The interest of medieval Jewish historians in the works rather than the lives of the great figures of history explains the relative paucity of biographical data to be found in their writings. Indeed the most factual contemporary accounts of the foremost Jewish thinker of the medieval period, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), are to be found in Muslim historiographies, whereas entries of comparable substance by Jewish authors are both later in date and more fictitious in nature. Although Maimonides's legal and philosophical writings betray at times both warmth and humanity, the autobiographical letters that have come down to us, on the other hand, portray him as an extremely occupied person, whose professional engagements left him little time for the mundane affairs of his fellow men.

Though beset with dispute, wavering conviction and a fair amount of inconsistency, most theories of Biblical prosody exhibit a dominant concern with phonology. Since one at least of the phenomena under scrutiny is metre, this shared propensity is hardly surprising, conditioned as a matter of course by Classical literature and the European tradition, but also by considerable evidence from the proximate sphere of other Semitic literatures. Comment upon the poetry in Hebrew scripture is as ancient as Philo and as varied as could be expected from two millennia of scholarship characterized by evolving method and changing fashion. For the metrical component, acknowledgement of more than one period of poetic production has enabled a chronological hypothesis to accommodate several systems that would otherwise, restricted to the data of the Massoretic text, be in mild competition if not, indeed, severe conflict. At stake is the unit of stress: its identity, distribution and frequency, a phonological quest rarely modified by reference to morphology. A notable exception is the attention recently directed to line internal juncture (sandhi) of which the primary effect is to eliminate or at least blur word boundaries. While the value of this operation for describing an evolution from accentual to quantitative prosody cannot be denied, its practical consequence may be merely characterization of the poetic line as a more or less constant number of syllables. In such an arbitrary continuum the location of stress is no easier than in the admittedly simplistic but nonetheless pragmatic identification of word with ictus. To this end Massoretic accentuation, whatever its shortcomings, has proved remarkably adaptable.

Modern tendencies in the linguistic development of Arabic, in both its literary and colloquial aspects, has for some time now been the subject of serious scholary study (see, e.g. Blau, 1978, Cantarino, 1974-5, Stekevych, 1970, amont others). Contact between different social groups and thus between different dialects and speech levels, has brought about changes in the actual speech of Arabic-speaking peoples which have been variously called koineization, levelling and classicization (or literarization) (cf. Blanc, 1960). These processes will be the subject of this paper.

Khums was, like zakāt, a ritual duty incumbent on individuals, a farīḍa 'alā l-'ayn. Distinguished from the other 'ibādāt by being as to immediate aim human rights and not divine ones (ḥaqq li'l-ādamiyyīn not ḥaqq li'llāh) the final aim of both khums and zakāt was none the less divine reward and more certain salvation. The qur'ānic basis for khums was found in the verse (8: 41):

Know that whatever you acquire as material gain a fifth belongs to God and to the Prophet and to those related and the orphans and the poor and the wayfarers.

L'objet de la prèsente ètude est ľèdition de trois documents relatifs aux rapports èconomiques entre la Moldavie et les Ottomans au temps du sultan SelĪm Ier (1512–1520). Nous les dèsignerons de la manièsignerons de la manière suivante:

Documents no1: Acte adressè par Selīm à Bogdan III de Moldavie le 25 janvier 1512, soit trois trois mois avant son avànemenyt au trône ottoman (24 avril).

Documents no2: Acte adressè par SelĪm au commandant de la fortersse ottomane de Kilia 2 entre le 9 et le 18 fèvrier 1512 (donc antèrieur de plus de deux mois à son avènement).

Documents no3: Deux paragraphes d'un repport adressé le 15 avril 1520 à la porte ottomane par Küčü Pīrī, caid ď; Aqčaqazanliq, et concernant les droits d'explonitation de quinze lacs situès en Moldavie mèridionale.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in Turkish art and architecture, an interest that embraces not only the monuments in Turkey proper but also those which were erected in south-eastern Europe during the Ottoman occupation. Thus a few years ago, when in conjunction with the World of Islam Festival a symposium was held in Edinburgh dedicated to Islam in the Balkans, the participants dealt with Islamic monuments in Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece and Yugoslavia. The Ottoman monuments of Hungary are admittedly not as numerous as those of these south-east European countries; nevertheless,they represent the achievements of a period which is justifiably called the ‘classical’ period in Ottoman art.

Guṇḍam Rāuḷ lived in the thirteenth century in Ṫddhipur, a small town in the easternmost part (Vidarbha) of the Marāṭhī-speaking region of India. He appears to have been somewhat mad. Members of the Mahānubhāva sect, a devotional (bhakti) sect native to the region, revere him as the guru of their founder, Cakradhar, and as one of five major incarnations of their one God, ParameŚvara. Reverence for Guṇḍam Rāuḷ does not lead his Mahānubhāva biographers to deny his madness: the present paper will demonstrate this fact, and attempt to explain it.

Geiger in his Etymological glossary of the Sinhalese language, 27, under uyana gives as its origin Sk. udyāna-, Pa. uyyāna-, but does not explain the -yy- < -dy- as opposed to Pa. -jj- in ajjā < adyá or upajjati < utpadyatē. Geiger was not alone in his failure to explain the difference in development. V. Henry in Précis de grammaire pâlie, 33, and Geiger himself in Pāli, Literatur und Sprache, 66, both note that it was ud + y- which > -yy- and quote Pa. uyyutta- and uyyōga- < udyukta- and udyāga-, while Mayrhofer in his excellent Handbuch des Pāli does not refer to the problem.

In his pioneer work on the Burushaski language, Lorimer (1935a:64) noted the existence of what has been later described as an ergative construction: the subject of a transitive verb is in the ergative case (a special case, usually marked by the suffix-e) while the subject of inttransitive verbs, as well as the object of transitive verbs, are in the absolutive case (morphologically unmarked) as appears in the examples 1(a)-(c) below:

Among the many texts and manuscripts that Sir Aurel Stein brought to London from the Grottoes of the Thousand Buddhas at Tun-huang early in this century was a text of the first half of the Lao tzu (chapters 1–37 of the standard, received version of the text) with a commentary known as the Hsiang erh chu (Stein MS 6825 in the British Museum). This document has attracted considerable scholarly interest because of its ostensible connexion with the origins and early history of Celestial Master (t'ien shih ) Taoism in the Later Han dynasty. Lu Te-ming (c. 550–c. 630) listed the Hsiang erh chu as a commentary to the Lao tzu in his Ching tien shih wen, and said that accordingto one tradition it was written by Chang Lu (d. 216). This is the earliest known suggestion that the Hsiang erh chu is a text of the Celestial Master school.

Among the principle inhabitants of the northern Togolese town of Sansanne Mango, the Anufom, only the members of one of the forty named lineages possess a ‘genealogy’ which purports to extend to ancestors born significantly prior to 1764, the year in which the forbears of the Anufom overthrew the Gurma inhabitants of the village of Kondjoko and established their military camp on its site. This aberrant genealogy of the lineage Kambaya is also of interest in that it consists, in its greater part, of two written documents, the only example of the use of Arabic script for this purpose that has been discovered in northern Togo.