Although the Hebrew Bible is a literary document of relatively limited size, containing only a certain segment of what must have been a considerable body of literature, there is little doubt that even those remnants which have come down to us include some areas of the vocabulary of lewdness which have not always been recognized, either intentionally or unintentionally. While I do not hold the view that the Old Testament is either exclusively or even primarily a ‘religious’ text, it is unquestionably true that the criteria of admission into the canon were governed by considerations not entirely divorced from the element of likely divine approval. Yet even within those books of the Hebrew Bible whose orthodox propriety was never in any doubt there are embedded thoughts as well as expressions that fall within the field and broad range of the present paper. And this is, a fortiori, the case with regard to those compositions which had to struggle hard to gain admission into the canon of the Old Testament.

The vocabulary of Khotan Saka of ancient Khotan, Gostana-deśa of Buddhist Sanskrit, has a large fund of basic words; for the philosophy of Buddhism too they made full use of the Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary, beside a number of north-western Prakrit forms. Many words, however, stand isolated. Their meanings are indeed often assured by bilingual texts or parallel passages in Buddhist literature, but other words are translated speculatively from contexts.

The many thousands of inscriptions conventionally classified under the headings of Dedanite, Lihyanite, Safaitic, and Thamudic, all share the characteristic of a definite article in the form h- or hn-. Pre-Islamic texts displaying the distinctively Arabic article al are a mere handful; among them, easily the most important is the funerary text of Umru' al-Qays at Nemara (RES 483). This very minuscule corpus has recently been enlarged by two inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (anciently Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil; near modern Sulayyil, on the trade route linking Nagrān with the eastern Arabian coast), publicized by Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Ansary in spring 1977 at the first International Symposium on Studies in the History of Arabia at Riyadh. These texts are particularly welcome in that they are written in fine monumental South Arabian script, and thus do not pose the acute problems of reading occasioned by the exceedingly ambiguous scripts of Nemara and the other northern texts.

It is well known that, according to Pliny, the originating terminal for caravans conveying frankincense from South Arabia to the Mediterranean was at Shabwa; and there has been much talk of an ‘incense road’ followed by those caravans. It is, however, very unlikely that there was any single ‘road’ invariably followed. More probably, there was a multiplicity of routes, any one of which might be chosen according to prevailing circumstances. One such route runs directly from Shabwa to the eastern end of the Wādī Jawf, across a gravel corridor bisecting the Sayhad sand-desert, surveyed by Philby in 1936. The possibility of this route has been disregarded mainly because of a widely prevalent but tendentious translation of Pliny's remark, ‘evehi non potest nisi per Gebbanitas’, as ‘[the frankincense] cannot be exported [from Shabwa] except through the land of the Gebbanites’, where the text says nothing about a ‘land’ but merely ‘by the Gebbanites’. Other possible routes are one skirting the southern edge of the sand-desert and passing through Tumna', and one reaching the upper Wādī Bayḥān by way of Nisab and the Wadi Markha. West of Bayhan, the passes of Nagd. Marqad and Mablaqa clearly represent alternative routes.

It is well known that during the course of their histories a number of Indo-European languages, all of them members of the Indo-Iranian branch of the family, developed an ergative construction. Thus, in certain tenses of the verb, their grammars came to treat in forlly identical manner the subject of an intransitive verb and the logical object of a transitive verb, the agent (or logical subject) of this latter being given a different morphological marker. Now although ergativity has been studied in a wide variety of languages as a synchronic phenomenon, the opportunities for examining it from a diachronic point of view are in the great majority of cases severely limited by lack of historical documentation. The Indo-Iranian languages, however, form a notable exception. These, thanks to the availability of texts from closely related languages covering a time-span of some three millennia, provide us with a chance to observe both the development of the construction and its subsequent decline. The present paper will do no more than attempt to trace a part of this process, namely the way in which the ergative construction has disappeared from a certain area of western Iranian. It bases its arguments upon the assumption that the geographical continuum of the Kurdish dialects, whose grammars exhibit the whole range of possibilities from fully ergative systems in the north to fully accusative systems in the south, reflects the successive stages of a diachronic process. This being granted, it should be possible by ordering the synchronic patterns of representative dialects from the northern, the central and the southern regions, to arrive at a picture of the historical sequence of events which has led to the loss of ergativity in the southern dialects and to isolate the mechanisms involved in their resultant restructuring. The wider problems of precisely how the construction arose historically and of why within the Indo-European family it appears to be confined to Indo-Iranian will not be dealt with here.

The decline of the Gondarine monarchy and the concomitant increase in wealth and power of Tegre province, and of its capital Adwa, led, in the mid-eighteenth century, to a shift in the Ethiopian balance of power. This development, which threatened the then impoverished ruling house of Gondar, and the very continuity of the but weakly centralized State, resulted, as on other such occasions, in a major dynastic alliance between the contending parties. The compact involved two of the most important Ethiopian political figures of the century: Emperor Bakaffa's astute widow Empress Mentewwab, and the first of the great warlords of Tegre, Sehul Mika'el, a rich and powerful chieftain who was soon to emerge as the maker and breaker of kings. Mika'el was by then already well known in the Ethiopian metropolis where, according to the later Scottish traveller James Bruce, he was so ‘lavish in his money’ that ‘all Gondar were his friends’, as a result of which it was ‘plain’ to ‘everybody, that nothing could stop’ his ‘growing fortune’.

The studies of Sūra CXI 1 have not yet arrived at satisfactory results, hence the meaning of this sūra is still obscure. The present study tries to present a better basis for its understanding.

1. The date and background of the sῡra

Sūra CXI deals with Abū Lahab, whom all the Muslim sources identify as Muḥammad's paternal uncle, 'Abd al-'Uzzā b. 'Abd al-Muṭṭalib of the clan of Hāshim.

It has been observed (Emeneau (1957), 63–4) that Toda and Kota show loss of many vowels in the non-initial syllables of reconstructed proto-Dravidian (PDr.) or proto-South Dravidian (PSDr.) forms. An attempt was made to state a rule as follows: ‘every non-initial syllable of PSDr. (or perhaps PDr.) that has a short vowel loses its vocalic peak in Toda; vowels of all qualities are lost except that *i > y'. Exceptions were noted, and an attempt was made, with some misgivings, to save the rule by several manoeuvres. One of these was to insist that the rule applied only to pre-Toda short vowels and to note that some at least of the short vowels that appear in non-initial syllables in Toda words ‘originally’ were long vowels, i.e. some Toda short vowels in non-initial syllables were derived from pre-Toda by a rule that stated that PSDr. (or PDr.) long vowels in non-initial syllables became short vowels in Toda and remained as such. This latter rule can be demonstrated to hold for a greater number of examples than the few that were mentioned in the 1957 paper. It should be noted at once that the rule applies only to Toda, and that when cognates are to be found, Kota retains the length of these vowels.

The dialects spoken in the Najd of Saudi Arabia have striking features which not only are unknown or unreported in other dialects but also retain some characteristics of the 'Arabiyya and of ancient dialects of the peninsula reported by the Arab grammarians. On both these counts, they are of paramount importance for synchronic, comparative and historical dialectology. Yet little is known of them and published materials remain scanty. It is the purpose of this article to describe in some detail the morphology of the verb, i.e., the stem, the subject markers and the object pronouns, and in the process, present phonological features and processes, in a dialect spoken in the North of the Najd, specifically that of Hāyil. This is an important town on the edge of the Jabal Shammar mountains just south of the Nafud, and some 350 miles to the north-west of Riyādh. Although the dialect manifests features which are typically Najdi, in the sense that investigation shows them to exist in other dialects of the Najd, it also possesses peculiarities all its own.

The India Office Library MS Ch ii 003 contains 73 folios of a medical text written alternatingly in Sanskrit and Khotanese. The folios are numbered from 44 to 116. Although the text ends in the middle of a Sanskrit recipe, the beginning of the text has survived. As no title and no colophon are extant and as the text has not been traced elsewhere H. W. Bailey assigned the text the convenient label Jwaka-pustaka ‘The Book of Jivaka’. The text begins as an exposition made by the Bhagavant to the famous physician Jīvaka, called elsewhere in Khotanese ‘the king of physicians’.

It is remarkable that, of the many more or less fragmentary Manichaean writings in Iranian languages discovered in Central Asia at the beginning of this century,1 one of the few texts directly attributable to Mani himself has still, three-quarters of a century after its first partial publication, not appeared in a full and satisfactory edition, with translation. ‘Mani;apos;s Šābuhragān, in which he summarized his teachings in Persian for the enlightenment of Sabuhr I,;apos; is known from nine more or less fully preserved sheets (i.e. of at least two pages each) of one MS. and some eight or nine smaller pieces. The larger fragments were first published in transcription in 1904, in F. W. K. Müller's pioneering ‘Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift aus Turfan, Chinesisch-Turkistan’, II, with an incomplete interlinear translation and partly out of order. The text alone was then republished in transliteration (in Hebrew letters) in C. Salemann's ‘Manichaeische Studien’, I. There the matter largely rested until 1930, when A. V. W. Jackson used the text extensively in his article ‘A sketch of the Manichaean doctrine concerning the future life’. In an article published posthumously in 1946, A. Ghilain established, without seeing either photographs or the originals, that the two fragments of M 473 glassed together as a and b, and published by Müller as they so appeared, are to be fitted together in the reverse order, the lower piece b above the upper a. Most recently Mary Boyce has included the text of the fragments M 473, 475, 477, 482, 472 and 470, so ordered correctly but with the omission of a number of incomplete passages, as text z in her Reader in Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian.

This paper, by means of original Bedouin documents relating to matters of personal status, attempts to disclose interaction between custom and sharī'a and to illuminate some of the mechanisms tending to complete the islamization of a tribal society in process of sedentarization. The Bedouin dealt with here are a group of tribes in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem region: al-Sawāhira (c. 6,000 persons now) east of Jerusalem, al-'Ubaydiyya (c. 5,500) east of Bayt Saḥūr, the 13 al-Ta'āmira tribes (c. 20,000) extending over a sector east of Bayt Saḥūr in the north to Bayt Fajjār in the south, and al-Rashā'ida (c. 500) south-east of Taqū'a. Most of these tribes originate from Ḥijaz and Najd. They appeared in the region in small groups from the sixteenth century and in time developed into tribes, while absorbing local fallāḥs. Their main numerical increase took place in the twentieth century.

By the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which marked a disastrous defeat of the Ottoman empire by Russia, the Russians were accorded the right to build a church in Istanbul, in the Galata quarter. The treaty further specified that the church was to be under the protection of the Russian minister, who could make representations concerning it to the Sublime Porte. This church, and the Russian right to protect it and to make representations about it, furnished much of the basis on which Russian governments, in later years, built a claim to a broader right to protect the Greek Orthodox Church, even the Greek Orthodox people, in the Sultan's domains. The claims were exaggerated, but since the church in Istanbul was to be ‘of the Greek ritual’, as article 14 of the treaty said, the connexion seemed logical. The Turkish text of the treaty, however, as Cevdet Pasa reproduces it in his history, makes no mention of a church ‘of the Greek ritual’. Instead, his article 14 specifies that this church is to be called the dusugrafa or dosografa church ().

It has been recognized from the earliest times, i.e. from Kātyāyana (K) on, that, although Pāṇini's description of Sanskrit is miraculously concise and almost equally comprehensive in those topics it covers, it requires some supplementation. Even so, P's inadequate treatment of adverbs is noteworthy, and the more so as the tradition was remarkably slow to supplement this deficiency. This paper deals with two connected topics: (i) conceptualization and naming of the adverb; (ii) grammatical descriptions of adverbial usage.

There is evidence that a particular musical instrument was used by various Sino-Tibetan groups to convey speech, both for courting and for religious purposes. The Proto-Sino-Tibetan etymon for this gourd reed-organ is reconstructible as *s-jan. Its use as a speech surrogate is widely reported, from the earliest sources to the present. It is still used thus by many Tibeto-Burman groups.

These examples from Targum Neofiti 1 should be appended to the note of Jonas C. Greenfield, ‘The prepositions ‘AD/‘AL in Aramaic and Hebrew’.

Scholars seem to be almost unanimous in admitting that there must have existed striking differences between the ritual institutions which are more or less clearly alluded to in the hymns of the Ṛgveda-saṃhitā, and the systematized rituals described and discussed in the brāhmaṇas and ritual sūtras. It has even been surmised that in ṛgvedic times there did not yet exist one elaborated and practically homogeneous ritual system. The probabilities would rather be in favour of the supposition that the chief Vedic families—in the first place those to which we owe some important collections of hymns—performed divine service according to substantially parallel but partly divergent traditions of their own, which, however, did not fail to influence each other. Evidence of these differences is expected from a careful comparison of the relevant facts found in the so-called family books of the Ṛgveda.

Tibetan orthography looks phonetically challenging, to say the least; and one may well wonder whether such tongue-twisting combinations as the brj of brjes, the blt- of bltas, or the bst- of bstan ever did twist a Tibetan tongue, or whether the significance of these and other such orthographic forms might not have been morphophonemic in origin, with the letters r, l, and s in the syllable initial of forms such as these serving to associate these past-tense forms lexically with their corresponding present-tense forms; e.g. Viewed in relation to Tibetan orthography the past-tense forms of a class of verbs in the Golok dialect seem to support this hypothesis. Table 1, below, contains a number of examples of Golok verbs in their past-tense and present-tense forms to illustrate a type of phonological analysis suited to that view of the r syllable-initial unit in the Golok examples, and, indirectly, in the WT examples too (the symbols b and b will be accounted for in section (B) below).

The oldest texts—Rgveda and Avesta—of the Indie (Indo-aryan) and Iranian languages, which together form the Aryan family, agree in much of their vocabulary, as well as in much of their grammar and syntax.

It is a common experience in Avestan studies that a seemingly novel explanation on closer inspection turns out to have already been published long ago but to have been disregarded by all later authors. A case in point is the Gāthic hapax DušƏrƏθrīš Y 49.I

which Hanns-Peter Schmidt (1968), 172 translates as follows: ‘Wahrlich, mit (Lebens-)Dauer erfiillt ist der Verpester, der sehr Grosse! Der ich auf die schlechtbehiiteten (Kühe) hinhören will mit der Wahrheit, o Weisheit…’. While the first line poses many problems, which, however, are not relevant in the context of this brief note, the general meaning of the second is not disputed.