In this article I offer two versions of the Kurdistani folk-tale ‘Khajo and Syabando’ in Barzani Jewish Neo-Aramaic, one of the rarest and most highly endangered modern Aramaic languages, spoken in Israel by no more than twenty elderly Jews from the regions of Barzan and ʕAqra in Iraqi Kurdistan. Three dialects of this language were discovered during the years 1996–2000: Barzan, Shahe and B[ecy ]jil. The latter dialect is already extinct. The narratives that served for the texts were furnished by two speakers of the Barzan dialect. The texts are accompanied by observations related to etymology, comparative dialectology, vocabulary and various aspects of grammar.

This article is based on letters from the Geniza. The writers were merchants who dealt in imports and exports between Egypt and other countries of the Mediterranean basin. These merchants were part of the Jewish elite and maintained close ties with the Muslim authorities. They enjoyed considerable status with these authorities, who co-operated with the merchants, especially in the transport of goods; some of the high officials were, in fact, ship-owners. The administration of the time took a great interest in imports and exports, and would at times confiscate goods required by the army. The article reviews a series of citations from letters thus examining the relationship between the merchants and the authorities. The second part deals with the evidence of the droughts found in the merchants' letters; it is interesting to compare the details on droughts with the information in the Arabic sources. The third part discusses the information contained in the Geniza documents on the conquest of Jerusalem (638). This is followed by a discussion of two figures who are also known from Arabic sources: Manasseh b. Abraham Ibn al-Qazza¯z, and Barjawa¯n. The letters also reflect the restrictive measures against Jews and Christians in the days of Caliph al-Ha¯kim.

This paper outlines the centrality of the Late Roman period in the settlement history of Palestine, and the marginal contribution of the Christian establishment to the development of the land. Settlement momentum during these periods resulted from the fact that Palestine was part of the Roman Empire. The historical trends in Palestine should be regarded as part of a broader political settlement drive that characterized the eastern parts of the Roman realm during the period under discussion. The argument that the process of expansion was unique and stemmed from Palestine's holiness in the eyes of the Christian world is unfounded.

The student who approaches the study of the turbulent life of Ibn Taymiyya will soon realize that Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, his renowned shāfi‘ī disciple, is indeed one of the main sources for the Hanbalī scholar's biographers. Al-Dhahabī wrote many biographical notices of Ibn Taymiyya and one of these has been identified with the manuscript source presented in this article. The article briefly introduces the source, discusses its content and its importance in relation to the early biographies of Ibn Taymiyya as is evident from the text, and raises some questions about the state of consensus towards the Hanbalī jurist among his traditionalist Damascene fellows. An edition and annotated translation of the Arabic text are appended to the introduction.

The ‘appendix’ to a mid- to late seventh-century East Syriac history includes a detailed account of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n by Muslim armies between c. 635 and 642. This article translates this section of the ‘appendix’ (along with another dealing with the conquest of Egypt), subjects it to detailed analysis and criticism, and compares it with Arabic accounts of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n that survive in the much later historical and legal traditions. The results of this exercise—using an early and local source to control the Islamic tradition—is in some measure mixed, but some striking agreement suggests that the transmission of conquest history in early Islam was not as discontinuous as has been previously argued.

This article deals with a further series of events reflected in the Geniza letters, as listed below. In 1016, Jerusalem was afflicted by a severe earthquake; the letters help to determine the exact date of the event. Between 970 and 1030, Palestine was beset by battles; I have referred to this period as the ‘Sixty Years War’. In the Geniza letters, we find information on these events, beginning in 1021 and continuing to the Fatimid victory at Uqhuwa¯na in 1029. The letters provide information on the heavy taxes imposed on the Jewish population in Jerusalem. Because the liveliest trade took place between Egypt and the Maghrib, a great many letters were sent from the Maghrib, containing information on the incessant struggles there, especially between 1010 and 1027. The letters supply information on the struggle in Spain between the ‘slaves’ and the Berbers. We find an extremely detailed description of the events related to the earthquake of 1033, which is also described by the Persian traveller Na¯sir Khusraw. Also contained in the letters is information on the mutinies in the Maghrib under al-Mu‘izz; the separation of Ifri¯qiya¯ from Fatimid supremacy (1048/49); events during the rule of the vizier al-Ya¯zu¯ri¯; and the destruction of the city of Qayrawa¯n (1059). The article ends with a discussion of the great rebellion which took place in Safa¯qus in 1062/63.

This article is a description and analysis of the twelve-day renovation ritual or kumbha¯bhiseka (‘water-pot bathing ritual’) celebrated in the Mi¯na¯ksi¯ Temple in the south Indian city of Madurai in 1995. After briefly discussing the historical background, the article describes the priests' division of labour at the kumbha¯bhiseka, the preliminary rituals—including the transfer of the deities' power from their images into water-pots—and the most crucial rituals: the series of ya¯gapu¯ja¯ (‘sacrifice-worship’) rituals, which mainly consisted of fire-sacrifices to enhance the power in the water-pots, and the culmination of the entire event, when the pots were emptied over the Temple's towers and images, so that the power flowed back in. The article concludes that despite its extreme elaborateness, the kumbha¯bhiseka's symbolic logic and purpose, especially as displayed in the spectacular destruction of the fire-sacrifices and then the final water-pouring, are unusually transparent compared to many other temple rituals.

The debate concerning the Head of the Jews (ra'is al-yahud) in the Fatimid kingdom, which has interested researchers since the late nineteenth century, has yet to reach a final conclusion. Today's researchers usually argue that this position was established in Egypt at the end of the eleventh century with the final fall of the Palestinian Yeshiva; prior to this the Head of the Jews was the gaon of Palestine, appointed by the Fatimid Imam. More recently a new argument has emerged, re-embracing the approach of J. Mann, who argued that the position of the Head of the Jews was established at the beginning of Fatimid rule (late tenth century), and the person to hold the position was a Jewish courtier from the field of finance or medicine, appointed by the Imam to be the supreme leader for all Jews in the Fatimid kingdom: Rabbanites, Karaites and Samaritans. This old–new notion is yet to be clearly proven. Such views are mainly supported by circumstantial analysis of logical arguments that arise from the Geniza documents, without real written proof, but the Geniza is known for surprises and it is possible that we will soon find unequivocal proof to show that the Head of the Jews in the Fatimid kingdom was indeed a Jewish courtier appointed by the Imam, since the beginning of the Fatimid rule over Egypt, Palestine and Syria at the end of the tenth century.

This paper looks at the professional alternatives that Buddhism offered to women by analysing the important role played by a female master in the as yet little studied Dhūta movement, a form of ‘heretical’ Chan Buddhism that flourished during the final years of the Jin dynasty and afterwards in the Yuan dynasty. By examining the descriptions of female master Jizhao and male master Puguang, as seen in epitaphs composed by officers-literati and preserved in a Bejing gazetteer dating back to the mid-fourteenth century, this paper aims to highlight some features of the Dhūtaists' discourse of femininity and also to point out the differences vis-à-vis orthodox Chan constructs, in order finally to evaluate whether such a discourse could have an influence on the general definitions and content of gender roles.

The historical development of Vedic exegesis, as attested in the Rgvedic and Sāmavedic commentaries, remains virtually unexplored, although those that survive have long been available in print, those of the Sāmaveda since the 1870s (the Sāmavedic Sāyana) and 1941 (the relatively early Mādhava and the later Bharatasvāmin). A new edition of the Ārcika or recitation text of the chanted Sāmaveda, currently appearing in the Harvard Oriental Series, combines some improved readings for its commentaries with several disappointing features, notably the failure (so far) to provide either the crucial melodic transcriptions (Gāna) of chanted texts or the bracketing of spurious passages in Sāyana, both of which are valuable assets of the Bibliotheca Indica edition. In this article, an attempt is made to show that the Ārcika commentators Mādhava and Bharatasvāmin have no independent value, being wholly dependent upon Skandasvāmin's Nirukta commentary and the Vedārthaprakāśa that subsists in Sāyana's Sāmavedic and Rgvedic adaptations; and that they were themselves responsible for the unhappy compromise between Gāna performance and Rgvedic poetry that the Ārcika corpus actually represents, and hence ultimately also for the two recensions of Vedārthaprakāśa that are ascribed to Sāyana in the fourteenth century.

This article presents a detailed review of A Dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Samaritan Aramaic (SA) is a Palestinian Aramaic dialect similar to Jewish Aramaic and Christian Aramaic, the two other dialects in use during the first millennium CE in Palestine. Based on the best critical editions of Samaritan texts (for each of them the author initially prepared a comprehensive concordance), it presents the entire vocabulary of SA literature as it is known at present; namely the Samaritan Targum, liturgical poems, midrashic literature and SA material attested in Samaritan texts written in Late Samaritan Hebrew. The article deals with lexicographical issues, such as the method of introducing entries and the scope of the dictionary (e.g. its being a sort of mini-encyclopedia). It focuses mainly on matters relating to SA, such as differences between ancient and late layers of the dialect, lexical loans (from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Latin) and influences of Jewish texts (e.g. Onkelos). The scope of the dictionary, its method and, above all, the way its author deals with the vast lexical problems of SA, make it one of the most important contributions to the research into this dialect. It is therefore unsurprising that DSA has already gained an important place on the bookshelves of scholars of other dialects of Aramaic, Hebrew and biblical studies.

This article attempts to shed new light on the significance of the Zhouyi (Changes of Zhou or Book of Changes) in Zhong Hong's intellectual biography, and sets forth insights into the way in which intellectual influences of philosophical strata are interwoven in the Shipin (Kriterion Poietikon), one of the major contributions to Chinese literary criticism during the Nanbeichao period. Departing from comments made by Zhong Hong's biographers about his expertise on the Zhouyi, the intricate textual fabric of his writings is explored in the light of the intellectual discourse of his day. The Shipin is read as a complex blend of scholarly traditions and original insights, a number of its underlying structural principles are interpreted as allusions closely linked to conceptual kernels which originate from the Zhouyi and its exegetical literature.

Though early Buddhist texts are concerned with giving alms and all aspects of the merit to be gained by so doing, the sharp, perhaps witty, categorization of donors that we find in Mishna¯h, ’Avôt 5:13 (one of the six groups of four) has no other counterpart in Pali sources despite the fact that numbered categories are very common in Buddhist texts. The parallel between the Mishna¯h and its Buddhist counterparts is explicable. The two civilizations were at one on the point: Jewish merchants were prepared to expound significant Jewish learning; the first Christian missionaries were Jewish; the items from which Mishna¯h 5 was concocted, especially anonymous ones (as here), could have existed well before the third century and a contact about 200 CE would not offend any known criteria.

This article examines the relationship between the Mughal colonization of the Deccan during the twelfth/eighteenth century and the development of the Sufi traditions of Awrangabad. Concurrent with the defeat of the Deccan sultanates was a process of re-ordering the sacred Muslim landscape of the Deccan into harmony with the cultural and political values of the region's new elites by the importation of Sufi traditions from the north. As a reflection of the wider cultural make-up of the Mughal world, questions of regional, political and ethnic affiliation were articulated by writers whose own remembered homelands lay far from the Deccan. Placing Sufi commemorative texts written in Awrangabad into a wider social and literary context, the article discusses the place of the city's Sufis in the social, political and intellectual life of a short-lived imperial centre. The city's saints are in this way seen as the most semantically rich of all the cultural products of the period.