The legal and social attitude towards delicts against individuals in the great settled states of South Arabia is a subject on which information is very scant. All that has survived in the case of homicide is a fragmentary legal prescription of uncertain import, a temple regulation on the subject of slaves, and two incidental communications gleaned from dedicatory inscriptions. To this may be added a general prohibition contained in a late Greek law code purporting to stem from the Homeritae. Moreover, this small corpus of information is geographically limited in the first case to Qatabān, and in the remainder to Saba', while each instance refers to a different stage in the social development of South Arabia.

In the course of a visit to Urfa in south-eastern Turkey in 1961 I was able to re-examine and to photograph the short inscription at the bottom centre of the Tripod mosaic which I had discovered in 1956. The photographs are incorporated in the colour transcription of this mosaic by Mrs. Seton Lloyd, published with my article ‘The Sabian mysteries’, in E. Bacon (ed.), Vanished civilizations, 1963, 204. The revised text of this inscription, however, has not yet received detailed analysis; I venture to return to it here because it contains features that may be of interest to students of Semitic philology and religion.

Among the Arabic documents preserved in the archives of Sicily is one relating to the affairs of the Jewish community in Siracusa at the end of thetwelfth century. Belonging by origin to the episcopal church of Cefalù, it isnow in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo (Tabulario della Chiesa Vescovile di Cefalù, Perg. no. 25), and was included in the collection published by S. Cusain 1868–82.

The so-called ‘Anonymous Chronicles’ of the Ottoman dynasty and the closely related texts which pass under the name of Uruj present formidable problems to an editor, for they are not ‘histories’ in the classical sense, handed down in copies made for scholars by professional copyists, but rather storybooks of the genre of the Baṭṭāl-nāme and the Dānishmend-nāme, written for the edification and entertainment of the ordinary man, so that many a ‘copyist’ was in effect a redactor or even an author, freely paraphrasing his model, adding new stories or alternative versions of old ones, and occasionally stitching together two recensions to make a new and fuller version.

The establishment of a British political agent at Baghdad marked an important shift in British policy in the area of the Persian Gulf. It underlined the changing interest from trade to politics, the recognition of the strategic problem of Indian defence, and the assertion by the British Government in India of a policy towards the Ottoman Empire which was in contrast to that of the Government in England. During the period of office of the first Resident, Harford Jones, these changes were but dimly perceived through the fog of personal feuds which surrounded him. None the less these feuds did ultimately reflect significant divisions about policy.

Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73) wrote Meghanādbadhkāvya‘ The death of Meghanād’, a nine-canto epic, in 1861. Being a Rāma story, the poem naturally owes much of its substance to the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, which is represented in Sanskrit by Vālmīki's mahākāvya and in Bengali by Krittibās's work; but it differs from that tradition, widely and in a most original way, in the characterization of the persons, the selection and presentation of the episodes, and above all in sentiment and sympathy. This divergence was the result of deliberate choice. ‘I despise Ram and his rabble (i.e. the monkeys); but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination’ Datta wrote to R. N. Basu. In other letters he gave further indications of his thinking about the approach to his subject. ‘I mean to give free scope to my Inventing powers and to borrow as little as I can from Vahniki’; and,' If the father of our poetry (i.e. Vāhmīki) had given Ram human companions I could have made a regular Iliad of the death of Meghanad.

Ever since the Ta hsüeh was extracted from the Li chi to form part of the ‘Four books’, the term ke wu which appears in the sentence in the opening passage: ‘The furtherance of knowledge lies in ke wu’, has exercised the ingenuity of commentators. I do not propose here to review the vast literature on the subject, but before going on to deal with the meaning of the term a brief look at the two best-known commentaries may prove instructive. Cheng Hsiian £ comments as follows

Among the five essays ascribed to the sophist Kung-sun Lung (c. 300 B.C.) is an ‘Essay on hard and white’ () which argues that a hard white stone is two things, the white stone which one sees and the hard stone which one touches. In an earlier paper I offered evidence that the last three essays in Kung-sun Lung tzŭ (including the ‘Essay on hard and white’) were written between A.D. 300 and 600, but did not question the apparently self-evident facts that many pre-Han and Han writers mention a sophism of Kung-sun Lung about the separation of hard and white and that in the third century B.C. the common-sense position that hardness and whiteness are mutually pervasive was defended against the sophists in the Mohist Canons. The purpose of the present inquiry is to look again at the whole of the early evidence with fresh eyes.

The study of codified law under the T'ang dynasty is greatly complicated by the fact that, of the four main categories of laws only the penal Code (lü ) is preserved in full. The chief secondary category of law, the administrative Statutes (ling) have been painstakingly reconstructed on the basis of their Japanese adaptations, by reassembling the very large number of quotations which are preserved in T'ang sources, and we have a tolerably complete picture of their form and content. The other two categories of centrally codified law, the Regulations (ko) which codified the major amendments to and supplements to the Code and Statutes which had been promulgated from time to time in imperial Edicts, and the Ordinances (shih) which provided detailed rules for the local implementation of the other categories of law, have disappeared almost completely, and virtually the sole substantial surviving fragments are included among the Tunhuang manuscripts.

Much of the recent work done in Japan on the political and social background to the Meiji Restoration has concentrated on analysing the manifestations of unrest in Japanese society, which arose from its failure to adjust quickly enough to economic change. Writers point to the growing wealth of merchants, accompanied by the impoverishment of samurai, to the increasing differentiation between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ farmers in the village; and they relate the consequent discontent to samurai reform movements within the great domains (han) and to the rising incidence of peasant revolt. These factors in turn are fitted into general—and often widely differing—explanations of the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the nature of Meiji political institutions.

Traditionally, in Thailand, theatrical performances and ancillary entertainments, feats, and games had an important ceremonial function. The generic term that is applied to them is mahōrasop. The context in which they are found in their most highly developed form is that of court ceremonial, though, since ceremonies in the country were often analogues of those held at court, performances of this kind had a wide distribution beyond the walls of the royal and princely palaces of the capitals. To-day, the tradition, even though progressively devitalized as a result of a century of cultural change, remains a living one.