The study of Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years owing to a wave of new publications which have considerably enriched the corpus of texts now at the reader's disposal. In parallel, significant progress has been made in the identification, publication and study of accurate manuscripts of Babylonian Rabbinic literature. Based upon a close reading of recently published magic bowls from the Moussaieff Collection, this article seeks to indicate how the two corpora are mutually enlightening and dependent. An accurate reading and interpretation of the bowls depends upon an intimate knowledge of Babylonian Aramaic grammar, for which much is to be learnt from the best rabbinic manuscripts. At the same time, the magic bowls confirm the antiquity of many linguistic traits found in these rabbinic sources, and accordingly confirm their status as reliable witnesses to the Talmudic language.

Words which designate both themselves and their opposites can be found in many languages around the world. For the Arabic grammarians of the eighth and ninth centuries the existence of such a class of words was a concern as it was a potential hindrance to intelligibility and clarity of semantic interpretation. This paper seeks to engage one thread of that tradition, to reposition it in the context of more modern linguistic scholarship, and to expand on it implications for an understanding of language, all the while hopefully dispelling some of the more wanton psychological misconceptions it has engendered.

This article examines the information given in the Quran, as distinct from the exegetical tradition, on the livelihoods pursued by the mushriku¯n to whom the Messenger was preaching. It finds them to be uniformly described as agriculturalists and seafarers. The purpose of their maritime activity is not usually specified, but on one occasion it is said to be for fishing. The believers, too, are agriculturalists in some passages, but they are more commonly described as traders. There is a wealth of passages depicting them as such, and preaching to them in commercial imagery, in the suras classified by the tradition as Medinese.

In this article I examini two problems regarding women's participation in shared saint veneration and festivals in the eastern Mediterranean and Iberia. First, I ascertain what women's practices were, whether women participated in or assigned meanings to rituals that were separate from those of men, and finally, whether these shared practices were enough to break down religious barriers between women so that we may speak of ‘women's piety’ or ‘women's religious culture’ as a category that extends beyond the confines of individual religious affiliations. Secondly, I explore the meanings that certain male writers assigned in these practices and their emphasis on the fact that it was women, according to them, who engaged in the rituals. I show that, in contrast to Christian or Jewish authors, many Muslim legalists focused on women as the primary participants in certain types of piety as a polemical strategy to denigrate religious practices of which they disapproved.

This paper attempts a periodization and dialectal attribution of Iranian loan words found in Tocharian A and B, two Indo-European languages attested in c. 10,000 fragments unearthed in Chinese Turkestan since 1892. More than 100 loan words are scritinized and classified in eight sections, according to their origin: Old Iranian (probably issued from the common ancestry of the ‘Sakan’ languages, Khotanese, Tumshuqese and Waxi), three different stages of Khotanese, ‘Śaka’, (the language of the Iranian invaders of northern India), Parthian, Bactrian and Sogdian. Tocharians had dealings with all neighbouring Iranian peoples, but Khotanese and its ancestors clearly exerted the most durable influence. No loan word from more remote dialects (e.g. Persian and Ossetic) can be evidenced. The predominance of war-related and political vocabulary among the loan words and the direction of borrowing, overwhelmingly from Iranian to Tocharian, both point to a political ascendancy of Sakan-speaking tribes, and later of Bactria, on Tocharians.

To judge from one recorded case, the Huichang persecution of Buddhism in China of 840–44 could have brought a number of relics of the Buddha into the hands of the government, and this might further have allowed the succeeding, more pro-Buddhist, emperor to carry out a redistribution of these sacred objects to enhance his own prestige, as had already been done twice by earlier rulers. But while it is clear that he was prepared to send a relic to Korea as part of a diplomatic mission, there would appear to be no surviving records confirming that any systematic large-scale distribution was carried out at this time. We must provisionally conclude therefore that a later systematic distribution in the tenth century was influenced—perhaps indirectly—by the earlier examples, not by any event of the mid ninth century.

The Xuanjie lu has long been recognized as an early recorded example of a printed text. The date of printing given in its preface suggests that its author, Hegan Ji, was about to be or had just been demoted from the governorship of Canton on the grounds of corruption, from where he was sent to Luoyang. This article argues for the latter place of publication, and suggests that the printing of ‘several thousand’ copies of this short work, while a notable achievement in itself, was perhaps primarily intended to recover the author's political fortunes—a goal in which the evidence suggests that he succeeded, to judge from a recently published inscription by one of his sons.