The great inscription of Darius I at Bisitun has hitherto been the only Achaemenid inscription known to exist not only in the three versions carved on the rock-face—Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian—but also in an Aramaic translation on papyrus. The fragmentary scroll containing the Aramaic text was first published by Sachau in 1911. In general, the Aramaic version agrees closely with the Babylonian and is therefore comparatively easy to interpret in spite of its poor state of preservation. However, both Sachau and all later editors have been baffled by one passage in the last column of the Aramaic text. The lines preceding and following correspond, at least approximately, to §§44 and 49 of the Babylonian: ‘King Darius states: King, whoever you are, who may arise after me, protect yourself well from lies. Do not trust the man who lies … Believe what I did and tell the truth to the people. Do not conceal (it). If you do not conceal these matters, but you do tell the people, may Ahura Mazda protect you …’. The intervening lines have not been identified up to now and their meaning has remained obscure.

In an article published in the early sixties, M. Bogaert shows certain groups of verbs which in Biblical Hebrew (as well as in other north-western Semitic languages) may govern verbal suffixes instead of ‘dative’prepositions. This phenomenon is called by him ‘non-accusative verbal suffixes’.

In his article ‘'et = ’el “to, towards” in Biblical Hebrew', S. Izre'el argues that the particle 'et sometimes occurs in contexts that elsewhere require the prepositions 'el ‘to, towards’ or 'im ‘with’. He concludes thatwith 'et is a preposition which in Modern Hebrew may be rendered by 'im or 'el, similar to the Hebrew preposition bƏ- which is sometimes translated into English as ‘in’ and at other times as ‘at’, according to the context.

The study of Muslim lexicology concerned with the Qur'ān has a short but illustrious bibliography, the highlights of which may be summed up for the purposes of the following discussion by mentioning four people: Arthur Jeffery, whose Foreign vocabulary of the Qur'ān contains a lengthy introduction concerning various classical Muslim attempts to come to grips with the Qur'ānic lexicon; Chaim Rabin, who in his Ancient West-Arabian attempts to use a text which deals with dialect words in the Qur'ān as one of Ms sources for the reconstruction of ‘pre-literary Arabic dialects’; Lothar Kopf, who, through his articles and posthumously published dissertation extracts, exposes many of the trends and pitfalls in Arabic dictionaries, most notably those features which result from the influence of the Qur'ān; and John Wansbrough, who via his Quranic studies has treated us to his analysis of some of the early texts and has provided some very cogent and persuasive arguments concerning the motivations behind the compilation of such treatises.

During its first half-century of existence, from the time of the revolution of 132/749 to the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd in 193/809, the 'Abbāsid caliphate embraced a huge area. From Ifrīqiya to the banks of the Indus and the deserts of Central Asia, governors were appointed to rule provinces, taxes were collected and armies sent to punish any who dared to rebel against the authority of the Commander of the Faithful. It is a very impressive achievement. If we seek an explanation of how this was possible from the great chroniclers of Islam, al-Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Athīr or al-Ya'qūbī, we are left with the impression that it was all very simple; the provinces were ruled by governors sent by the caliph and their authority was absolute until they were dismissed by their master. If any of the local people were so misguided as to attempt a rebellion, then units of the great Khurāsānī army, which had brought the dynasty to power, could be drafted in to chastise them. The system was, in short, an absolute military dictatorship.

In 1836 the Arabian traveller J. R. Wellsted described the Hindu community of Masqaṭ, 'Umān, as constituting ‘a body of the principal merchants’ of that port. By the 1870s the Indian merchants dominated the commercial life of Masqaṭ and had replaced the Āl Bū Sa'īd rulers of the town as the paramount economic power in 'Umān. While this community has much wider significance than their pivotal role in the commerce of Masqaṭ and 'Umān (the Indian merchants in Masqaṭ were a component of the great Indian Ocean trading network, and as Hindus and Shī'īs in a Sunnī, more properly Khārijī, country they offer potential insights into the status of minority groups in Muslim states) the focus of this study is the more specific problem of their origins, development and social and economic activities in Masqaṭ to the end of the nineteenth century.

L'emploi des Psaumes en dehors de l'usage liturgique est bien attesté aussi bien dans la tradition juive que dans la tradition chrétienne. Il y a d'abord la bibliomancie à proprement parler. Comme tous les livres bibliques, les Psaumes peuvent servir à la divination. La méthode la plus courante dans la bibliomancie est celle où l'on ouvre le livre au hasard et l'on prédit l'avenir d'après le passage que le doigt touche ou bien on cherche à répondre à une question posée au préalable.

A recent article (BSOAS, XLIII, 2, 1980, 311–28) was devoted to distinguishing the Sanskrit root mā- ‘to make, produce, create’ from mā- ‘to measure’. By this the number of homonymous roots mā- was not exhausted. A survey of the passages in the Ṛgveda in which this root is found soon makes it evident that these two meanings account for only a portion of the usages. There are many passages in which neither of these meanings applies. Most notable are those passages in which the poet asks the gods to bring riches, etc., and uses the root mā- to express this action. Examples are as follows:

nū no rayíṃ puruvīraṃ bṛhántaṃ

dásrā mímāthām ubháyeṣu asmé

‘0 you two skilful gods, bring to both of us people (poets and patrons) great wealth associated with many men.’

In 1933, in a brief remark on the expression hun-t'o‘leather bag’, Peter A. Boodberg identified it as a Kitan word and proposed to explain it through the Mongol °huquta, huyuta (modern Mongol uyula, pronounced ūta) ‘bag, sack’. Boodberg referred to Pelliot's article of 1925 on the Mongol °h- lost in the modern language; but Pelliot in his paper does not even mention hun-t'o. Professor Boodberg's note remained largely unnoticed, due no doubt to its brevity, comprising as it did not more than a few lines in a longer article which appeared in a publication distributed in rather restricted circles.

The publication of a new history of medieval Central Asia, over half of which is concerned with the empire of the Chingizid Mongols, provides an opportunity for a survey of a number of books on that subject that have appeared during the past decade. Professor Kwanten's book is, more or less avowedly, an attempt to replace Rene Grousset's L'empire des steppes as the standard introduction to Central Asian history. I begin, then, with the English translation of Grousset's celebrated book.

Dirayta (ɗiraytá) is an Eastern Cushitic language spoken by a people calling themselves Diraaŝ (ɗiráaŝ), who live in the immediate vicinity of Gidole. Within Ethiopia generally the language is known as Gidoliñña. Dirayta and Musiya (Bussa or Busiñña) constitute the northernmost dialects of the Konsoid dialect chain, a linguistic entity first clearly established by Paul Black (forthcoming).

The following two Mahānubhāva manuscripts in Marathi were recently presented to the author in Aurangabad and have been deposited in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Since they are written mainly in sakaḷa script (see my ‘The Mahānubhāva sakaḷa lipī’, BSOAS, xxxiii, 2, 1970, 328–34) and between them contain several Mahānubhāva works, they are worth describing in some detail.