As is well known, the Eastern (or Nestorian) vocalization of Syriac (henceforth ES) consistently distinguishes between ē and ī, whereas the Western (or Jacobite) tradition (henceforth WS), although having both e and i, also has in many cases (originally long) e coinciding with (originally long) i. The question arises of how it happened that in some cases (originally long) e was preserved, whereas in others it shifted to i. Brockelmann and Birkeland were, no doubt, correct in assuming that in Proto-Syriac (henceforth PS) there existed two long e sounds, ē and ē. In ES vocalization these two sounds were not differentiated, whereas in WS (originally long) ę was preserved, but ē shifted to i. Only the assumption of two different forms of ē in PS can account for the twofold representation of original ē in WS, by both ę and i.

One of the great problems in the study of Zoroastrianism has been to determine what were the new elements in Zoroaster's teachings—elements which roused such bitter hostility among his own people that he was driven to seek exile and to find his first converts among strangers. It is a problem because, through comparison with the Vedic religion, it has been possible to establish a good deal about the religion of the Iranians before Zoroaster, and naturally even more is known about the religion of the Zoroastrian church after him; and the two are remarkably and disconcertingly similar, as if the second were in many respects a natural development of the first, without any break in continuity, whereas neither is very fully or clearly reflected in Zoroaster's own highly complex Gāthās. Western scholars have fairly generally sought to explain this apparent anomaly by postulating that in many points of doctrine the religion of the Zoroastrian church is not in fact that preached by its prophet; they suppose, that is, that the followers of Zoroaster fairly rapidly betrayed his teachings and evolved a syncretic religion in which they reverted to many ancient beliefs and observances which he himself had denounced.

No comprehensive study of the Ottoman fetvā has so far been carried out. Of the great many Ottoman fetvā selections in print and manuscript, very few have been published in a scholarly edition or translated into a Western language. The systematic inquiry into the application of Muslim law in the Ottoman Empire as reflected in the fetvās has hardly even begun. This article will not examine the decisions of Ottoman muftīs on specific questions of law but discuss some general aspects of the Ottoman fetvā—its form, the procedure of its composition and issuance, the subjects it deals with, the law it applies, and related matters.

Priyā Dās was the first commentator on Nābhā Dās's celebrated work, the Bhaktamāla. His commentary entitled Bhaktirasabodhinī is a most valuable exposition of the Bhaktamāla, and later commentaries are mainly based on Priyā Dās's work. It is both surprising and disappointing how little is known about Priyā Dās. Although all the writers on the history of Hindi literature have frequently referred to and quoted from the commentary, only a few sentences, in some cases not more than two or three, are devoted to the author. This paper attempts to throw light on some aspects of his life and his other works, and to remove certain misconceptions.

In general outline the pattern of government in Outer Mongolia during the Manchu dyasty in not unfamiliar and it is a well-known fact that there was no judiciary as such, the administration of justice being only one of the various duties of local officials at various levels. A certain amount of work has been done on problems of law and justice, but there remain many problems of detail to be both raised and commented upon. Two lines of inquiry are open. On the one hand it is instructive to see how the processes of investigation and trial worked—how an alleged offence came to offical notice, who investigated, how evidence was recorded, what instances a case passed through, and how, and on what legal basis, it was disposed of. Other closely related technical questions concern the form and language of official documents. On the other hand, examination of criminal cases will afford insight into the social status, living conditions, and perhaps the psychology, of the persons concerned. It is in fact largely through the medium of legal and other official documents that we shall glean whatever information there is to be had about the day to day lives of individual persons in Mongolia under the Manchus, since other sources of information—journalism, biography, fiction, letters, memoirs, and so on—are non-existent. Apart from reports of criminal cases, some of which have been dealt with in model fashion by Klaus Sagaster, much information can be found in other types of official document, such as complaints submitted by ordinary people against officials, but in the present article we shall be concerned exclusively with the report of one criminal case dating from the late eighteenth century.

The extent and nature of Chinese penetration into Central Asia during the third century and the problems raised by the Chinese and Kharoṣṭhī documents that have been found at the various sites of Lop-nor, Niya, and elsewhere have recently formed the subject of articles by two scholars. Professer Brough has suggested that the territory of the state of Shan-shan was incorporated into the Kuṣāṇa empire for a short period, perhaps in the middle of the second century, before independent rules took over control. He believes that a further change was marked by the adoption of the royal title jiṭuṃgha from the seventeenth year of king Aṃgoka, and that thereafter the country was subject to Chinese control (or at least nominally so) for the period of about 60 years until the end of King Vaṣmana's reign; and he suggests that the seventeenth year of king Aṃgoka can be identified with 263. Professor Enoki has recently taken the opportunity to revise his earlier theory that the year in question should be identified as 609; and he now believes that the five kings mentioned by name in the Kharoṣṭhī documents should be dated from the middle of the third century to the decade starting in 330.

In this paper I seek to show that proto-Mon-Khmer *p as the second element in an initial cluster normally developed in Mon to -w-, and that *b underwent the same development accompanied by voicing of the initial consonant where this was a plosive. The point, as a contribution to Mon-Khmer phonology, is a minor one; but it has consequences of some importance for morphological reconstruction.

Hanoi Vietnamese, although not apparently genetically related to Chinese, is a language phonologically of the Chinese type; in the terminology of Hockett (1955, 60–1, 129), Hanoi Vietnamese phonology constitutes a system without interludes, with syllable juncture, and with tones as ICs of syllables. Hanoi phonology is in fact rather close to the phonology of Middle Chinese (Karlgren's ‘Ancient Chinese’, cf. Pulleyblank, 1962, 64), the source, via the dialect of Chinese called ‘Sino-Vietnamese’ (Haudricourt, 1954, 79), of the majority of Vietnamese lexical items.

Among the Ethiopic manuscripts in the British Museum, which originate from the Emperor Theodore's Magdala collection, were two copies of the Kebra Nagast ‘Glory of the Kings’, the Ethiopian national saga, catalogued as Orient. 818 and 819 (=Wright, Catalogue of the Ethiopic MSS in the BM, NO. CCXCI). But Orient. 819, written during the reign of the Emperor Iyasu I (1682–1706), was returned to Ethiopia in circumstances which throw a dramatic light on the paramount importance of this work. In August 1872, the Emperor Yohannes of Ethiopia wrote to Queen Victoria and to Earl Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, and requested the return of the Kebra Nagast which had been taken to England by the Napier expedition in 1868.