A study of the poetry of the Sīra shows that a high proportion of it is the work of more or less professional forgers who supplied narrators with poems especially prepared to suit the narrative and appeal to the audience whose outlook towards the events of early Islam had undergone considerable change. Two or three generations after the final victory of Islam and the death of the Prophet, the persons as well as the events of that era were becoming part of pasthistory. Past events had begun to take a different form and when viewed acrossthe years they appeared like a panorama in which only certain high points werevisible, and different landmarks were differently placed in relation to each other. Time had produced a shift of interest and a change in outlook, andcertainpersons were becoming more legendary and less human.

In the Dark Ages there was a break in the ruling dynasty of Ethiopia, and the kingdom fell into the hands of a line called Zāguē, of Agaw origin from Beguenā. (Bugnā), which made its capital at Roha in Lāstā. There is much that is obscure about the events that led to the Zaguē usurpation; the orthodox Ethiopian view, as expressed in the Be'ela nagaśtāt, was that God was angry with the House of David (the dynasty which they believe to be descended from Menilek son of Solomon and the ‘Queen of Sheba’) and gave the kingdom to the Zāguē. According to a document at Dabra Libānos in Šimezana, 2 a woman called Terde'a Gabaz transferred the kingdom to the Zāguē after the reign of Ḥezba Nañ, ‘and they reigned for 133 years, 700 years from the bringing of the Faith to Ethiopia’ (= A.D. 1033). This suggests that Terde'a Gabaz was the daughter of Ḥezba Nañ and married the first Zāguē king, thereby establishing him on the throne. These Zāguē, being Agaw, are referred to in the Chronicles as ‘not Israelites’, as in the Paris Chronicle, f. 2: ‘Anbasa Wedem begot Delna'ād, from whom the throne was taken3 and given to others who were not Israelites’. The end of the Zāguē line came in 1268, when ‘Takla Hāymānot restored the kingdom to Yekuno Amlāk’ (Paris Chron., f. 3), a descendant of the last king before the Zāguē. That there was a break and a restoration cannot be doubted, but the manner of the restoration is not clear and the evidence is conflicting, as well as of late date.

Of the nominal syntagms in modern Aramaic, the one in which one substantive is determined by another substantive is deserving of special notice. This kind of syntagm may be classified as follows: (1)a substantive determinedby another substantive in the genitive case; (2)a substantive determined byanother substantive with a relative particle; (3)a substantive determined by a possessive pronominal suffix and a relative particle with another substantive; (4)a substantive determined by another substantive with the aid of a pronominalsuffix; (5)a substantive determined by another substantive without recourse todot; any morphological element whatsoever.

Venetian preponderance in Mediterranean commerce during the late Middle Ages is attested in many ways. Muslim and European chronicles, travellers' reports from the Levant, and business records of the Republic illustrate the concern of Venice with the affairs, commercial and political, of the Muslim states in the Mediterranean. One striking aspect of this preponderance is found in the contemporary commercial treaties concluded between Muslim rulers and the Christian states of southern Europe.

It is surprising that not a single page has hitherto been devoted to the treatment of Khotanese syntax, even though Khotanese is unique among the attested later Iranian languages in preserving, for the most part distinctly, at any rate in Old Khotanese (OKh.), in the singular, six of the eight cases normally attributed to Indo-European (IE), and in the plural, five. M. J. Dresden, in his ‘Grammatical notes’ introducing his edition of the Khotanese Jatakastava (Trans. Am. Phil. Soc, NS, XLV, 5, 1955), called attention to the need for a treatment of Kh. syntax. He commented (p. 419): ‘Superfluous to say that the efforts of future research should be turned to this subject’.

An important phonological feature of many of the dialects of Arabia is the pronunciation of . This sound change is not confined to one dialect group, and unlike the affrication of and is non-conditioned. The evidence whether > in Classical Arabic or in the ancient dialects is rather inconclusive, and exceptin a few authors it is not categorically stated to be a sound change in the way that this is stated, for example, of 'aj'aja (iy[y] > ij[j] mainly in pause) for the dialect of the Tamīm.

The argument to be presented here proceeds from the analysis of a Sogdian word of uncertain orthography and disputed meaning. It first occurred, as by' / npšqty (apparently with word-division), in Soghd. Texte, I, 39.4, in a translation of Luke xii, 36, corresponding with Syriac bed meštūoā = (ÉK) Tŵv yáuwv; Müller gave ‘Gastmahl’, with an asterisk to denote his doubt. Later I published two Manichaean passages. One, hi the text I titled ‘A Job story’, speaks of a man who makes his way in the world and becomes rich and “takes to himself many wives and has by them many sons and daughters and gives wives to the sons and grooms to the daughters and makes a great By‘n’yšp / [']krty” : the context demands ‘marriage-feast’, in agreement with the Greek of Luke. The other is a Sogdian version of a Middle Persian verse, the original having been preserved by good fortune, ‘Hail to you, bridegroom, who hast made a marriage-feast for the sons’ : here By'ny / pškt'kw renders MPers. wdwdg'n ‘wedding’.

When Lord Salisbury's long administration came to an end in the summer of 1892, there ended also an era in British diplomacy. This was not immediately apparent because the development of the ‘new course’,2 different from Lord Salisbury's, took more than a decade. Lady Gwendolen Cecil has described Lord Salisbury's policy as ‘neighbourliness’. Dame Lillian Penson has called it ‘practical co-operation’. This policy had by 1892 secured for his country a position of political authority in Europe which was unique, in that it ‘owed nothing to military pre-eminence or that subtle manipulation of international jealousies, which was the chief weapon of Prince Bismarck's genius’. Its weakness was that it was his alone and depended for its success upon personal characteristics which could not be passed on to a successor.3

It is of great importance to identify the autographs of al-Jabarī (1754–1825/6), 2 as by doing so we shall be able to know whether there were any deliberate changes or omissions by the redactors, editors, and copyists of his works. Moreover, it will be possible to solve many problems created by the calligraphic and copying mistakes of the transcribers, such as homoeoteleuton, homoeoarchy, homoeotopy, dittography, misplacement of diacritical dots (taṣḥīf), and other errors, and hence to know his authentic statements and style. This identification might shed a new and powerful light upon the way in which the author compiled his data, and even the sequence in time of their compilation.

Since its début in 1881, when Charles Rieu's brief but masterly grammatical sketch appeared, the Gorānī koinĒ has become one of the Cinderellas of Iranian studies, literary and linguistic. Apart from a notice by E. B. Soane, of which more below, its only real outing has been in Professor Minorsky's compendious article on ‘The Gūrān’, containing an illustrated survey of all the epic, lyric, and religious verse then known in Gorānī. The surviving manuscripts acquired by Professor Minorsky he has since donated to the Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute (Institut Narodov Azii AN), where they remain unpublished.

Warren Hastings resigned the Governor-Generalship of Bengal in February 1785 and arrived in England in the following June. He faced his retirement with a fortune of approximately £75, 000, a total amounting to little more than a third of all the money which he had sent out of India during the 13 years of his administration. Those who knew Hastings well and who were aware that he had found it almost impossible to save anything out of his official salary of more than £30, 000 were pessimistic about his chances of living within the income of £3, 500, which he could anticipate from his capital of £75, 000. Such pessimism was fully justified.

In 1961, while on a visit to Cambodia, I first came to know of this work from the chief Abbot of Vat Unālom of Phnom Penh. I was informed by the learned Abbot of the existence of a ‘Mahāyānist’ work known as Dibbamanta.The work was not available there but subsequently a palm-leaf MS of this work was found in the National Museum of Bangkok, a microfilm copy of which was made available to me through the courtesy of the curator of that Museum. The MS consists of 48 folios1, written in Cambodian characters. It is not dated and does not carry any information regarding the author or the scribe. As it was a common practice in Siam to copy Buddhist texts in Cambodian script, and as the work is not in use at the present day either in Siam or in Cambodia, it is hard to locate the original place of this MS. But on the basis of certain internal evidence which will be noted below I am inclined to believe that it could be of Cambodian origin.

‘Our policy and our powers have reduced all the powers in India to the state of mere cyphers: at the same time that their intriguing, discontented and rebellious followers still remain, with increased causes of discontent, diminished sources of profit and field for speculation and plunder. Nothing can keep these people in order excepting the Company's arms or a complete state of defence at all points which they can reach. The Company's arms cannot be everywhere ….’

The turn of events in Tehran completely frustrated whatever chance there might have been for a loan from Britain in 1898. On 21 July Durand reported that Muzaffar al-Dīn had complained that the loan was not big enough. Hewanted §2,000,000 and he would not increase the security. The Amīn al-Sultān was ‘practically in power’ (he was reinstated on 12 August 1898 as Sadr-iA'zam), and was working vīgorously against the loan. This is partly explainedby his being himself a farmer of customs from whīch he drew an estimated§ 70,000 annually and so was against any foreign control. The sum which the Shah named could not be raised in London on the security offered. Besides,after the return to power of the Amīn al-Sultān the loan discussions betweenthe British and the Persians took on an air of unreality.

Between 1690 and 1720 Śridhar narrated in simple Marathi verse nearly all the basic, perennial stories of the Indian tradition: the epics in Rāmavijaya and Pāṇḍava-pratāpa, the essential puranic tales in Harivijaya and Śivalīlāmṛta. As a consequence he is still read very widely by the devout

The early centuries of the Christian era are of crucial importance for the history of the Buddhist religion. It is customary to ascribe to this periodthe emergence and development of the Mahāyāna; and by the latter half of the second century A.D. , towards the end of the Later Han dynasty, Buddhism hadspread as far as China, where the earliest of the long succession of translatorswere beginning to produce Chinese versions of Indian Buddhist texts, both Hīayāna and Mahāyāna. A detailed and connected narrative of this remarkable expansion of the religion would form one of the most fascinating chapters in theearly history of Asia. Such a narrative, nevertheless, cannot be written: the surviving information is fragmentary, interpretation is often uncertain, theproblems numerous and intractable. Encouraged by sheer exiguity of primary historical evidence, many modern scholars have consecrated to this period whole

In his new work Presuppositions of India's philosophies, addressed as a textbook to the Western reader, Professor Karl H. Potter submits an interpretation of the key Indian concept of mokṣa, in which he draws an analogy with Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of Will to Power. The latter is invoked as typifying ‘a strand of thought which glorifies spontaneity and growth, which looks ahead to man's eventual success in overcoming the bonds which make him temporarily less divine, and which sees no exercise of power of which man is not in principle capable’(p. 2).

In another place I have suggested that some of the works ascribed to Haribhadra contradict each other so sharply on matters of doctrine and usage that it is scarcely credible that they can have been written by the same author.

English Translation: The ‘Song Of Bagauda’ In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate. May God bless our Lord Muḥammad and his family, and his Companions, and his wives, and his offspring, and grant them peace.

For over 2,000 years the Sun tzu has been considered the most authoritative work on the art of warfare, not only in China but also in the neighbouring countries to which Chinese cultural influence extended, particularly in Japan.In Europe the first translation appeared as far back as 1772, but this work by Father J. J. M. Amiot aroused little interest amongst professional sinologues and remained the only translation in the French language. In England, whilethere have been attempts to translate the work in more recent years, Lionel Giles's translation, though far from being satisfactory, has remained the most widely known since its publication in 1910. After half a century, a new attemptat translating this important work is naturally welcome. In the event, it isunfortunate that this new translation by General Samuel B. Griffith has turnedout to be so disappointing. The qualifications of the translator as an expert on the art of war may be taken for granted.