The normal method of settling questions of inheritance in Babylonia was not by testament but according to a division among the male heirs. In legal terms, then, inheritance was normally ab intestato in Babylonia. The regulation of the size of the portions of the various heirs in a family varied according to local custom and regulation. Testaments are known sporadically from Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian sources but are not found among the documents from Babylonian proper. In place of testaments we find posthumous regulations of inheritance among the heirs and parental regulation of inheritance by means of gift, i.e. donatio mortis causa. Such documents are infrequent, and we must assume, not only that normal inheritance was ab intestato, but also that frequently, and perhaps as a general rule, the parental estate was administered jointly by the heirs.

Works of fiqh often have chapters or sections concerned with various questions related to the topic of entering the Ka'ba, usually signalled by headings such as Fī dukhūl al-Ka'ba or Al-ṣalāt fī (jawfi) 'l-Ka'ba. In them a number of ḥadīths are referred to, many of which are to be found in the classical collections and some of which occur as well in ‘historical’ literature such as sīra and ta'rīkh. This paper discusses the way in which this material is presented and developed, both in fiqh and in ḥadīth and ‘historical’ literature, what sort of questions it is concerned with, and what reasons there may be for its existence. This last question is taken up at the end of the paper but here it may be said that I think that the fiqh and ḥadīth material is relevant to an understanding of the development of the Muslim sanctuary and that it illustrates a tension, which is also observable in other traditional material, between two concepts of the sanctuary: is it ‘open’, comparable to a temple or church, or is it ‘closed’, like an ark or sacred stone? Both concepts exist within Muslim tradition, and it seems to me likely that the material discussed in the following two sections has been generated, originally, by the tension between them.

La loi musulmane n'admet, en principe, que des baux à courte durée pour les awqāf. Toutefois, les juristes dans les différentes parties du monde musulman admettaient, dans certaines circonstances, des baux divers à long terme équivalant à une quasi-aliénation. Quelques-uns de ces contrats, par exemple le ḥikr égyptien, l'inzāl tunisien, les djalsa et djazā' marocains, ont été traité d'une manière approfondie. Le contrat d'‘anā’ — le bail à long terme le plus répandu à Alger à l'époque turque — n'a cependant pas suscité une attention analogue de la part des chercheurs, à cause, peut-être, du manque d'intérêt dans un contrat, qui ne signifiait plus grand chose sous l'égide de la législation française, laquelle supprima le caractère inaliénable des awqāf.

The land sale contracts of the late eleventh century published here are important for several reasons. First, they are the oldest known legal documents written in Turkish. Very many Uighur-Turkish civil documents were found in the more eastern parts of the Tarim basin, but none of those appear to be older than the thirteenth century. On the other hand, there are Central Asian legal documents in several non-Turkish languages from as early as the first centuries of our era. After the Turks had penetrated the area in alternately warlike and peaceful manner and become owners of land, they may have gone on using the local vernaculars for such purposes, as they adopted many other facets of local life. The present texts have a fairly rigid structure, but this should not be taken as an indication that they were preceded by a Turkish legal tradition: the Persian text of A.D. 1107 published by Minorsky (1942) shows a rather similar form, which may simply have been borrowed by the Turks. Formally, our documents differ from the non-Muslim deeds of land sale in Turkish, which appear to follow Chinese models; this also speaks against a common Turkish tradition. There is nothing surprising about this: the Turks were probably relatively new both to the area and the occupation.

The Ālu Kuṟumbas are a tribe of shifting cultivators, food-gatherers and (casual) hunters. Numbering about a thousand souls they inhabit the steep slopes and glens of the south-western, southern, south-eastern, and eastern ranges of the Nilgiri Hills of South India. They speak a tribal language of its own which holds a kind of mid-position between the Tamil-Malayalam and the Kannada group of the South Dravidian family of languages.

One major problem which comes to the fore in comparing Omotic languages is the wide diversity seen in the inflectional morphology of the verb. To the linguist coming from Ethiopian Semitic or East Cushitic the variety encountered from language to language in Omotic is bewildering. The problem may be illustrated by comparing paradigms of three languages of the Ometo cluster—a group which on the basis of lexicostatistic calculations is considered to be fairly close-knit. Two of the languages, Zayse and Koyra, have been classified (together with Haruro, Ganjule, Harro and Zargula) as East Ometo, a label which is intended to convey a genetic as well as a geographical affiliation. The third language is Gofa, which, as a member of the dialect cluster which includes Wolaitta, Kullo, Konta, Gemu, Zala, Malo, Oyda, etc., is classified as Central Ometo. The paradigms compared are: (i) the perfect (or past) declarative, (ii) the perfect (or past) interrogative, (iii) the imperfect (or present) declarative, (iv) the imperfect (or present) interrogative. The verb employed in the illustration is wod'-‘kill’.