as the possibility that the standard TB honorific prefix, a–, often attached to TB kin terms for elder kin, is present at least in Bu., in both loans and native material. Also discussed are a number of more problematic cases, as well as some that can only be understood as instances of common borrowing by both Burushaski and TB from IE. Finally, I list for convenience the undoubted IE loans among Burushaski kin terms, which will demand much less discussion in view of their identification already in Lorimer and Berger. The whole is intended as a preliminary to a further, somewhat longer, article I wish to publish discussing the whole Burushaski kinship terminology from a more semantic and anthropological point of view.

It has long been observed by Cushiticists that the prefix conjugation in various Semitic languages represents one of the major arguments for treating this language group as belonging to the Semitohamitic (Erythraic, Afroasiatic) language phylum. From Semitic and Berber we are acquainted with (at least) two different prefix conjugations, a short one and a long one. THe long from is found in Berber and in several Semitic languages, although there is no general agreement about this. With this in mind, we should be surprised if we could not find so-called long imperfect forms in Cushitic as well. A strong candidate would be the Beja present which nasalizes the second radical, which is lengthened in other languages. In this context, however, I should like, not to discuss the problem bearing on the verbal forms of North Cushitic, but rather to draw the attention of the compartive Semitohamiticist to some East Cushitic languages for which new material is now available. ITt seems convenient to limit this discussion to the Rendille and Boni languages which have recently become knownthrough the work of Bernd Heine (1975–76, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982) and Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1979, 1980a, 1980b).