The remarkable rise of the ‘Aẓms from an inconspicuous family of landed campaigners at Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man to a dynasty of governors that ruled in Syria for most of the eighteenth century owes its origin to the process of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and its institutions.

In the new activity of qānūn-making at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Egypt preceded Turkey, especially with regard to criminal law. Although Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire, Muḥammad ‘Alī framed new laws based on Egyptian conditions and valid in Egypt only, while the Ottoman laws of the Tanzimat did not come into force in Egypt before Sa‘īd's days. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of Egyptian penal laws in the nineteenth century, to analyse their relation to Ottoman laws, and to relate the story of the Ottoman Sultan's attempt to introduce into Egypt ‘the Tanzimat’—meaning mainly the Ottoman penal code.

In a passage found in all manuscripts of ‘Āshiqpashazāde's History of the Ottomans, and hence in the two editions ‘C’ and ‘G, the author relates that in 816/1413, when Meḥemmed I marched against his brother Mūsā, he himself—then a lad of about thirteen and evidently accompanying the army—fell ill and was left behind at Geyve (the township where the main road from Ankara to Constantinople crosses the Sakaria).

[For parts i and ii see BSOAS, xvi, 3, 1954,542–55, and xvir, 1, 1955, 92–110. On the death of Col. Lorimer, in February 1962, the whole of his rich collection of linguistic material, mostly unpublished, passed by his bequest into the possession of the School.

Older Khotanese Saka has the word jsei'ṇa-, jseiṇa-, jsäṇa-, superlative jsei'ndama-, later Khotanese jseiṇa-, jsaiṇa-, jseṇa-, jseṃṇa-, jsiṃṇa-, jsiṇa- ‘small’, of size rendering Sansk.

The translation, included in this study, of the passages concerning vṛtti in the eighteenth chapter of Abhinavagupta's commentary on the Nātyaśāstra has been used as the starting-point for an attempt to determine the manner in which one small portion of the text and commentary reached their present confused state.

Most Sanskrit texts dealing with Indian music refer to 7 svaras (notes) and 22 śrutis (intervals ? microtones ?) which are said to be the basis of Indian music. Many modern writers in Western as well as the vernacular languages consider that śrutis refer to the microtonal variations in particular notes from one rāga to another. In order to convey the general opinion on the subject of intonation, we quote from Alain Daniélou, a prominent writer on North Indian music:

‘It is impossible to sing the complete scale of the shrutis accurately in succession (as some singers pretend to do), but they can all be sung with perfect accuracy when they are embodied in expressive scales’.

The comparative Altaic phonology recently published by Professor Poppe is the third post-war attempt to give body to the theory of the genetic relationship of Altaic languages. In the recent spectacular renascence of Altaic studies two similar works have been published: one by Kotwicz, the other by Ramstedt. It is interesting to note that these surveys were published at a time when the genetic relationship of the Altaic language had already been tacitly admitted for about a century.

The tone patterns of the Recent Style (chin-t‘i ) have always given trouble to Western readers of Chinese poetry. Chinese authorities offer us a confusing variety of patterns, each with a different tone sequence for every line of the quatrain, no apparent principle of organization, and seemingly unaccountable licences for certain syllables. Yet if we choose to ignore these patterns, we are left only with such clumsy rules of thumb as that syllables of the same tone tend to fall into pairs and that corresponding syllables within the couplet generally contrast in tone.

No. 6174 of Giles's Catalogue of the Chinese manuscripts from Tun-huang states that on the back of this manuscript there is a ‘short text relating to the legend of the Weaving Maiden and the Cowherd’. On inspection this turns out to be a series of verses, two for each of the five watches of the night, headed Hsi ch‘iu t‘ien ‘Eejoicing in the autumn sky’

The term ‘verbal piece’ is applied here to any utterance stretch defined initially by one of the particles listed in paragraph 6 and finally either by sentence-closing intonation or by a marker indicating the onset of another piece. Investigation of the order in which forms appear within these limits leads to the recognition of a number of sequential positions within the verbal piece. Forms are classified according to their distribution over these positions and commutability within them.

The Iranian field seems sometimes to have more than its fair share of fakes. In material form they range from silver bowls with novel ‘Old Persian’ inscriptions to highly original ‘early modern Persian’ manuscripts. On the literary side we have a series of dictionaries which should rate high among works of fiction, containing as they do, beisde the glossators' mistakes of centuries, the vocabularies of at least two fictitious languages.

The commemoration volume published by the Turkish Historical Society for the tercentenary of the death of the Ottoman polymath Kātib Čelebi (1609–57) contains an exhaustive survey of his works by 0. Ş. Gökyay, with much new information on the extant manuscripts. Here appears a description of his Rawnaq al-salṭana ‘Splendour of the sultanate’, previously known only from the author's cursory mention of it, in his Mīzān al-ḥaqq, as ‘a history of Constantinople’.