During a survey of the Djebel Khaled area, in conjunction with the excavation of the nearby Bronze Age site of El Qitar, Professor Graeme Clarke discovered two Syriac inscriptions on the wall of a small, vaulted tomb- chamber. Tracings were made and these, together with photographs of both the inscriptions and the sepulchre, were sent to me so that I might translate their contents and offer accompanying comments. In the meantime, Professor Clarke has published his valuable description of the Djebel Khaled area and its necropolis, including the tomb-chamber.1 Furthermore, Professor Takamitsu Muraoka has offered a tentative reading of the two Syriac inscriptions.2

The Mishnah, a philosophical treatise in the form of a law-code produced by sages of Judaism in the Land of Israel at c. A.D. 200, works out in acute detail a set of philosophical principles expressed in general principles in other writings of the same age. These principles emerge only in the medium of practical logic and applied reason, rather than in the philosophical idiom of abstraction and generalization. For example, principles of political economics familiar from Aristotle's writings make their appearance in sustained inquiries into such matters as the nature of profit or interest, the principles of distributive economics enforced in the markets, and profound speculation on the nature of true value. Along these same lines, as I shall show here, the interests of natural philosophy in questions of the physics of mixtures come to expression in the Mishnah's authorship's treatment of the problem of mixtures. True, the facts that require explanation take an odd and even egregious form. While Stoic physics asked about mixtures in the abstract, the Mishnah's authorities addressed the same questions in quite concrete terms, the one speaking of things in general, the other of meat and gravy, water, flour and dough. But the principles of physics that tell us how to differentiate one kind of mixture from another and how, therefore, to draw consequences from the different traits of things that fuse, affect one another in some ways but not in others, or are merely juxtaposed with no mutual affect, are not merely parallel; they are in fact identical.

Qur'ān 2:114 describes those who prevent God's name being uttered in His mosques (man mana'a masājida ‘llāhi an yukhdara fīā’smuhu) as ‘most unjust’ (aẓlamu). If further states that ‘they shall not be allowed to enter them except in fear; they shall endure the curse of chastisement in this world and great torture in the aftermath ’.

In the Northern Church of the Negev town whose name has been preserved by the local Arabs as Ruḥeibe, on a flagstone still in situ in the south-westernpart of the atrium, Loc. 523, the following inscription was carefully and clearly inscribed:

The distinguished orientalist Reinhart Dozy, writing in 1849, and referring to the possible influence of Arabic poetry on Spanish romances and on the early troubadour lyrics, pronounced the whole question as ‘tout à fait oiseuse’. He went on to say about this highly controversial question: ‘nous voudrions ne plus la voir débattue, quoique nous soyons convaincu qu'elle le sera pendant longtemps encore. A chacun son cheval de bataille’.

In Muslim law one of the topics of dispute which is traced back to some of the earliest authorities, and which persists as a difference between the various madhhabs and sects, concerns the obligations owed by her former husband towards a wife who has been divorced. Schacht attempted a summary of the positions taken in the dispute together with an explanation for them:

The Medinese hold that the definitely divorced wife who is not pregnant, can claim from her former husband only lodging during her period of waiting {‘idda); the Iraqians give her also the right to board. The two doctrines are based on two variants of Koran lxv.6, the Medinese on the textus receptus, the Iraqian on the reading of Ibn Mas‘ūd. When the text of Ibn Mas'ūd was superseded in Iraq by the textus receptus during the reign of the Umaiyad caliph ‘Abdalmalik (A.H. 65–86), this basis of the Iraqian doctrine was forgotten, and Abū Ḥanīfa was reduced to justifying it by an arbitrary interpretation of the textus receptus and by a tradition from ‘Umar.

Despite the similar titles of the two books reviewed here, they are very different in aims and scope. While Samadi's book is primarily an etymological dictionary of verb forms, Kellens's is in effect the first volume of a comprehensive Avestan grammar, as a companion to which the author promises ‘ in the near future' (p. 435) a complete lexicon of the Avestan verb. What they do have in common, in addition to the relationship in subject-matter indicated by their titles, is a comprehensiveness which ensures that they will both become standard works of reference. It is this characteristic above all which seems to justify reviewing them in more than usual detail.

The inscription recently found in the Negev (see Y. D. Nevo, ‘A new Negev Arabic inscription’, p. 18 above) mentions one Hakim b. Abī Asmā', a mawlā of ‘Abdallāh b. 'Amr b. al-‘Āṣ. No reference to a person called Ḣakīm b. Abī Asmā could be found in any other source, literary or archaeological, for the early Islamic period. His master, ‘Abdallāh b. ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ, is presumably the famous scholar, son of the conqueror of Palestine and Egypt, who was from the Quraysh clan of Banū Sahm. There is a considerable amount of evidence linking both father and son to Palestine

This study presents some new observations on selected features of the phonology and morphology of the Omani Arabic dialects, and attempts to place them in a peninsula-wide typological framework. The paper is based on the results of an analysis of tape-recorded conversational data gathered in more than thirty, mainly rural locations in northern Oman between 1985 and 1987. Most of the speakers were men and women aged 35 and above with little or no formal education who, if not retired, were engaged in traditional occupations such as farming, fishing, pottery and animal husbandry. Much of the data was gathered in the context of a study of the epidemiology of rheumatic diseases conducted on a random sample of 2,000 Omanis adults by my wife for the Omani Ministry of Health, during which the subjects were interviewed by me at length in their homes or places of work.

Of the many astronomical observations which are recorded in ancient and medieval history, perhaps the most interesting and useful relate to solar eclipses. Obscurations of the Sun are often noticed by the casual observer and may indeed leave a profound impression on him if the degree of obscuration of the Sun is very large. In particular, total solar eclipses are responsible for the onset of sudden and intense darkness, during which the brighter planets and stars may become visible. Hence ancient and medieval accounts of solar eclipses (and to a lesser extent lunar obscurations) are not confined to treatises on astronomy. They also tend to be reported fairly frequently in chronicles and other writings of a historical nature. The only other celestial phenomena regularly to attract widespread attention in ancient and medieval times were comets. However, in chronological studies, eclipses have a distinct advantage over comets. Both solar and lunar obscurations last for only a few hours and their exact date of occurrence can be computed, as well as the time of day (or night) when the event took place. Comets, on the other hand, often remain visible for several weeks and only for Halley's Comet can useful computations of visibility be made.

The importance of poetry as the chief aesthetic experience of the Arabs as well as the principal repository of materials on their life and thought had long been recognized by the Arab and, following them, non-Arab students of Arabic culture. The fact that all the technical terminologies of Arabic verse which were formalized in ‘ilm al- ‘aruḍ (Prosody) are derived from the components of the bedouin tent—a highly prized possession—indicates the significance of the art to the Arab mind. The pride of place enjoyed by poetry in Arabic literary thought derives primarily from the hieratic idiom associated with it, as well as from its structural coherence, which relies on the harmony of prosodic factors (al-‘awāmilal-‘arūūiyya) associated with poetic praxis.

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī’s rendering into Arabic of the fourth and last chapter of Patañjali’s Yogasūtra cum commentary. Our translation of the three preceding chapters was published in BSOAS, xxix, 2, 1966, 302–25 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS ch. I); BSOAS, XL, 3, 1977, 522–49 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS, ch. II); BSOAS, XLVI, 2, 1983, 258–304 (henceforth abbreviated as BSOAS, ch. III). This translation is based on Ritter’s edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritters Text: Kopriilii, 1589, fols. 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Birunl's India.

The hill of Ramtek (21°.28´N, 79°.28´E), c. 45 km. NE of Nagpur (Maharashtra), merits special attention because it appears to be one of the very few places in India where an uninterrupted historical development from the fourth century A.D. to the present day can be investigated through a series of archaeological monuments which, although partly restored or built over in later periods, seem never to have been exposed to destructive and iconoclastic forces. From at least the fifth century onwards the hill, also known as Rāmagiri, Sindūragiri, or Tapamgiri (Tapogiri), served as a regional centre of religious activity and probably, also had a more secular function as an outstanding strategic base controlling the highway that connected, and still connects, the central and eastern part of the basin of the Ganges with the northern Deccan. This could possibly explain, at least in part, why the religious structures on top of the hill have attracted the attention and care of the rulers of the area from a very early date.

When in 1857 Ferrier reported a rock relief, apparently Sasanian, in the region of Sar-i Pul in North Afghanistan, he left us with an enigma which is still unsolved and which has for over a century remained a subject of intense discussion for specialists. The intrepid scholars who searched around the remote and often inaccessible rocky mountains of the area found no trace of the rock relief, but A. D. H. Bivar, while searching for the relief in 1964, was the first to notice some important and yet previously little known Islamic shrines near the village of Sar-i Pul. The two most interesting monuments were the shrines (ziyārat) of Imām-i Khurd and Imām-i Kalān. The first, a small squaredomed chamber, with several inscriptions, one commemorating the martyrdom ofYahya b. Zayā (d. 125/742–3), was described in detail by Professor Bivar who suggested a mid eleventh century date for the building, and it is not discussed again here. The other shrine was briefly mentioned, and two photographs showing details of the cut stucco work of the building were given.

The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education, and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters—poets and prose writers alike—it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of Rhetoric known as badī, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices2 (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

It was a common idea in the last century, and one which can be found even today,2 that Soma/Haoma was a drink which led to ecstasy, and drugs which produce such an extraordinary state of mind have always been objects of curiosity. Therefore, the search for the plant which was used by the Indo-Iranian peoples in their solemn rituals was never abandoned, although the variety of candidates brought forward made the question look unsolvable.Some of the strong drugs suggested for the original Soma had to meet with statements from the Rgveda or Avesta which ran contrary to their shapeor properties. The effects of others on the human mind are so unspectacular that it was difficult to accept them as the plant so highly praised in antiquity.

My purpose in this paper is to outline a preliminary reconstruction scheme for the agreement morphology of the Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) verb. I will deal with two separable issues: the provenence of the widespread suffixal agreement paradigm, and that of a less widely attested set of prefixes. The suffixal paradigm has, since the work of Bauman (1974, 1975, 1979, see also DeLancey 1980, 1981b) been recognized by some, but by no means all, Tibeto- Burmanists as being reconstructible for PTB. The prefixes, on the other hand, are as far as I know currently universally viewed as of secondary origin (although Bauman (1975) attributes a PTB provenence to one of the morphemes involved, he does not consider it to have been part of an original agreement system). I will show, however, that there is good evidence on which to base an argument that these also are of PTB provenence, and in fact very likely older than the suffixes.

The book which passes under the name of Ho-kuan-tzu, ‘Master of the pheasant cap’, an otherwise unknown teacher supposedly of the third century B.C., expounds a variety of syncretism which roots the fa decreed by the ruler in a Yin-Yang cosmological scheme. It is remarkable for presenting no less than three contradictory programmes for ideal government, two of them described at length and ascribed to sage emperors missing in orthodox historiography; one is roughly classifiable as Legalist, one as Yin-Yang, the third as Taoist anarchist. It attracted little attention until recently because of lack of evidence as to its date. But with the discovery in 1973 of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts of Laotzu it was noticed that the ‘Yellow Emperor’ documents attached to manuscript B are closely related to it; and Wu Kuang has since pointed out that the first two chapters observe the taboo on the personal name of the Ch'in First Emperor.

‘The meaning of texts is dealt with by a dispersal of analysis at mutually congruent series of levels, beginning with contexts of situation and proceeding through collocation, syntax (including colligation) to phonology and phonetics⃜ Stylistics with some notice of phonaesthetic features, lexicography and the place and use of translation are to be included to complete the spectrum’ (Firth, 1957: 30).