Previous dictionaries of Jewish Aramaic (JA) have pursued practical rather than strictly linguistic aims and tried to include lexical material from the whole of Rabbinic literature written in East and West Aramaic as well as in post-Biblical Hebrew. Given that (1) Rabbinic literature is thoroughly infused with Hebrew passages and words commonly used in JA, (2) that the Jewish literary ‘diglossia’ in (East and West) Aramaic may even have developed into ‘pentaglossia’ (i.e. two spoken and literary Aramaic dialects and Hebrew), (3) and that Jewish copyists were more used to the language of the Talmudic Babylonian Aramaic (TBA) and altered many original Palestinian forms accordingly—to mention just three main reasons—it is obvious that earlier lexicographers of JA were entangled in a complex of problems which they were forced to solve practically rather than linguistically. Their works will stand as the great achievements of JA lexicography before the later classifications of JA dialectology took effect.

The Altmeister of Aramaic studies, Th. Nöldeke, who is quoted by Michael Sokoloff, author of this first dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA), said more than a century ago:

One could doubt the propriety of a dictionary of the entire old Rabbinic literature. Namely, it is anathema for linguists to find Hebrew and Aramaic together in one lexicon. But on the other hand, this entire literature, as diverse as it is, stands together.

In a study which has been described as pioneering, Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, Theodor Nöldeke ‘discussed in detail the “Stylistische und syntaktische Eigentümlichkeiten der Sprache des Korans” (pp. 5–23) thereby collecting together everything that had occurred to him in this respect during his protracted and intensive study of the Holy Book of the Muslims.’ Among the examples Nöldeke discusses (pp. 13–14) are Q. 7 (not 77 which is clearly a misprint in his text): 55, 27:61; 35:27, 6:99, 20:55, 10:23, etc. where there is a sudden shift in the pronoun of the speaker or the person spoken about, known as iltifāt in balāgha (Arabic rhetoric), though Nöldeke does not refer to the term here. Introducing his discussion of this feature, Nöldeke remarks that ‘the grammatical persons change from time to time in the Qur'ān in an unusual and not beautiful way (nicht schöner Weise)’ (p. 13). This is a personal value judgement. Arab writers, in contrast see the matter differently. Ibn al-Athīr, for instance, after studying this stylistic feature, as we shall see below, classed it among the ‘remarkable things and exquisite subtleties we have found in the Glorious Qur'ān.’ It will be seen that the examples Nöldeke cites immediately following the statement quoted above do not occur haphazardly in the Qur'ān but follow a pattern. Examination of where exactly the shift occurs and why, will show how effective the technique is in these examples and why Muslim literary critics and exegetes greatly admire iltifāt and its related features. Nöldeke further remarks (p. 14) that in a few places the second and third person plural are exchanged abruptly: 30:38, 49:7, 10:23. Here again it will be seen that the changes are made according to an effective pattern and that the frequency of occurrences of this type is much greater than is indicated by Nöldeke.

Four versions of an episode in the Sumerian composition ‘Gilgamesh and Huwawa’ are discussed here. The encounter of Gilgamesh and Huwawa is interpreted in terms of Gilgamesh playing the role of a visitor received in audience at a foreign court. His gifts aim at inviting Huwawa to reciprocate, and thereby give up his protection. Gilgamesh especially exploits Huwawa's social isolation and lack of noble ancestry by offering him his two sisters, one in marriage and one as a concubine. he version in which the two sisters are the only offer makes most coherent sense. In another version the inner logic was distorted when the list was expanded to at least six offers.

TIM IX 47 (IM 62827) was first published by J. van Dijk, in Šumer, 15,1959, PI. 2, and edited in the same volume, pp. 8–10.1 had a chance to collate the text in the spring of 1990 when I visited the Iraq Museum, Baghdad.1 Since this led to some improved readings, which may clarify a difficult episode in the Sumerian composition ‘Gilgamesh and Huwawa’, a complete edition of the tablet is presented here.2 With a few exceptions my readings are in agreement with van Dijk's copy.

Scholarly assemblies in the Arabic intellectual tradition served as forums not only for entertainment butalso for spectacular events of both literary and historical significance. Al-Sīrāfī (d. 368/979) related how at one such literary seance, which was organized at the instance of Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933), a participant read these verses, attributed to Adam, the progenitor of mankind, lamenting the murder of Abel by Cain:

The land and all those on it have altered the face of the earth has turned dusty and vile. Anything of beautyand splendour has altered and the smile of the lovely face has waned.

The observation that the rhyme letter carries, in breach of the standard rule, different desinential vowels, namely, ḍamma in one line and kasra in the other, provoked a reaction from Ibn Durayd who said ‘This is a poem said at the beginning of the world, yet iqwā' was committed in it.’

But of course in Arabic historical lore, Ishmael, the son of Abraham, is said to have been the first to speak Arabic; and Adam is believed to have spoken Syriac. Factors which encouraged false ascriptions and the outright forgery of poetry have been discussed in various published works and the subject need not detain us here: suffice it to say that the foisting of these lines on Adam, and indeed the entire anecdote, might well be seen in terms of myth, in the sense defined by Jolles (Wahrsage), invented for the sake of a historical perspective.

The category of participle (P) usually includes at least two distinct paradigms. The terms for these vary, as it is not easy to determine the often language-specific nature of the opposition encoded in them. Temporal- ‘aspectual’ terminology is widely applied, giving present or ‘imperfect’ or progressive Ps as opposed to past, preterite, or ‘perfect’ Ps. An alternative popular opposition in many a linguistic tradition is of active vs. passive Ps. To avoid commitment to any of these nomenclatures, I use neutral formal terms: PI and P2.

In order to establish the place of P in the verbal system of a given language, the relevant verbal-syntactic categories of that particular system must first be isolated. For this, I define the following components of indicative verbal systems in non-aspectual languages.

In the mid eighth century, towards the end of the Umayyad regime, a major earthquake occurred in Palestine and the East, of which we know from Christian, Jewish and Muslim sources. Archaeologists relate to destruction by this earthquake layers in several sites, such as Jerusalem, Gerasa in Arabia, and sites mostly along the Jordan valley, among them Kh. Mefjer near Jericho, Pella, Capernaum, Sussita-Hippos, and recently, Bet Shean-Scythopolis (see below).

The exact date of this earthquake is controversial; some scholars date it to 746, others to 747 or 748, In 1960, M. Margaliot suggested that the earthquake took place in 749. In this article we present new archaeological and numismatic evidence in support of this later date (see below p. 234, and pl.II).

In a recent work, Paul Dresch gives us an admirable study, hard to praise too highly, well researched, engagingly written, with mercifully little of sociological jargon. His field contact and knowledge of the (Zaydī) tribes of the northern Yemeni Arab Republic is of the kind of experienced political officers in the former Aden Protectorates like the well-known late Major Ian Snell and ‘Johnny’ Johnson, to which he adds the ability to relate his findings to the Arabian cultural background. Dresch makes use of Arabic documents, printed or MS, and uses the valuable evidence of political verse that I do not recall seeing utilized by other writers on Yemeni society. It is a pleasure to see Arabic correctly vocalized and transliterated, not mangled and distorted. A glossary of the technical terms of tribal law would have been of great value to scholars— many of these are known but more than a few, special to the region, are not. (Can one hope to see these in a further publication?)

The flourishing of Ṣūfism in al-Andalus during the first half of the sixth/twelfth century with mystics like Ibn al-‘Arīf, Ibn Barrajān (who both died in 536/1141) and Ibn Qasī(d. 546/1151) has been interpreted in different ways. For M. Asín Palacios it reflects the influence of the mystical tradition initiated by Ibn Masarra in the second half of the third/ninth century, although he himself does not fail to mention the impossibility of providing evidence for such influence. For other scholars, it was mainly due to the influence of al-Ghazālī's works and thought. D. Urvoy, for his part, has shown how in the ‘image’ of Andalusian Islam during the fifth/eleventh-seventh/thirteenth centuries presented by scholars like Ibn Bashkuwāl and Ibn al-Abbār, Ṣūfism appears to be almost non existent. The question of what religious, intellectual and sociopolitical background allowed figures like Ibn al-‘Arīf, Ibn Barrajān and Ibn QasīT to appear, is still to be answered.

Johnstone (1968, 1975, 1980, 1981) has pointed out that two of the Modern South Arabian group of Semitic languages, Jibbali (Śḥeri) and Socotri, systematically lose the person-marking prefix t- (whether it mark the second person or the feminine third person) in certain types of verbs. An example of this phenomenon from Jibbali may be seen in the passive paradigm of the basic stem, which is given below alongside the active-voice paradigm of a ‘stative’- type basic verb, the conjugation of which (aside from the person-markers under discussion) closely matches that of the passive form. In the active voice, the tappears in the positions in which we expect it on the basis of the cognate prefixes in the other Semitic languages, while in the passive voice the t- is absent.

The Akhbārī/Uṣūlī controversy within Twelver Shī‘ism has been portrayed in Western-language scholarship primarily as a scholastic dispute over jurisprudential methodology which came to fruition only in eleventh/seventeenthcentury Ṣafawid Iran. Uṣūlism is generally characterized as having stressed recourse to rationalist, subjective forms of analysis—particularly the principle of ijtihād (independent judicial reasoning)—on legal questions where the revealed sources were deemed wanting. Akhbārism has been portrayed mainly in negative terms, as having forbad recourse to speculative reasoning in favour of reliance solely on the Twelver-accepted revelation— the Qur'ān and the sunna, the latter especially including the akhbār (sg. khabar), the Arabiclanguage body of statements of and narratives about the twelve Shī‘īImāms, the last of whom disappeared in 260 A.H./A.D. 873–874.

The period from the late sixteenth century has been characterized in Ottoman historiography as one of fundamental change in the composition of the army. One of the features of this change was the gradual replacement of the tīmār-based cavalry force, to whom were awarded benefices in return for military service, by provincial levies able to use muskets (tüfenk), often hired only for the duration of a single campaign. Although the extent to which such changes were directly prompted by the supposedly superior technology which the Ottomans encountered when fighting the Habsburgs on their western borders remains open to further research, that there was a radical transformation which relied on the greatly increased use of firearms is beyond doubt.

The main purpose of this two-part essay is to reconsider the interpretation Western scholarship has generally placed on the Akhbārī/Uṣūlī confrontation in Twelver Shī‘ism. To this end, Part 1 (BSOAS, LV, 1, 1991, 22–51) presented an edition and translation of the relevant section of ‘Abdallāh al-Samāhijī's twelfth/eighteenth-century treatise, ‘Munyat al-Mumārisīn’. The importance of this text to the present discussion is twofold. First, Western scholars have considered this treatise to be a summary of the main points of Akhbārī/Uṣūlī disagreement, the Akhbārī element generally being understood as having been given its earliest discrete form only a century earlier by Muḥammad Amīn al-Astarābādī; and secondly, discussion of al-Samāhijī's treatise has relied primarily on an abridged version of the text written nearly two centuries later.

A large number of bronze musical instruments of the Shang and Zhou periods (thirteenth–ninth centuries B.C.E.) which display pronounced regional characteristics have been unearthed in south China. As systematic research on these was relatively late in getting under way, their importance in terms of archaeology and the history of music has not yet been nearly sufficiently recognized. Many divisions remain among scholars on issues of typology, periodization and the origins of yongzhong bells, and on the question of the relationship of these artifacts to central plains culture. In this article I intend to discuss my own views on these questions.

Over the past several centuries, the town of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh has celebrated the loves of the pastoral god Kṛṣṇa and his beloved Rādhā. Numerous saints and devotional authors have contributed to the rich cultural heritage of this Hindu holy land, all doing much to strengthen its position as a centre for one of the most important streams of religious feeling in India. However, despite the theological claims of universal liberation from mundane preoccupations said to result from such religious feeling, the Vaiṣṇavism of Vrindavan shows the same susceptibility to human rivalry that can be detected in other religious movements. This rivalry takes the form of controversies which have not yet been entirely resolved. In this article and another which follows it, I undertake to address a triad of such controversies, well aware that the matters are still sensitive ones for both the parties involved: the Rādhāvallabhī followers of Hita Harivaṃśa, and the Gauḍīyas, followers of Caitanya Mahāprabhu. The chief matter contested by these devotees is the authorship of a book well-loved by both sects: the Rādhārasasudhānidhi (RRSN), ascribed to Hita Harivaṃśa by his followers in the Rādhāvallabhī tradition and to Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī by the Gauḍīyas. Before treating this question, however, one is obliged to confront two others: one concerns the identity of Prabodhānanda, the second that of Hita Harivaṃśa's relation to the Gauḍīya school. Both of these personalities are claimed by each of the sects to have, at one time or another, accepted allegiance to their own group.

In an earlier article (‘Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī: from Benares to Braj’, BSOAS, LV, 1, 1992) an attempt was made to establish an authoritative biography of Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī, the author of a number of devotional poems and commentaries in Sanskrit. It was shown there that the sannyāsin Prabodhānanda's life can be divided into three parts: the first, about which we know little, in which he was a Śankaraite monk living in Benares; a second, in which he came under the influence of Caitanya and his devotees, and a third, in which he associated closely with Hita Harivaṃśa, the founder of the Rādhāval-labhī sect in Braj.

The account given of the Bamboo Annals pre-Conquest chronology in Part 1 of this paper bears comparison with the internally consistent chronological sequence found in Yi Zhou shu, whose coherence has not been fully appreciated by those attempting to reconstruct the chronology. As we saw in the discussion of King Wu's reign in Part 1, Yi Zhou shu ‘Da kuang’ and ‘Wen zheng’ chapters are correct in dating the appointment of King Wu' s siblings as viceroys in the former Shang domain, which event we know took place in the Conquest year, to the 13th year of the Mandate, a finding that is fundamentally incompatible with Chou Fa-kao's, David Nivison' s, and Edward Shaughnessy' s account. The same two chapters in combination with ‘Zuo luo’ are also correct in implying that King Wu died in the 14th year. Furthermore, ‘Wen zhuan’ chapter of Yi Zhou shu correctly dates King Wen' s demise to the ‘9th year of the Mandate’ in those very words.

The challenge of establishing the chronology of the early Zhou dynasty, especially the date of the Zhou Conquest of Shang, periodically arouses the intense interest of scholars. Down the centuries interest in the general problem has revived whenever advances in calendrical, astronomical, or textual knowledge seemed to offer the promise of a breakthrough. Extraordinary efforts have repeatedly been brought to bear, but until quite recently little progress was achieved in verifying benchmarks prior to 841 B.C., a date already regarded as secure in the time of Sima Qian toward the end of the second century B.C.

The recent publication of the complete translation of the Yogasūtrabhāṣyavivaraṇa (also known as Pātañjalayogaśastrabhāṣyavivaraṇa and Bhagavatpadīya; henceforth abbreviated as Vivaraṇa) into English by Trevor Leggett is the latest contribution to the study of this intriguing and significant Sanskrit philosophical text. Prior to this publication (whose first two chapters were separately published already in 1981 and 1983 respectively) only a few excerpts thereof have been translated by Hajime Nakamura, into Japanese. It is a measure of the growing interest in the original text that it has attracted several astute preliminary studies, notably by P. Hacker, T. Vetter, W. Halbfass and A. Wezler in the West, and H. Nakamura in Japan.

As it stands, the title of the printed English translation reads: ‘The complete commentary by Ṥaṅkara on the Yoga Sūtra-s-a full translation of the newly discovered text.’ This is regrettably likely to be misleading in more than one way.

The Chadic (Afroasiatic) language Hausa, spoken mainly in Nigeria and the Republic of Niger, has a series of ‘glottalic’ obstruents. This includes both ejectives ([k’], [s’] or [ts’]; orthographic κ, ts) and two other consonants which have often been described as ‘implosives’ and are represented by the IPA symbols for implosives in Hausa orthography (б, d). In addition, there is a ‘laryngealized’ palatal glide (orthographic ‘y). The description of orthographic б, d as implosive has been called into question, however. Ladefoged, in his well-known work on the phonetics of West African languages (Ladefoged (1964: 16)), suggested that, while these sounds may on occasion show the ingressive air flow characteristic of implosives, their most consistent characteristic is a distinctive mode of vocal fold vibration (phonation type) known as creaky voice or laryngealization; thus, Hausa б and d should be labelled ‘laryngealized stops’ rather than ‘implosives’. One implication of this change in descriptive label is that, at least from a phonetic point of view, б and d should be grouped with ‘y.

This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of grammatical relations in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to develop a hypothesis on the typological nature of word order and grammatical relations in the mother language which gave rise to all of the many languages within the Sino Tibetan language family. As the verb agreement (pronominalization) systems of Tibeto-Burman have been said to be a type of ergative marking, and to have been a part of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations, the questions of the dating and nature of the agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman are relevant to the discussion of the nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.