Sīr Banī Yās is an island in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, off the coast from Jabal Dhanna (Zanna) (fig. 1). Much of the landscape of the island has been entirely changed in recent years through earthmoving and landfill although the pre-modern terrain still exists in a few areas. There has also been widespread tree planting, and vast areas of Ṣīr Banī Yas are fenced to protect the plantations from gazelle, great herds of which roam free on the island. Nevertheless, limited areas with significant archaeological remains survived the plantation and the associated trenching.

In a previous paper, we discussed a series of solar eclipse observations recorded in medieval Arabic chronicles both for their astronomical and chronological value. In the present paper we investigate lunar eclipses reported in these same sources as well as in many further chronicles. It should be stressed that our interest here is limited to eclipse records from chronicles; we have not included any material from technical treatises composed by astronomers. The observations are largely from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), Egypt, Iraq, and Syria; they mainly cover the date range from A.D. 867 to 1520, with additions from 1674 to 1791.

Although it is difficult to envisage the history of Islamic art without considering the role of ornament, many distinguished scholars have found it an embarrassment. Professor Necipoğlu's achievement here is to have written an exhaustive historical analysis of the angular interlace (girih) and its 3-dimensional counterpart, the muqarnas and their place in the ornament of Islam as a whole.

The documented history of the theory of the muwashshaḥ and one of its constituent parts, the kharja, spans almost 800 years: from Ion Sanā' al-Mulk (d. 608/1211) to the present day. Apologists for the various theories broadly belong to one of two schools, which for the sake of convenience I shall label ‘integralist’ and ‘partialist’. The integralist view holds that the muwashshaḥ is an indivisible poetic unit with a coherent internal structure; partialists, on the other hand, divide the muwashshaḥ into two separate units where certain linguistic criteria are applicable: the main body of the muwashshaḥ in Classical Arabic and the kharja if it employs a Romance and/or Arabic vernacular.

The madrasa as an institution dedicated to the teaching of one or more of the four madhhabs, or schools, of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, often in conjunction with the ancillary Islamic sciences, including Arabic grammar, the study of quranic exegesis (tafsīr) and Prophetic Traditions (ḥadīth) alongside more secular disciplines such as history, literature, rhetoric, mathematics and astronomy, began to proliferate in the eastern Islamic lands from the fifth century/eleventh century, although its origins are traceable as far back as the early fourth/tenth century in eastern Iran. As the religion of Islam and its accompanying civilization spread into new territories, e.g., Anatolia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the institution of the madrasa not only accompanied this diffusion but also lent it active support.

1. Bray's excellent work (1909, 1934) on Brahui, the Dravidian language spoken, so improbably, in Baluchistan, could not help but be used to the full by Burrow and myself in our 35 years of work on Dravidian etymologies. My very short contact, no more than eight hours, with Brahui speakers at the Chanhu-daro excavation early in 1936 (Emeneau, 1937) had stimulated me and provided a background for intensive etymological study based on Bray's material. This resulted in my publications, especially in 1962, reprinted in part and with some slight change in 1980a (pp. 315–49). In this latter publication (p. 318) I ventured a statement: ‘More descriptive field-work would certainly provide [more material on the language]. Whether much more would emerge to add to Bray's account is uncertain. Certainly it seems that vocabulary additions would probably include no new items from the Dravidian heritage’.

In stratified societies, accumulated material goods—be they made of metal, stone, cloth, bone, or even foodstuffs—represent the wealth and privilege of the élite within a social hierarchy. Anthropologists have shown that goods symbolic of wealth generally fall between two absolutes: alienable goods (items not tied to social membership and produced for giving, trading, or selling), and inalienable goods (items tied to social membership and imbued with a sense of the sacred history of the owner; relics found or crafted specifically to be treasured and saved). (See Weiner, 1982; Appadurai, 1986: ‘Introduction’.) The value of these objects is a measure of the power of the owner over the acquisition and distribution of desired goods. The objects in turn represent the cycles of production and exchange that provide them with a social value (Webb, 1974: 351–82). This is particularly evident in redistributive economies, such as the Native American societies of the North-West Pacific and South Pacific island communities, or certain highland South-East Asian societies where goods are collected by Big Men or chiefs and redistributed at ritual occasions. Gift-giving, often performed in association with ritual feasts involving lineage representatives, both living and dead, is a feature many of these complex societies share with ancient China.

One of the great ‘lost’ stories of Chinese tradition concerned a magistrate, a courtesan, and a tea-smuggler. It was probably based on real-life events, and was one of the most popular tales during the Southern Sung (1127–1279) and Yüan (1280–1368) dynasties. Yet the piecing together of its outline has entailed much effort, much painstaking sifting and mooting. A tentative reconstruction of it runs as follows:

The Gurung language made its Bulletin début in 1955 with an article by Burton-Page: ‘Two studies in Gurungkura: I. tone; II. rhotacization and retroflexion’ (BSOAS, 17/1, 1955, 111ff.). Since tone is the subject of one of these studies, it might seem that there would be little point in adding a further study of that same topic, important though it is; but a different dialect can lead to a considerable difference in the appearance of Gurung phonology as a whole, and so, too, can a difference in technique of analysis. As Burton-Page himself writes: ‘it should be mentioned that the material presented here is relevant only to the Ghandrung dialect, which of the four or five major Gurungkura dialects is accorded the greatest prestige-value by the Gurungs themselves’; his informant was G./Lieut. Ganesh Gurung, M.C., 1/2nd K. E. O. Goorkha Rifles (Burton-Page, 1955: 111).

In terms of number of speakers, Tibeto-Burman vies with Indo-European for the title of the world's largest language family. Yet by comparison little is known of its past. In linguistic terms, eastern Eurasia has always been much more of a terra incognita than western Eurasia. Speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages occupy a vast area in the heartland of eastern Eurasia, but Tibeto- Burman peoples are by no means the only inhabitants of the Orient. Yet at one time it was believed that virtually all languages spoken by what was impressionistically called ‘the Mongoloid race’ or ‘Mongolian races’ belonged to a vast language family known as Turanian. In the middle of the last century, Friedrich Max Müller, a celebrated champion of this theory, divided the languages of the Old World into three language families.

Few non-Asian sinological scholars would not recognize the name of James Legge (A.D. 1815–97), partly because his voluminous translations of the Confucian canon still continue to be reprinted and used by Western sinological circles 120 years after their first publication. In China itself, Legge has recently received new attention with the republication of bilingual editions of The Four Books and The Book of Changes. Japanese readers have had rather more access to Legge's English translations of The Four Books, beginning with the early Meiji period and continuing into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, none of these Chinese or Japanese editions has included the extensive commentarial notes drawn from Chinese Confucian and early Western sinological sources which earned Legge his reputation as a world-class Chinese scholar in the nineteenth century.

The role of some form of breathing meditation in most of the world's great mystical traditions has long been known, but few have seen much evidence for this in early Taoism. By ‘early Taoism’ I mean the formative stages of the tradition, from its mysterious origins to the completion of the Huai-nan-Tzu (139 B.C.). Perhaps scholars have seen so little evidence of meditative practice in early Taoism because they have tended to focus almost exclusively on its famous foundational works, Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu and have, furthermore, tended to treat them as works of abstract philosophy. In my research I have been particularly interested in the experiential basis of the philosophy found in the Lao-Tzu and the Chuang-Tzu and in a variety of other related texts that have hitherto been generally overlooked as sources for early Taoism. In order to clarify the context for the present investigation of meditative stages, I would like to present briefly the most relevant hypotheses from this research:

Twenty years ago hardly any legal texts from the Middle Mekong region were known. Now more than a 150 legal manuscripts have been borrowed from monastery book-chests, cleaned and microfilmed. Only one of these discoveries has been translated into a non-Thai language, but that is a substantial and important text. Aroonrut Wichienkeeo's and Gehan Wijeyewardene's Laws of King Mangrai translates a manuscript from ‘The Elephant Supported Temple’ in Nan which Richard Davis arranged to be copied. Reviewing it in these pages I suggested that the MS has jumbled together four distinct works in two broad categories. The bulk of the text consists of rules about family, theft and compensation drawn from works called Worldly law and the law of Dhamma (§1–49) and Mangrai's Dhammathat (§50–76). The rest of the MS deals with legal precedents rather than rules and can be divided into a collection of judgement tales (title unknown) (§77–87) and The traditions of King Mahosot (§88–106). There are corruptions, lacunae and interpolations throughout, but the earlier sections can at least be checked against other recensions of Northern Thai law. That is not possible for the last 20 sections: there is nothing in the surviving literature remotely similar to The traditions of King Mahosot. In this paper I attempt to reconstruct the original intentions of its author on contextual grounds: knowing what we do about Middle Mekong legal culture, what is the most plausible reconstruction of this damaged, but fascinating, work? My main aim will have been met if I can make the text more accessible to legal and political historians.

The Japanese language was traditionally written vertically. Recently, journals, textbooks and academic reference works have appeared with the script written horizontally. One reason for this may be that quotations of foreign names and articles (written in European languages) and mathematical equations often appear in technical texts, and it is therefore more convenient to have the main text of this kind of work written horizontally.

Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936), the founder of the Wellcome Trust, left at his death a superb collection of oriental materials relating to medicine which is now housed in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.1 Although he had a keen interest in China, which is reflected in the substantial collection of Chinese materials, he never made any systematic effort to acquire Japanese materials. Nevertheless, the Japanese collection contains a number of rarities and items of bibliographical or medical interest, and the most significant are described below.

It is hardly possible to praise the work which is the subject of this article too highly. It follows quite rapidly in the wake of a quartet of volumes devoted to the study of the languages of the Horn (Lamberti 1986, 1988a, 1988b; Haberland and Lamberti, 1988), and together with the more recently published Materialien zum Yemsa, (Lamberti, 1993b) constitutes a deeply impressive contribution to this area of scholarship. It is the present writer's long-held opinion that within this field the most pressing need continues to be good synchronic descriptions and dictionaries of the lesser-known languages and dialects. The work in hand meets just that need. As it happens, Shinassha has not been altogether neglected by previous research (cf. Grottanelli, 1941; Plazikowsky Brauner, 1950; Rottland, 1990), but every reader of this book will agree with me when I say that we now have a treatment of the language far beyond anything we have had previously. Indeed, as far as ‘Westkuschitik’ (alias ‘North Omotic’) languages are concerned, this bids well to be the most thoroughgoing description yet. Of course, it goes without saying that, short of reduplicating the researcher's fieldwork, it is impossible for any reader of such a book to vouch for the forms presented; but such is the scrupulous attention to detail in transcription, the accuracy in cross-referencing, and the general internal consistency in this particular work that little doubt could be entertained as to its being anything but authoritative.

The literature on the cultural interrelations of East and West published up to the present time is enormous. Even so, every new scholarly study in this field cannot but provoke interest, so important is the topic, particularly today in the era of so-called globalization. The books under review here, edited and introduced by Andrew Gerstle (SOAS) and Anthony Milner (ANU),1 are based on papers presented at conferences held by the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. The theme of the conferences—‘Europe and the Orient‘—attracted a great number of specialists in art history, musicology, anthropology and history, Asianists and Europeanists, from Europe, the United States and Australia. It is worth noting that the most of the papers are based on published works in which their authors have discussed the same or closely related topics. In presenting the principal ideas of those publications, these collections of papers form a ‘miniature library’ of works on East-West comparative cultural studies. The interdisciplinarity of the articles—their extraordinary ‘polyphony’, the diversity of their often mutually contradictory and polemical approaches, judgements and evaluations—reveals the complexity, multifacetedness and theoretical difficulties which are only too characteristic of the study of comparative culture. The reader is here provided with quite a complete picture of the contemporary state of the field, as well as of the strong and weak sides of its investigations. This breadth of coverage is one of the main strengths of the volumes.

A new text edition usually stimulates further publications and evaluations of similar texts. This situation particularly applies to J. Naveh and S. Shaked, Magic spells and formulae (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), since much new material has come to light in recent years. The present article consists of additional texts which have special relevance to the above mentioned volume (see my review of Naveh-Shaked in this issue). Two magic bowls which appeared at Sotheby's (London) in 1985 were copied by me and sent to Naveh and Shaked for study and publication. One bowl in Jewish Aramaic script (Text A) was also copied by the present writer, but the bowl was not easily legible, and Naveh and Shaked chose not to include it within the corpus of bowls, because neither the photographs nor the hand copy were sufficiently reliable. Since the present owner and location of the bowl is unknown, I have included my hand copy of the bowl here, with an attempt to read as much as is reasonably legible, in the hope that eventually the bowl will reappear and corrections to these readings can be made, through collation of the original. A second bowl, in Syriac script, was edited by Naveh and Shaked (Bowl 17), but since they chose not to publish the hand copy of the bowl, it is given below (as Text B).

In the 1994 season of the excavations in Ramla, archaeologist Don Glick, digging on behalf of Israel Antiquities Authority, exposed in a field on the eastern part of the city, some 600 m. to the south east of Birkat al-ՙAnaziyya, a complex of water installations consisting of two small basins or troughs (one 1.00 × 1.50 m. and the other 0.50 × 0.62 m.), and water canals and pipes. One of the canals was covered with a slab of marble, with an Arabic inscription, in a secondary usage. In the course of fitting the stone to its new purpose, it was cut and a few lines from the top and bottom of the inscription were lost. From the contents of the inscription, as we shall soon see, it can be learnt that the field and the water installations continued to be in use, long after the inscription ceased to serve its purpose, for it was utilized in the repairs of the water installations in the field at some later date.

The Kushan god μοζδοοανο is attested on a group of rare coins of Kanishka I, where he is depicted as a bearded male bearing a trident in his right hand and riding a two-headed horse. It has been universally assumed that the name μοζδοοανο is connected in some way with that of Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity of the Zoroastrian religion, the second element of the Bactrian form being generally interpreted as an epithet meaning ‘victorious’.