The biographer al-Mālikī reports that, in the year A.H. 171, Rūh b. Hatam, the governor of the Maghrib, offered the post of qādī to ‘Abd Allāh b. Farūk, a scholar-jurist of Qairawān. ‘Ibn Farūk firmly refused the offer. The governor, however, forced him to take his seat in the mosque and ordered the litigants to address their pleas to him, Ibn Farūk weeping the while and crying to them: “Have mercy upon me, that Allah may have mercy upon you”. When he thus refused to judge, the governor ordered that he be bound and taken up to the roof of the mosque: if he should then still refuse he was to be thrown over the edge.

It would be all but impossible to compile a complete list of all the Arabic writers who used Ibn Isḥāq's Biography of the Prophet. In the Introduction to my translation of his work1 I endeavoured to collect and include anything of importance which other writers had quoted on the authority of Ibn Isḥāq. Among the writers whom I may have overlooked must now be mentioned Abū Nu‘aym Ahmad b. ‘Abdullah al-Ispahānī (d. 430)2 who wrote a book entitled Dalā’ilu'l-Nubၫwa.3

Between the River Tigris at Mosul and the first Kurdish villages some 20 miles to the east there is a strip of territory, extending approximately 40 miles from north to south, inhabited by a variety of peoples professing many religions. The least known of these are three extreme Muslim sects. The first to study them was Father Anastase Marie, in an article concerning the Šabak, the Ṣārlī, and the . These , ‘ Kurds … calling themselves Allāhī’, he places in the villages of ‘Umarkān, Topraq-ziyāra, Tell Ya℈qūb, and Bašpīta. He names ‘Alī-raš, , Xazna, and Tallā;ra as Šabak villages but is clearly wrong in ascribing them to the district. They are, in fact, due east of Mosul, in the same nāḥiya of Ḥamdāanīya (= Bartallā) as Topraq-ziyāra and the other villages.

The ms of miscellaneous contents from which this treatise has been extracted was lent me by its owner, Shaikh Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Ḳāadir Bā Maṭraf, Assistant State Secretary to the Mukallā Government; a microfilm is now in the Library of the School.

Of the author, Muhammad Bahrak1 (H. 869/A.D. 1465 – H. 930/A.D. 1524) I have already given some account in connexion with his manual al-Nubdhah al-Muharrirah.2 Brockelmann does not, however, allude to the work from which this brief extract is drawn, Ḥilyat al-Banāt wa-'l-Bariīn.

Prominent among the authors of the ‘Silver Age’ or Renaissance of Georgian literature was Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani (1658–1726). A scion of one of the leading K‘art‘lian princely families, Sulkhan Orbeliani was related on his father's side to the Mukhranian reigning dynasty of Eastern Georgia; his mother, T‘amar, was the daughter of the feudal magnate Zaal, Erist‘avi or Duke of the Aragvi. On becoming a monk in later life Sulkhan replaced his Christian name by that of Saba, and is therefore usually known as Sulkhan-Saba.

In 1955 the Sudan Government presented to the School of Oriental and African Studies photographs of several important documents connected with the Sudanese Mahdia (1881–98). Amongst these are three letter-books containing the text of communications from the Mahdi, Muhammad (Ahmad) b. ‘Abdallāhi, who led the movement until his death in 1885, and his successor, the Khalifah ‘Abdallāhi b. Muhammad al-Ta‘āīishl, who was defeated by Kitchener at the battle of Kararī (Omdurman) in September 1898. None of these MSS has yet been published, although extracts have been printed from one. The purpose of this article is to give a brief indication of their history and contents. They may be designated the letter-books of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Nujūmī, ‘Uthmān Diqnah, and Yūsuf Mikhā'īl, and the letters N, D, and M will be used for the respective short references.

The Arabic manuscript which forms a part of Majmū‘ No. 17, preserved in the ຒahirīya Library in Damascus, is the only fragment extant of a diary kept during the fifth/eleventh century by a contemporary historian of Baghdad, Abū ’Alī b. al-Bannā’ al-Ḥanbalī. An edition and translation of this fragment (hereafter referred to as the Diary) are given here for the first time. It covers in some detail a period of slightly more than one year, from A.H. 460 to A.H. 461 (corresponding to A.D. 1068–69), in the socio-religious history of Baghdad.

Whatever was the original meaning of IE *sneigwh-, it is clear that it already meant ‘snow’ in the time of Indo-European community. Words of that group are to be found in all branches of Indo-European except Hittite, Albanian, Armenian, and Tocharian (of which in any case the recorded vocabulary is small).

PŪr-i BahĀ (probably Tāj al-dīn, son of Bahā al-dīn) was a contemporary of the Mongol il-khan Abaqa (663–80/1265–82), son of Hulagu, and was closely associated with the family of great statesmen, Juvaynī. He is now a forgotten poet and the information available hitherto has been scarce. Even the most accurate editor of the history of ‘Alā al-dīn Juvaynī forgot to mention Pūr-i Bahā, among the panegyrists of the Juvayni family. Yet Pūr-i Bahā enjoyed a considerable reputation in his day. According to Hamdullah Mustaufā (Tārīkh-i Guzīda, 816) his dīvān was well-known (mashhūr), and Waṣṣāf (see below) readily quoted his verses.

The purpose of this essay is to trace in outline the history of the languages used in Calcutta and its environs during a period extending roughly from 1760 to 1840. The languages were Arabic, Bengali, English, Hindustani, Persian, Portuguese, and Sanskrit. Account has been taken of the status of the languages at different times, the people who used them, the extent to which they were used, and the purposes they served. To do this it has been necessary to take a wide view of the history of the period, and make references which properly fall within the field of political, social, religious, and economic history: such as the policies of the East India Company, both in London and Calcutta, the plans and actions of the Christian missionaries, the attitudes and preferences of the main religious communities, the development of education, and the changing opportunities in the economic life of the people.

It was recently possible to establish that the Middle Iranian mäṡṡa-, miṡṡa-, later miṡa-, mūṡa- (with adjectival mūṡlja)2 used in Khotanese texts meant ‘field for seed’. The Khotanese word ttumāṡa- attested in the plural ttumāṡa in the Sanghāta-sūtra 16 b 4 corresponded to Tib. Hit ‘field, kṡetra’. The first syllable ttu- was earlier3 explained from the base tauk- by comparison with Mid. Pers., Zor. Pahlavī tōxm, Armen. loan-word tohm, NPers. tuxm. We could then take the word as *tauxma-m- > ttum-. But since Khotanese ttíman- ‘seed’ seems to derive from *tüman- from *tuγman-, we might prefer to trace ttu- to an older *tava- or *tuva- and see in it the base tav- without the enlargement by -k- in OInd. tok-: tuk-.

Fundamental concepts are often the more difficult to define because of their ubiquitous employment, and though the majority of people are content to do without a definition the lack of one stands as a perpetual challenge to human intelligence. Property is just such a concept, standing upon the frontiers of linguistics, law, and logic without deriving final shape from any of them. Since no legal transaction or dealing could take place without it, and since innumerable events familiar to daily life depend upon it for their effectiveness, it seems strange that it is so little understood.

In investigating the nature of original Buddhism a consideration of its position as one among a number of contemporary historical systems, and of the way in which it may have arisen in opposition to the others, may be more illuminating than attempts to trace back the original doctrine through the history of the schools of Buddhism itself. The most important among these systems appear to have been those of the Ājīvakas, the Nirgranthas or Jainas, and the Lokayatas. Many other systems existed, and are occasionally discussed in the extant literature, but the majority failed to attract a substantial following and to persist as organized schools. We may mention the doctrines attributed to the Buddha's teachers, and perhaps the Iśvaravāda, if this was not simply a part of the older Brahmanical tradition (Iśvara = Prajapāti or Brahmā). The cults of Baladeva and Vāsudeva, which with the Kṛṣṇa and other legends were later integrated into Vaisnavism, and which probably were non-Brahmanical in origin, seem from Jaina references to have existed already in eastern India. A heterodox proto- may date back to the period of the origin of Buddhism.

The story of Tepegöz is the eighth of the twelve surviving tales of the medieval Turkish cycle of Dede Korkut. In language and style it is uniform with the remainder of the cycle, but in character it differs considerably, being composed largely of incidents common to the folktales of many peoples. Its most striking feature, and the one which has attracted most attention, is the variant of the story of Polyphemus which it contains. But besides this the story has a peculiar interest of its own. It is not a mere chance retelling of an old tale. Its narrative has been based upon a traditional wording which goes back to a time before the various incidents, of independent origin, were welded together in the present complex story.

In a previous article I described certain features of that form of Chinese short story which is most conveniently known as hua-pen. Illustrations were taken in the main from a number of stories of the Ku chin hsiao shuo, a collection published in Soochow in or about the year 1621.

As I indicated, however, the stories of the Ku chin hsiao shuo show wide variations in age and in the degree to which they qualify to be regarded as genuine hua-pen, that is to say, as written versions of the actual stories told by the story-tellers of the Sung, Yüan, or Ming periods.

The horizontal division of Indian societies into hierarchically ranked castes and sub-castes has been the subject of a considerable literature, and recent anthropological studies of individual villages have largely concentrated on analysing the function and interrelation of such caste groups. The internal organization or vertical divisions of endogamous castes have, on the other hand, received little attention, though the work of Louis Dumont in Tamilnad, of Kathleen Gough in Malabar, and of Adrian C. Mayer in Madhya Bharat, which is for the most part still unpublished, promises to throw considerable light on the internal structure of castes in these areas.

The people whose language forms the subject of this article live in the Belgian Congo, on the sandy plateau immediately to the north-east of Léopoldville. Known to the neighbouring Kongo-speaking tribes as Bamfununga or Bamfunika, they call themselves Bamfinu, and their language Emfinu. Following the usual practice of referring to Bantu languages in English by means of the stem of the vernacular name, this particular language is termed Mfinu.

Although a Bantu language, Mfinu displays a number of features that are not found elsewhere in the Bantu family, except to a certain extent in some of the neighbouring languages.

THERE would seem little to commend the establishment of an etymological equation between Tibetan so ‘tooth’ and Chinese ya of the same meaning, even after substituting for the northern pronunciation ya of the latter word the Cantonese pronunciation nga, which is identical with Karlgren's reconstruction of the ‘ancient’ Chinese sound, and almost identical with his reconstruction of the ‘archaic’ sound value as nga.1