The long-awaited first volume of the astronomical diaries, the life-work ofthe late Abraham Sachs, has been admirably brought to fruition by HermannHunger, in Sachs and Hunger, Diaries and related texts from Babylonia.2Although one laments the passing of Abraham Sachs before the completion ofthis momentous task, Hunger has earned the acclaim of his colleagues for thepolished presentation of the finished product, particularly as the Sachs Nachlasswas not yet in publishable form when he died. The importance of these diariesreaches far beyond the narrow confines of philology, since they includecalendrical and astronomical data, lists of commodity prices for the particularday or month, weather reports and often a tantalizing allusion to a currentevent, being the closest ancient counterpart to a modern news report.

At Sāmarrā’ there are the remains of a number of ‘Abbāsid walled tracks which appear to be racecourses. Ernst Herzfeld found one track in the course of the German expedition of 1911–13 to the ‘Abbāsid capital at Sāmarrā’, and the outline of two more became known from a series of maps of the Sāmarrā’ district made by the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in 1917. Herzfeld published his first brief discussion of these courses in 1948 in his Geschichte der Stadt Samarra’, and a further description was published posthumously in his Persian empire in 1968. At about the same time in 1948, a fairly extensive discussion was published by Ahmad Susa in his Rayy Sāmarrā’, though without much illustration. Sūsa enumerated five courses, but it has proved necessary to exclude two, for they seem not to have been for racing. One further course has been added here, not identified before.

Muhammad b. Muhammad b. ‘Alī Abū Bakr al–Khawāfī al–Harāwī was born in Khurāsān in 757/1356 and he died at Herat in 838=1435. Praised by Jāmī as one who personified wisdom, both exoteric and esoteric, he was, without doubt, an important master of the Suhrawardiyya Sūfī order, though he established his own silsila, the Zainiyya. None the less, he was schooled in a number of other Sūfī orders. Dr. Leonard Lewisohn has revealed in his studies of the mystic poet, Mawlānā Muhammad Shīrīn, otherwise known as al–Maghribī, that al–Khawāfī is listed at the end of the Ṭaifūrī silsila by Ḥājj Zain al-‘Ābidīn al-Shirwānī. According to Ibn Karbalā'ī, he was a part-time student of Ishāq Khuttalānī and he was also affiliated to ‘Ala’ al-Dawla Simnānī, though it is ultimately to Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī that his silsila is usually traced.

The controversy as regards the genuineness of the allegedly seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosophers Zär'a Ya‘qob an Waldä Haywät and their two opuscula, known as hatäta ‘examination, inquiry’, has for close on a century generated scholarly discussion. In the footsteps of C. Conti Rossini (RAL, vm, 1899, 43 and RAL, xxix, 1920, 213—23) Mittwoch has adduced weighty arguments against the authenticity of the two tracts, and in his Amharische Version der Soirées de Carthage (Berlinand Leipzig, 1934) he has cited the relevant literature. I do not propose, in the present context, to traverse the same ground once again. The Ga‘az texts of the two hatäta were edited and translated by E. Littmann (CSCO, Scriptores Aethiopici, vols. 1 and 2, Leipzig 1904) and rendered from Ga‘sz into Amharic by Zämänfäs Qaddus Abraha (Asmara, 1955).

In the 1920s Eugen Mittwoch's pupil, Dr. Hans Schlobies,2 wrote to Alaqa Dästa,3 who was considered a notable student of Ethiopic literature, to enquire about indigenous knowledge of those two works. Part of the learned Aläqa's reply was published by Mittwoch in the Soirées de Carthage, 3–4, but Mittwoch's Ethiopian Nachlass (now in my possession) contains the original of Alaqa Dästa's letter which I propose to set out here in its entirety:

To the honoured Dr. Yohannes Schlobies. While I say ‘let my respectful greetings be to you and your entire family’, I present the compliments appropriate to your distinction. Honoured Sir, so far from being-as you wrote to me-' famous

Sixty-five years ago, in brief remarks devoted to the Shina of Dras, Bailey noted an unusual construction associated with the verb lezhonu ‘to get’:

The Kiranti languages are spoken in eastern Nepal and western Sikkim. What I call Eastern Kiranti in this article includes the languages Limbu, Yakkha, Yamphe, Yamphu, Lohorung and Mewahang. Further study will probably demonstrate that other languages spoken to the east of the SĀlpĀ watershed, such as Sam, underwent the same developments described here and must also be included in Eastern Kiranti. The autonyms used by the Limbus, Yakkha, Yamphe, Yamphu and Lohorung are indicative of a close historical relationship between them. The Limbu call themselves Yakthuŋba; the Yakkha call themselves Yakkha; and the Yamphe, Yamphu and Lohorung refer to their language as Yakkhaba.

The languages belonging to the South-Dravidian sub-group of the Dravidian languages exhibit various degrees of genetic relationship. Though the common retentions and the later innovations have led to an indisputable consensus on broad issues, details regarding the finer genetic relationship remain to be worked out. This paper tries to analyse the genetic relationship between Tamil and Malayalam in the light of some sound changes, and also discusses the problems involved in the interpretation of the linguistic material.

All the comparative evidence points to a closer relationship between Tamil and Malayalam. They preserve alike some of the Proto-South-Dravidian features such as *ḻ, *ṛṛ besides innovating sound changes such as *k– > c–. On the basis of a number of common phonological and morphological features, scholars concluded that at the stage known as late Old and early Middle Tamil, Tamil and Malayalam were most probably basically one language with pre- Malayalam as a diverging western dialect of the spoken form of that common language. The innovations which appeared in the ninth- and tenth-century West Coast inscriptions were linked with the similar tendencies observed in colloquial Tamil. The oldest Malayalam inscriptions and literary texts are not earlier than about the ninth century A.D. Since this period is contemporaneous with Middle Tamil, it was argued that the development of a separate language had to be dated to that period.

The aims of this paper are: (i) to report new dialect data for a vowel contrast in Acehnese which was not recorded in earlier descriptive work, (ii) to show that this contrast is cognate with a contrast reconstructed for Proto–Chamic, and (iii) to reconstruct this part of the vowel system of Proto–Aceh–Chamic.

A close genetic relationship between Acehnese and Chamic was first suggested by Nieman (1891). Although a contrary view was expressed by Blagden (1929), the issue has been conclusively put to rest by the work of Cowan (1933, 1948, 1974, 1981, 1983, 1988), Shorto (1975, 1977) and Collins (1975) who all agree on the existence of a distinct Aceh–Chamic sub–group within Austronesian.

Unfortunately, comparative work on Aceh-Chamic (Cowan: Chamo- Achehic, Shorto: Achino-Cham) has been hampered by problems of access to the data. In Lee's (1966) and Burnham's (1976) reconstructions of Proto-Chamic no mention is made of Acehnese. On the other hand, Cowan and Shorto, the two scholars who have furthered Aceh-Chamic studies the most, have not had access to Lee (1966), nor, in more recent works, to Burnham (1976). Another problem has been that Acehnese source materials have been restricted to just one dialect, as reflected by Djajadiningrat's (1934) and Kreemer's (1931) Acehnese-Dutch dictionaries.

This paper represents one step towards addressing some of these problems, by comparing new Acehnese dialect data with the comparative Chamic wordlist compiled by Lee and augmented by Burnham. I focus here upon a specific

Georgian and Caucasian historical studies have recently received a stimulus through the publication of Professor Ronald Grigor Suny's important work, The making of the Georgian nation. Professor Suny draws attention to the seminal importance of the first half-century of Russian rule in Georgia, following the 1801 annexation. The old picturesque norms of Georgian social life were increasingly under pressure, as the Russian autocratic military bureaucracy sought to absorb the intransigent Caucasian peoples into their own larger administrative entity. (Dr. Stephen Jones and Professor Laurens Hamilton Rhinelander have done useful work on this phase of Georgian history).2 As we know from recent events in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, these efforts at assimilation met with mixed results, and serious nationality problems continue today