The haunted house (“ Mostellaria ”) of Plautus. As played by the students of University College, Liverpool, March, 1890. The original text, with a translation... by L. P. Anderson, L. D. Barnett, F. E. Smith, pp. xii, [1], 86. Liverpool, T. Dobb and Co., 1890.

One of the main and most tempting problems for a student of Arab geographers is the analysis of their excursions into the little-explored regions on the periphery of the Islamic world, such as Eastern Europe, Central Asia, China, and India. It is a well known fact that these geographers, intent on Space, are often negligent of Time. On a sixteenth century Turkish map I have found a phantom of America stretched into the shape of a new-born moon, whereas the wastes of Siberia were still marked as the haunts of the traditional Gog and Magog. Thus, too, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the classical period of Arab geography, the scholars felt no compunction in plagiarizing one another, or borrowing from some ancient source data bearing no relation to the contemporary conditions: in the tenth century King Dahum of “common origin” still figured among, the rulers of India, although this name referred to Dharmapala, the ruler of Bengal about A.D. 800.

The kitāb al-fisal wa'l-nihal by Ibn Hazm has been expanded by the insertion of pamphlets which were originally separate works; see Friedlaender's article in the Noeldeke Festschrift. The British Museum manuscript Or. 843 does not contain these additions, but does contain a summary of theological ideas which is not in the printed book. This summary is in five sections, the tenets of the Qadariyya, Murji'a, Khawārij, and Shī'a, and what was thought about 'Alī. Friedlaender published the passage on the Shl'a in Heterodoxies of the Shiites, 1, 78 f., so there is no need to repeat it here. Expositions of Muslim dogma tend to be static; this one tries to be dynamic., to show that one idea grew out of another, often as a reaction. The passage is simple and does not need a translation, but some notes may be useful. As the copy was made some years ago and the MS. is not available, there is no point in attempting a full critical apparatus.

In preparing a bibliography of the modern South Arabic languages I came across the only document of the dialect of Curia Muria. It is J. G. Hulton's article, “ Notice on the Curia Muria Island,” in the Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, 3 (1840), 183–197.2 This article, in which the author gives a detailed description of the island and its inhabitants, contains a list of 103 words in English, Arabic, and in the dialect of Curia Muria.3

As a good missionary and teacher Mani knew the value of repetition. With endless pains he had elaborated a story of the world, which was to explain all phenomena, of nature and the mind, that came within reach of his knowledge. Its comprehensiveness made it so complicated that it required—and still requiresa strong effort to remember all its details. t All the greater was the need to force it, by ceaseless repetition, into the minds of those who were ready to listen to the new prophet. No doubt every one of his books and longer epistles opened with this story, which may have been the sole subject of several of them. It is therefore useless to try to identify the various accounts before us either with each other or with one of the books of which we know merely the title.

The Mahasin al-majalis of Ibn al-'Arif (†536/1141) is a Sufi treatise of minor dimensions and inconsiderable importance, one of a multitude of such summaries that bridge the gap between the classical works of Kalabadhi, Qushairi, and Makki, and the phenomenal productivity of Ibn al-'Arabi. For all that, the essay (for it is little more) is not without interest; it is allusive and elliptical in style, thus affording material for commentators; and the author begins his discourse proper by quoting, though not by name, the Mawdqif of Niffari; as Ibn al-'Arabi afterwards used Ibn al-'Arif quite freely and approvingly, it is always possible that he got to know and take an interest in Niffari through this intermediary.

In a recent lecture to the Philological Society (now in the press, and to appear in the Transactions, 1947) I had occasion to quote a Central Asian ethnic name Ttaudägara–. The one passage where this name has been found is in the Khotanese manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale numbered P 2741. I had prepared this text for publication in 1942, but it remains still unprinted. I therefore print it here since a controversy may be expected over this name as a possible equivalent of Ooyápa, and it is desirable the basic evidence should be in the hands of scholars as soon as possible. A complete translation is hardly possible yet and only the relevant passage is rendered here.

I. ′ÖMER B. MEZÎD: Mecmû‘atu’n-nazdir (S.O.A.S., 27,689), ff. 309, size 7 ½ in. by 5 ½ in., thick paper in library cloth, binding. The MS. has been considerably cut down, and the first leaf is missing. An odd leaf, formerly one of the end blanks, upon which verses have been written, has been bound in separately at the beginning. The first few leaves are defective, but have been carefully repaired, and nothing of importance is missing; in the main the MS. is in extremely good condition. It is undated, but belongs to the fifteenth century. Among the chronograms there is a verse which suggests that the compilation was made in 840/1436. The hand is a bold clear early Turkish neskh, black, with titles and ruled border in red. The harekes are carefully marked throughout. There are only eleven lines to a page, the area within the ruling being about 6 ¼ in. by 4 ¼ in., sometimes slightly more.

Some scheme of political organization can also be detected in the text of Vīs u Rāmīn.

The capital Marv is definitely considered the centre of a world monarchy, within the limits which we have tried to elucidate.1 Mōbad is the king of kings, shahriyār, to whom all the shahs owe obedience (banda būdand) (p. 28). His personal dominions he in North-Eastern Iran and are surrounded by a belt of vassal territories (abaristān, Gurgān, Dihistān, Khwārazm, etc.), but politically his authority extends to Media and beyond it to Transcaucasia (Arrān) and Armenia, reaching even the Mediterranean and North African territories.

An interesting footnote to the abortive expedition of the Florentines against the island of Chios in May 1599 is provided by a rare–possibly unique– book in the British Museum.

Its rarity may be gauged from the fact that we find no record of it in the catalogues of Steinschneider, Kayserling, and Ya'ari, or in the Jewish encyclopaedias. Nor have I been able to trace a reference to it in any other source. The book is a small quarto volume, measuring 7¾ in. by 5⅜ in., and consisting of twenty-eight leaves. The last leaf, which has no foliation, appears to be a cancel, as it reproduces, in a somewhat different form, the text of fol. 2. The book contains the Aramaic paraphrase of the Song of Solomon (known as the Targum), accompanied by a Judseo-Spanish (Ladino) version in the Hebrew character, and was printed in Salonica in the year A.M. (5)360 (A.D. 1600) at the printing press of Mattithiah Bathsheba and his sons, and subsidized by Moses [ben Samuel] di Medina. It was published for Jacob ben Judah Ashkenazzi, an itinerant bookseller of Safed in Galilee. A preface by him, as well as a poem by the same author on the game of chess, which, like the preface, is otherwise unknown (it is to be found on the verso of fol. 27), complete the book.

It has already been noted by Professor F. W. Thomas 1 that there are several striking coincidences in religious topography between Buddhist Khotan and Nepal. In addition to place–names, however, there is also a considerable body of legendary tradition common to the two countries.

JALĀL AL-DĪN RŪMĪ in Maihnawi, ii, 3478 sqq., recounts a story of a saint J falsely accused of theft, and of the miraculous manner in which he cleared himself. R. A. Nicholson in his annotation to the passage (vol. vii, p. 359) comments: “ Saints accused of theft, who produce miraculous proof of their innocence, appear in many legends related by Moslem hagiographers.”

It is surprising that the Manichaean religion did not become altogether submerged in the slime of witchcraft and sorcery. There were countless demons to be warded off and nearly as many divine and semi-divine beings that could be invoked. Mani, it is true, had regarded his " gods " as hardly more than exponents of particular functions of the Godhead, and had been conscious of the inadequacy of the anthropomorphic terms he had ill-advisedly employed:the resplendent hosts, he said in his Treasure of Life, will be called young women and virgins, fathers and mothers, sons, brothers and sisters, because such is the custom in the books of the prophets. In the country of joy there is neither male nor female... they do not differ from each other in weakness and force, in length and shortness, in figure and looks; they are like similar lamps which are lighted by the same lamp and nourished by the same material (Beruni, India, transl., i, 39).

Bkitish Museum Ms., Oriental 8606, a Syriac codex of Melchite origin, written in the year A.D. 723, contains, besides a Syriac Corpus Athanasianum (the only Syriac Corpus of Athanasian writings so far discovered), a collection of Homilies on the Nativity by various authors. With one exception, a Homily by St. Ephraim, these are all translated from Greek originals. One of these discourses, a Homily by Severian, Bishop of Gabala in Syria, ” On the Nativity of our Lord and against Heretics ”, seems to be no longer extant in Greek, nor, so far as I can discover, has the Syriac version ever been published. This is somewhat surprising since the same discourse is to be found in Cod. Vat. Syr. 369, fol.15v–17v. As very few of Severian's sermons are preserved in the original Greek, it seemed to me that an edition of this piece might be of interest to scholars.

In Telugu, unlike any other Dravidian language except Kui-Kuvi, there is a very numerous class of words of native origin, beginning with a consonant group of which the second element is r, e.g. krovvu, trādu, prōlu, mrānu, vrāyu, sraggu. These are all common words of some antiquity and most of them have doublets in which the r has been dropped, as in kovvu, in accordance with the Common Dravidian tendency to avoid initial consonant groups, which is shared with Prakrit. Sometimes there are three forms, as tirika a twist, trippu, tippu to cause to turn. Trikku a twist, has only this form and is presumably not popular, while tikka crazy, is also written trikka.

In two recent articles in the Transactions of the Philological Society the problem of Dravidian words in Sanskrit has been discussed, and a considerable number of etymologies have been presented.1 Roughly 170 Sanskrit words of Dravidian origin are dealt with in the two articles. There remains an even larger amount of material which has not been touched on in the above two articles, and the bulk of this is brought together in the list of etymologies proposed here. The present article contains 315 items, involving a larger number of words since several words may be treated together, bringing the total number of Dravidian words in Sanskrit dealt with in the three articles to well over 500. This is a very considerable number, and shows that the extent of Dravidian influence on Sanskrit has always been underestimated rather than overestimated. It by no means exhausts the field, and another supplementary list will eventually be necessary. When the subject has been fully dealt with, it is unlikely that the total list of Dravidian words in Sanskrit will be less than 750, and it may well turn out to be considerably more.

I have explained the first member in my article in KZ., 68, 218 f. (relationship to Arm. eres). The meaning of the second member is certainly near that of the first, since we evidently have to do with an old dvandva. I would suggest connection with the root of Olr. Mlr. bind “ melodious ’, Skt. bhand- “ worship, exhilarate, shine ”, IE. *bhend- “ ± sing ” (Walde-Pokorny, 2, 151). For the semantic development “ ± countenance ” from “ ± sing ”, cf. Skt. vadana- “ mouth, face ” and vad- “ speak, sound ”, and also Toch. A. sunk-, B. sähkw- “ muzzle ”, related to Grk. όμΦ “ voice ”, Goth, siggwan, OHG., OS. singan “ sing ” (cf. my Lexique etymologique des dialectes tokhariens, 127, and my Morphologie comparee du tokharien, 45).

It is astonishing how soon the Arabs fade out of Muslim history, Arabia itself excepted. There are notable instances to the contrary like the Hamdanids and the Banū Hilāl, but they are few. During the rule of the Fatimids in Egypt the Banū Jarrah of Tai' were the most important of the bedouins in Syria; their chief Mufarrij b. Daghfal b. Jarrāh died in 404/1013 and his son Hassān succeeded him. Contemporary with Hassān was Fadl b. Rabi'a b. Hāzin b. Jarrāh, who was, perhaps, as Ibn Khaldūn suggested and Ibn Hajar affirmed, the ancestor of the Āl Fadl: This Fadl was at times an ally of the Franks and at times an ally of thesultan of Egypt. He was banished and joined Sadaqa b. Mazyad and in 500/1106 was the ally of Sadaqa against the Saljūq sultan Muhammad b. Malikshāh; later he abandoned Sadaqa.

Among the many contributions by which Ignaz Goldziher. deepened and enriched western understanding of Arabic culture, one of the most familiar to all students is his study of the conflict of ancient and modern in Arabic poetry.1 Devoted in the main to an analysis of the attitude taken up by literary critics towards modern, i.e. post–Islamic and later poets, the study traces the gradual shift in the criteria of judgment from the older philologists view of the unapproachable superiority of the pre–Islamic poets to the later aesthetic appreciation of modern and contemporary poetry. At the same time, it is pointed out that the older view not only continued to find support amongst the reactionaries, but remained the generally accepted view of the whole learned society of the Muslim, and particularly of the Arab, East.

I have connected this adverb with Skt. atha,having the same meaning, and with OHG. unti, anti, enti =OE., Eng. and,Germ, und(cf. BSL.,41, 184 and also my Lexique (étymologiqbe des dialectes tokhariens),20);the Tocharian form agrees with Skt. athain its root-vocalism:both Sanskrit and Tocharian show the weak grade, IE. *nth-.This etymology, however, leaves the w-suffix of Toch. B. entweunexplained:for -weI have only assumed a secondary origin. At present this view seems no more plausible to me:several extended forms of Skt. atharender imperative a primary origin. Skt. athais attested with following him(“yes, well ”, in dialogue), with following ajri(“nevertheless ”), and with following uand vā.Skt. atha + umeans “afterwards, then, and, even ”, and Skt. atha+vā“or, or also, or even, etc.”Both Skt. atha + uand atha+ vāmay be the formal equivalents of Toch. B. entwe,but an original *-vē-extension is more probable for the Tocharian form, since the final of the Indo-European words is dropped in this language.