The article discusses two key terms in the Quran in connection with the corresponding (cognate or semantically related) terms in the writings of other religious communities in the Near East (Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, Manichaeism). The investigation leads to a discussion of the religious environment of early Islam and in particular its relationship with Jewish Christianity.

During the 1940s and 1950s D. Storm Rice and Seton Lloyd, together with the Turkish Antiquity Authority, undertook archaeological excavations in Harrān. With the exception of two preliminary reports and a few articles, the excavations remain largely unpublished.

The 264 coins constitute an independent source on the regional, political and economic history of Harrān. For the Umayyad and early Abbasid period, the coins constitute a source on the pattern of the city's regional integration. Two-thirds of the coins date from the Ayyubid period. The circulation is characterized by a competition of different coinages: first, those which were struck for the political entities to which Harrān belonged; and second, imported coins, i.e. of Byzantine and Rūm-Saljūq origin. Third, copper coins from Northern Syria, despite the fact that the Diyār Mudar and Northern Syria belong to different branches of the Ayyubid dynasty. Two dirhams of the Saljūq prince al-Malik Mas‘ūd, who resided in Mosul between 504/1111 and 511/1118, are historical documents of importance.

The port of Cambay in Gujarat was formerly one of the premier ports of western India and home to a rich and vibrant tradition of Islamic architecture and artistic patronage. This article presents a previously unpublished structure from Cambay, the Kothī gateway. Though commonly believed to have been constructed as part of the English factory at Cambay, the article demonstrates through stylistic analysis that the Kothī gateway in fact predates the factory by several centuries and is a neglected Tughluq structure, probably dating to the 1330s A.D.. The article also suggests that the gateway is in fact a rare, if not unique, surviving example of the secular architecture of fourteenth-century Cambay so praised by contemporary travellers. The Kothī gateway therefore represents a valuable addition to our list of known Islamic structures at the port of Cambay, and takes its place among the growing number of Tughluq structures identified in India. The article also provides an opportunity to publish a number of other structures, architectural fragments and carvings from Cambay that relate to the present gateway.

This article argues that the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti constituted the kernel of a ritual text recited during the Yasna ceremony. Zaraθušhtra's Gathas were arranged around it, and so were the holy prayers and later additions in Younger Avestan. The arrangement of the extant Older Avesta is probably the original one, and may go back to the composer himself. Its compositional principle is that of parallelism and ring composition, a pattern which can be found both in individual Gathic hymns, two of which (Y 28 and 43) are analysed, and in the structure of the entire Yasna.

This article is an introduction to the writings of two significant but little-studied Sufi thinkers of fourteenth-century Cairo. Muhammad Wafā' and his son ‘Alī were poets and mystical philosophers. They founded a new branch of the Shādhiliyya Sufi order, and their descendants went on to become one of the most important families in Egypt. The numerous writings of this father and son, in the tradition of Muhy al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī, have as yet received little attention from scholars of Islamic thought. This study introduces these thinkers and surveys their extant writings, almost all of which remain in manuscript form. Beyond describing the contents, the article also seeks to position their thought within the wider context of Islamic mysticism.

Ancient Greek and Roman conventional consolations of mourners are not reflected in Buddhist texts. Reason should modify grief, but the Buddha's ‘consolation’ of Visākhā by blaming her ‘affection’ is crude. Kisā Gotamī was consoled by the Buddha's asking her to get mustard seed from homes where no son, etc., had died, a technique employed by Democritus of Abderaj by Demonax, and in the Alexander Romance. The maxim of the Lame and the Blind figures in Indian philosophy, known to Buddhists. It appears in first-century Greek epigrams, and later Jewish texts a propos of resurrection. Movements of detail from West to East and vice versa are thus illustrated. Therefore the evangelists' and Buddhists' ideas could have been exchanged, despite pertinacious denials.

The 1990s bore witness to significant advances in the study of Chinese migration history. This paper explores ways in which these new insights into population and migration patterns in the lower Yangtze watershed throw light on the history of dialects currently assigned to the Jiāng-Huái family by the Language atlas of China. It is found that the lexical corpora of many of these dialects were laid down as the result of two migration waves, one during the late Táng period and the other after the fall of the Northern Sòng. Material from the first of these waves is now found in bái or colloquial pronunciations of certain syllables. Material from the second wave constitutes the primary lexical component of these dialects and also contributes those wén or literary readings which pair directly with the colloquial pronunciations in each dialect. Interaction with several contiguous dialect groups is also noted. In particular, interlocking or commensurate wén/bái correspondences with dialects of the Northern Wú group are discussed and exemplified.

The only notable works on poetics and prosody that survive in Pali are the Subodhālankāra (comprising, in effect, Kārikā and Vrtti) and Vuttodaya. They have been ascribed to the twelfth-century Sinhalese monk Sangharakkhita and described, almost from the outset, as ‘dependent upon Sanskrit models’ and ‘based entirely upon Sanskrit prosody’ respectively. Indeed the Vrtti names a ‘Dandi’ as its basic source. The Pali Text Society's 2000 edition of the Subodhālankāra, complete with two versions of the Vrtti, compiled by P. S. Jaini, has registered many, but by no means all of the parallel passages in Dandin's Kāvyādarśa, the seminal manual of Sanskrit poetic theory. The present article seeks to show that the Pali texts depend rather on earlier Middle Indian traditions of rhetoric and poetics, coupled with theories adumbrated in Nātyaśāstra. It is reasonably certain that the basic Pali material, especially as presented in the version with ‘Abhinavatīkā’, has been drawn upon by the author of the Sanskrit Kāvyādarśa; and there is evidence that the ‘Porānatīkā’ has been superficially influenced by the Sanskrit text. The material goes far to explain classical Sanskrit notions of Alamkāra, Rasa and Dhvani. The Pali prosody Vuttodaya seems to have been equally baselessly maligned, and should take its place along with surviving vestiges of Prakrit prosody as the fundamental link between Vedic and classical theory.

Coomaraswamy and other art interpreters have read into Indian images metaphysical meanings extrapolated from scriptural sources. In this article it is argued that such meanings, with which image-making was doubtless invested, were intended for purposes of meditation and cannot be admitted as part of the objective representation of the images, except where they figure as iconographical features. The images were also not conceived as yantras, but as full-bodied representations conforming to objective norms. The metaphysical excursions are largely extraneous to the aesthetic assumptions of Indian art and detract from its rich mythical content.

By the Han empire, concepts of the cosmos were changing basically from that of the ‘Four Quarters’ (Si fang) to the ‘Five Phases’ (Wu xing), with a place for emperors to act as an essential pivot in the interlocking relationships of Heaven, Earth and Man. Differing views of the duty of monarchs may be discerned, e.g., in the memorials of Dong Zhongshu and the chapters of the Huainanzi, and the underlying questions could lead to antagonisms between emperors and kings, or between high-ranking officials of government and scholars of traditional writings. The part that individual Han emperors played in determining decisions of state may well be limited to a few instances. While it may be questioned how far they were conscious of the intellectual basis that supported their authority with its implied responsibilities, Wang Mang tried to exploit a view of the cosmos to assert his claim to power.

In recent years, the field of Buddhist studies has witnessed renewed interest in the study of the Parthian An Shigao (active since 148 A.D., during the Later Han Dynasty), the earliest translator of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese.

This article examines the meanings and etymologies of several problematic Sogdian lexemes.I am very much obliged to Dr. J. Cheung (Leiden), Professor V. Livšic (St. Petersburg), P. Lurje (St. Petersburg), Professor M. Schwartz (Berkeley) and Professor N. Sims-Williams (London) who took pains to read the first drafts of this article and made valuable remarks, to Dr. B. Williams (Berkeley) who was very helpful in the matter of everything Chinese, to M. Ellsworth (Berkeley), A. Kassian (Moscow) and A. Kozák (Berkeley) who corrected my style. Final decisions are, of course, my own and none of those listed above are responsible for my errors. I am also grateful to the Houtan foundation (www.houtan.org) for its generous financial support, without which the completion of this article would hardly have been possible.

The early imperial period was a time of rapid change in medical ideas and practices in China. Manuscripts and artifacts excavated from tombs of the second century B.C. along the Yangtze river valley bring fresh insights into some of the processes involved in medical innovation in the early centuries of the empire. Through examining exorcistic practices and petty surgery to the refinement of a body sustained and nourished by physiological essences, this paper describes recurring patterns found in the changing medical techniques associated with stone, be that lancets, hot pressing stones or mineral prescription. After the transition to a culture of applying fine metal acupuncture needles vestiges of these treatments found in early Chinese stone culture remain enshrined in both the theory and practice of canonical medicine.

This article offers a brief introduction to the Ethiopic grammatical tradition. It engages in a discussion of selected terms used in the Ethiopic national grammars in the light of reference to and comparison with the Arabic and Copto-Arabic grammars of the late middle ages. Modern linguistic tools are used to analyse the linguistic ramifications of certain grammatical terminologies.

Since Shangdai de shenhua yu wushu, Chen Mengjia's article on Shang mythology, some sinological works have proposed that the Chinese wu was an equivalent of the Siberian shaman. I examine first the issues in anthropological comparatism involved in this problem and provide up-to-date information on Siberian shamanism. It must be noted that the Chinese texts are by no means equivalent to modern anthropological data and that these texts did not originate directly from the wu themselves; they are rather a collection of opinions or stories on the wu. Detailed study of the nature and social status of the Chinese wu, either in oracular inscriptions or late Zhou received texts, shows a systematic association of the wu with non-auspicious or negative events, like funerals, death or natural catastrophes. A further analysis of the data reveals that the wu's activities in relation to natural phenomena were frequently presented in terms related to sexuality. This last point permits a comparison with Siberian shamans, whose activities are also linked to fecundity and sexuality, although the Chinese texts often associate the wu with sexual misbehaviour and blame them on moral grounds. They go as far as to treat them as dangerous sorcerers who must be weeded out. According to these data, the wu's social function is linked to the handling of misfortune, either directly or by being associated with ritually unacceptable behaviours. On the whole, my conclusion is that even the common point between wu and Siberian shaman (the link with sexuality) is not sufficient to allow for a translation of ‘wu’ by ‘shaman’, especially in view of the differences of social and historical context.

Early in the twentieth century a hidden cache of manuscripts was discovered in the monastic cave complex of Dunhuang in Central Asia. The majority of the manuscripts, dating from the first millennium C.E., are in Chinese and Tibetan. The largest collections of Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang are in France and England. However, the fact that there are collections of almost equal size within China is hardly known outside of that country. In this article I report on the nature and size of these Chinese collections, and the results of my own examination of the collections in Dunhuang. This information largely completes the puzzle which was left to us after the dispersal of the manuscripts to various institutions, and allows us to attempt a reconstruction of the contents of the original ‘library’ of Tibetan manuscripts in the cave in Dunhuang.

Although the presence of Nestorian Christianity in China under the Tang dynasty is a familiar enough matter to students of religion, many scholars in Chinese studies were until very recently reluctant to undertake substantial research into this topic, for the very good reason that they had been expecting the appearance of posthumous work on one of our main sources for this episode by Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), who was probably the greatest Asianist of the twentieth century. In 1984 Pelliot's translation of the source in question, the ‘Nestorian stele of Xian’, originally erected in 781 but first rediscovered in the seventeenth century, was actually published as part of a posthumous publication by another scholar, J. Dauvillier, who had been concerned primarily with the Syriac portions of the stele inscription. Since, however, Dauvillier's volume did not include any of Pelliot's copious notes to his translation, sinological scholarship was not substantially advanced by the appearance of this monograph.