In 1962 I published some evidence based on Han and early post-Han transcriptions to show that Chinese still had a sibilant final in certain departing tone rhymes at that period. I can now add some still later examples which bring the date down to the beginning of the sixth century, at least in the south. As will be shown below, the transcription evidence is also supported by contemporaneous rhyming practice, which still allowed contacts between Middle Chinese -j' < -s and -t.

The history of the industrial and commercial district between al-Raqqa and al-Rāfiqa is reconstructed on the basis of literary sources, numismatic finds and aerial views from the early twentieth century. It probably came into being during the 160s/780s when the ‘old market of the caliph Hishām’ was transferred from within al-Raqqa to the free land between the two cities. The decision of Hārūn al-Rashīd to reside in al-Raqqa created a new demand, and consequently glass furnaces and pottery kilns were set up for mass production. A road running from the east gate of al-Rāfiqa connected this area. After 198/213 the governor of the west, Tārhir ibn al-Husain, erected a wall north of the area in order to protect it from Bedouin raids. During the third/ninth century at the latest the area developed into a third urban entity. Al-Muqaddasī mentions an al-Raqqa al-Muhtariqa. The identification with the commercial and industrial area is proposed. The decline of al-Raqqa al-Muhtariqa began in the 270s/880s and 280s/890s. The devastating rule of the Hamdânids probably marks its end.

If our present knowledge of the history of the Muslim Maghrib is in general unsatisfactory, few periods remain as obscure as the fifteenth century.

The extant sources are very scarce. Contemporary Maghribī historical writings are practically non-existent and, with few exceptions, this is still an epoch for which Christian chronicles are not yet really relevant. Only fragmentary and partial information can be extracted from the contemporary Spanish and Portuguese documents. Therefore, we have to rely for our knowledge on the so-called manāqib literature or hagiographic dictionaries which proliferated in Morocco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These volumes—many of which were lithographed in Fās during the nineteenth century—cannot be considered a first-rate source. They are posterior to the period dealt with and appear as versions of a traditional history composed over the years by agglomeration, repetition, and revision from a series of original stories which may be doubtful, even though they are hallowed by time and usage, and fortified by the weight of respectability. Committed to writing, they have acquired the seal of authority and have seldom been challenged.

The Niya Documents are a collection of some 760 or so texts, on wood, paper, leather, silk, etc., which were found (primarily) by Sir Aurel Stein in his Central Asian expeditions of 1900–01, 1906 07, 1913–14, at several ruined sites around Niya on the southern Silk Route. They are short texts, ranging from sentence fragments and brief lists to well-preserved connected texts of up to long lines, and they contain administrative records (deeds, bills of sale, etc.) and administrative correspondence (about criminal and civil complaints, tax collection, governmental management, and dangers from without) of the kingdom of Shan-Shan or Kroraina. One of their remarkable features to an indologist is that they are more or less securely datable, to a period of approximately 90 years in the third century A.D.

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook take an extreme stand in their study of early Islam when they dismiss Islamic Egypt as an utterly depersonalized and assimilated part of the orthodox Muslim polity. ‘Egypt in Islam was not so much a nation or even a country as simply a place.’ In their view the Copts with their indigenous traditions and civilization had become exiles in their own country. Rustic Coptic culture, if compared with the urban Christian intellectual heritage of Syria and Mesopotamia, lacked the stamina to assert itself in. the new religious setting, and receded to the countryside. In the opinion of the authors, Egypt surrendered with extreme readiness her distinctive provincial features to the new Islamic civilization and developed into the most loyal and most prolific, yet at the same time the most parochial and imitative stronghold of sunnī Islam. They flatly disclaim any specific Egyptian contribution to medieval Islam, even during the two centuries of schismatic Fatimid ascendancy when Cairo was the centre of an intrinsically Egyptian Empire with universal claims. So far the thesis of Hagarism.

The Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. possesses a collection of nearly 150 Sogdian fragments recovered from various sites in Central Asia between 1893 and 1915. During the first three decades of this century a few texts were published by F. Rosenberg and C. Salemann. Thereafter the collection was for a long time ignored, while Russian Sogdianists turned their attention to the important archive of Sogdian documents discovered in 1933 at Mt. Mugh in Tajikistan. Everyone concerned with the languages and culture of medieval Central Asia will be deeply grateful to A. N. Ragoza, whose efforts have finally resulted in the complete publication of these interesting fragments. Her edition, reviewed here, includes texts, translations, commentary, glossary, and 69 pages of facsimiles.

THE historian of Isma'Ilism, to whichever part of its chequered history he turns, is confronted with unusually difficult problems of historical criticism. These are due, at least partly, to the character of the movement itself. There can be hardly any doubt that when Isma'Ilism, which had started as an underground organization in the middle of the 3rd/9th century, established itself in the 4th/10th century as a powerful empire under the Fatimids, the official leadership endeavoured to cover up the origins of the movement with a thick smoke-screen. On the other hand, its enemies and Isma'Ilism was the besthated sect in Islamadded to the confusion by giving currency to sensational and fanciful accounts, curious mixtures of truth and fiction.

This paper is intended to summarize the results of our observations on the phonetics of the Georgian language, gathered in some fifteen sessions of listening with our informant, Mr. A. Gugushvili. Mr. Gugushvili, who has been on the Panel of Additional Lecturers as a part-time teacher of Georgian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was born in Kutais and describes his speech as normal educated West Georgian. He has lived in this country for the past twenty-four years as a member of the Georgian community in London, and has been engaged in the study of Georgian history and literature.

The Silk Road trade network was arguably the most important network of global exchange and interaction prior to the fifteenth century. On the question of how and when it developed, scholars have focused mainly on the role of either the empires dominating the two ends of the trade network or the nomadic empires on the Eurasian steppe. The sedentary people of Central Asia have, however, mostly been neglected. This article traces the development of the city-states of the Tarim Basin in eastern Central Asia, from c. 2000 bce to 400 bce. It argues that the development of the city-states of the Tarim Basin is closely linked to the rise of the ancient Silk Road and that the interaction between the Tarim polities, the nomads of the Eurasian steppe and the Han Empire was the central dynamic in the creation of the ancient Silk Road network in eastern Central Asia.

Interest in the Zoroastran religion is widespread among scholars, and knowledge of Zoroastrian practice has been diligently acquired. The main source of information has, however, been the Indian branch of the community; and a number of evidently ancient customs observed in the Persian homeland have passed almost, and sometimes indeed entirely, unnoticed in the West.

“All polite literature”, said the scholar Yen Chih-t′ui, “is derived from the five classical writings ”,. This statement, true in a general sense, illustrates the traditional attitude of Chinese scholars who, whenever possible, referred to the classical age as the source of anything new which they desired to introduce.

In 1260 an army of Egyptian Mamluks, led by Sultan Qutuz, defeated a Mongol army from the Ilkhanate led by Ketbugha, at the battle of Ayn Jalut (Ain Jalut), ‘Goliath's Well’, in Palestine. Because this campaign marked the furthest advance of the Mongols in the Middle East, scholars have paid considerable attention to its military and political significance. However, one potential aspect of Ilkhanid-Mamluk relations has only been mentioned casually; examination of the role and image of the Kipchaks in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries may illustrate a much broader feature of the history of the Mongol Empire and its successor states.

Before he set off on his fatal Persian expedition Julian appears to have issued certain instructions about the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Whether the initiative for this came from the Jewish community, or was from the emperor himself, is unclear, the sources being as divided on this point as they are on the exact nature of the events that brought the work to a halt. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the one pagan account that survives,

‘… magnitudine operum gestiens propagare, ambitiosum quondam apud Hierosolymam templum, quod post multa et interneciva certamina, obsidiente Vespasiano, posteaque Tito, aegre est expugnatum, instaurare sumptibus cogitabat immodicis, negotiumque maturandum Alypio dederat Antiochensi, qui olim Britannias curaverat pro praefectis. cum itaque rei idem fortiter instaret Alypius, iuvaretque provinciae rector, metuendi globi flammarum prope fundamenta crebris assultibus erumpentes, fecere locum exustis aliquotiens operantibus inaccessum, hocque modo elemento destinatius repellente, cessavit inceptum’.

This paper outlines the centrality of the Late Roman period in the settlement history of Palestine, and the marginal contribution of the Christian establishment to the development of the land. Settlement momentum during these periods resulted from the fact that Palestine was part of the Roman Empire. The historical trends in Palestine should be regarded as part of a broader political settlement drive that characterized the eastern parts of the Roman realm during the period under discussion. The argument that the process of expansion was unique and stemmed from Palestine's holiness in the eyes of the Christian world is unfounded.

This article reports the discovery by the Hebrew University Expedition to Bet Shean of two unique wall mosaics with Arabic inscriptions under the ruins of the entrance gate to the Umayyad market in the south-eastern part of the excavated city centre. This gate consisted of two stone piers; on the front of each of these was a rectangular decorated stone frame and a mosaic inscription in square Kufic script executed in gilded tesserae on a deep blue background. The first inscription contains four lines of prayer, including the Basmallah and the testimony of al-Shahāda. The lower part of the inscription was not found and it is suggested that the three missing lines contained the quranic verse (IX, 33), most frequently quoted in the Umayyad period. The second inscription consists of seven lines, again starting with the Basmallah formula, and followed by the order given by the Caliph Hishām b. ‘Abd al-Malik (reigned 105–125 A.H./724–743 C.E.) to the governor of jund al-Urdunn Ishāq b. Qabisa to erect this building. The market structure is believed to have been completed in the year 120 A.H./738 C.E. It collapsed eleven years later in the earthquake of 749.

The early centuries of the Christian era are of crucial importance for the history of the Buddhist religion. It is customary to ascribe to this periodthe emergence and development of the Mahāyāna; and by the latter half of the second century A.D. , towards the end of the Later Han dynasty, Buddhism hadspread as far as China, where the earliest of the long succession of translatorswere beginning to produce Chinese versions of Indian Buddhist texts, both Hīayāna and Mahāyāna. A detailed and connected narrative of this remarkable expansion of the religion would form one of the most fascinating chapters in theearly history of Asia. Such a narrative, nevertheless, cannot be written: the surviving information is fragmentary, interpretation is often uncertain, theproblems numerous and intractable. Encouraged by sheer exiguity of primary historical evidence, many modern scholars have consecrated to this period whole

The Mahānubhāvas are a Hindu sect whose members are largely concentrated in northern and eastern Maharashtra, between the old districts of Khandesh and Nagpur, while they are strongest of all in Berar. In many respects they have a rather marginal place in the culture of Maharashtra today. Unlike the Vārkarī pantha, the much more celebrated and popular Vaiṣṇava sect, they are centred on a backwoods area. They tend to gather in maṭhas (monasteries) in decayed villages that are a day's journey from the nearest railway or main road. Instead of Alandi, which is on Poona's doorstep, or Pandharpur, their holy places are Ritpur, a crumbling dusty village in the rolling country north of Amraoti, and Mahur, on a mountainside on the borders of Berar and the Adilabad district of Andhra. Like the Vārkarīs their followers are almost all non-Brahmans, but unlike the Vārkarīs they have, until recently at least, acquired few Brahman champions to lend them ethical and religious respectability, and indeed they are chiefly known in Marathi folk-lore as typifying a virulent brand of hypocrisy—the stereotype of a sweet tongue and professions of virtue that cover up all sorts of unseemly and unspecified ‘goings-on’. Their numbers are relatively small. Enthoven, whose section on them in The tribes and castes of Bombay is one of the few references to the sect in English, gives it an estimated membership of about 22,000 in 1901, and it is hard to judge what relation this figure would bear to the number of professed Mahānubhāvas today. The modern census figures are of course no help, since Mahānubhāvas are included under the general heading of Hindus.

The Imāmī Shī'ī theory of the imāmate evolved gradually during the first Islamic century and was given a definitive shape in the middle of the second/eighth century by Hishām b. al-Ḥakam. For the next 100 years or so, until the death in 260/874 of the eleventh Imām, al-Ḥasan al-'Askarī, no significant changes seem to have been introduced. Only in the mid-fourth/tenth century does a major addition appear in the form of a doctrine: it is the belief that there are 12 Imāms, the last of whom remains in a state of concealment (ghayba) until his ultimate return as Mahdī, or Qā'im. This ghayba is divided into two periods: a shorter, ‘lesser’ ghayba (al-ghayba al-ṣughrā), lasting from 260/874 to 329/941, during which the Imām was represented on earth by four successive safīrs; and a longer, ‘greater’ ghayba (al-ghayba al-kubrā), whose duration is known only to God. It is this doctrine which distinguishes Twelver Shī'ism from the earlier Imāmiyya, and it io worth examining in some detail ite origina and the-main-stages of its development.