One of the most controversial aspects of Hittite phonology is the question of the significance, if any, of the so-called plene-writing of vowels. Explanations for this practice have been sought in a variety of directions. Some have seen in it the continuation of a tradition inherited from predecessors of the Hittite cuneiform syllabary with perhaps little relevance to the facts of the Hittite language. Others have been more confident in seeing in it a method of representing some real linguistic feature, such as vowel length, while inconsistencies or apparent inconsistencies in its use have led others to the conclusion that it has often no functional significance at all. No full-scale investigation of the phenomenon covering the entire Hittite corpus has yet been carried out, nor is such an attempt practicable here. The present paper has the restricted aim of investigating one particular phenomenon, the occurrence of plene-writing in different syllables in different inflexional forms of the same words, and the material drawn upon is chiefly Old and Middle Hittite, since it seems likely that certain patterns of variation in the use of plene-writing were quite early disturbed by analogical levelling within paradigms, or eliminated by the abandonment of plene-writing in the words in question; nevertheless, I believe that the oldest texts in particular still preserve enough evidence for these patterns to be discernible and that the reasons for them are intelligible in historical terms.

There are two specific reasons for publishing these documents—quite apart from their intrinsic value—in an article in honour of H. J. Polotsky. My teacher H.J.P. and myself were, at different times, in statu pupillari, at any rate informally, in relation to Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942). Polotsky took part in a Syriac class and in 1933–4 collaborated in the work of editing the Arŝam documents (private letter from H.J.P. to E.U. dated 25 December 1977), while I attended some informal lectures on Arabic given by Mittwoch in the mid-1930s. And, secondly, Polotsky has declared that any specimen of Aläqa Tayyä's handwriting is ‘always extremely pleasing’ (see below and BSOAS, XXXV, 2, 1972, 255 ff.).

The term ‘derivation’ denotes a process of linguistic creativity. It does not involve creating something out of nothing, rather of availing oneself of material already existing in the language in order to create new lexemes (i.e. new ‘lexical words’). Clearly, the lexicon is not enriched through derivation only; generally speaking, derivation is not involved when a word is borrowed from outside, i.e. from another language. The borrowed word enters the Hebrew lexicon as a moneme, so there is no creativity (or very little of it) involved in the borrowing process.

The problem of the lawfulness of accepting and holding office under an illegitimate ruler posed itself in the Imāmī Shī'a from an early date. Imāmī Shī‘ism considered the historical caliphate, with the exception of the reign of 'Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, as invariably usurpatory and illegitimate. The rule of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet was the exclusive right of 'Alī and the Imams from among his descendants. They had been pushed aside from their rightful position, first by the three caliphs preceding 'Alī and later, by the Umayyads and the 'Abbāsids. On the other hand, the Imams from the fourth, 'Alī Zayn al-'Ābidīn, had ceased actively to seek to rule through the overthrow of the usurpatory caliphate. The sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Ṣādiq, rejected in particular any offer of help to restore him to his rightful position by force and strictly forbade his followers to engage in revolutionary activity on behalf of the Imams until the rise of the Qā'im Imam who would claim his right to rule with the sword. This quietist policy was consistently followed by his successors and came to be reflected in Imāmī belief and doctrine which did not anticipate a return of the Imams to rule before the coming of the eschatological Mahdī.

Early in the sixth century A.D. the Greek author known generally as Cosmas Indicopleustes records in his ‘Christian Topography’ that he visited Adulis on the western Red Sea coast and there saw two Greek inscriptions, one on a marble throne and one on a stela standing behind it. The monuments have long ago disappeared, but we have the texts as copied by Cosmas. The stela belongs to Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–222 B.C.), but the throne text begins in mediis rebus without name of author, and is introduced by Cosmas with the slightly mysterious words ‘Then, as if sequentially, there is further written on the throne as follows’. Whatever he may have meant by this, it is certain, as modern scholars recognize, that the throne text is not part of the stela one: the former is drafted in the first person, the latter in the third; and the throne text was drafted ‘in the 27th year of my reign’, whereas Ptolemy HI died at the beginning of his twenty-sixth regnal year. This leaves the field open to speculations about the authorship and date of the throne text.

The collection of legends about the prophets known as the Lives of the Prophets belongs amongst the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. It is a Jewish work in origin, perhaps dating from the first century A.D., and was composed in Greek or, less probably, Hebrew. It was subsequently taken over by the Church, and none of the extant witnesses to the text is entirely free of the signs of Christian editing. The wealth of textual evidence available is considerable. Thus the Greek version of the Lives, which is the most important, is found in numerous manuscripts belonging to several different recensions, but Syriac, Latin, Armenian and Arabic versions are also known. In addition an Ethiopic version is said to exist, but to my knowledge only the Life of Jeremiah has hitherto been published. Some years ago, however, I observed that the Lives of Ezekiel and Daniel are given in two Ethiopic manuscripts in the British Library—although they are not described as such in Wright's Catalogue. From the description in Dillmann's Catalogue it also seemed likely to me that the Life of Ezekiel was to be found in a Berlin manuscript, and I have now been able to confirm this. My purpose in this short study is to make available the text and a translation of these two Lives.

Our information to date about the possible existence of a work known as ṭomaräǝsbǝ't or ‘Epistle of Humanity’, by Emperor Zär'a Ya'ǝqob (1434–68) comes from the works of the Emperor himself. It is important that we study closely his description of this work in order to determine whether the contents of a given manuscript could be at least part of the so-called ṭomaräǝsbǝ't, or .

The name salūqī was that given by the Arabs, from, at the latest, the beginning of Islam, to the medium-sized gazehound with long pendulous ears which had hunted in the area of the Near and Middle East for perhaps thousands of years. As far as we are aware, the earliest occurrence of the word in Arabic literature is in a poem of Yazīd b. Dirār al-Muzarrid, who was born before Islam and who talks of banāt salūqiyyayn, ‘the offspring of two salūqīs’. Although the actual term salūqī does not, to my knowledge, occur in the classical hunting songs (ṭardiyyāt) of the Abbasid era, it is a word in general use in animal literature and that of the chase right through the medieval and late medieval periods. The word has survived to this day in the areas of the Arab World where the hound is still to be found, notably in the Hijaz and Najd areas of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

That the dialectical technique of Muslim kalām is a borrowing from Christian theology is no secret. Its extra-Islamic origin has indeed been asserted by van Ess with great forthrightness in the context of his recent publication of an early kalām text. The text in question is an anti-Qadarite polemic ascribed to al-Hasan b. Muhammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (d. c. 100 A.H.); it lacks a title, but may conveniently be designated Questions against the Qadarites. Van Ess accepts the ascription, and dates the tract to the 70s of the first century of the Hijra. Since the text contains no contemporary historical reference or colour, and. the ascription rests on the sole authority of the Zaydī imāam al-Hādī (d. 298), the case for so early a dating rests heavily on the theological style and content of the tract. Many of the arguments advanced by van Ess are questionable, and the result could not be said to constitute proof. But it would be churlish to reject the case for an early dating out of hand, and difficult to sustain one later than the first half of the second century. The text is thus an archaic one, and provides an appropriate starting-point for an inquiry into the origins of kalām.

In an earlier issue of BSOAS I published some notes on an interesting feature of the Socotri language, namely that certain imperfect forms lack the t-prefix which marks 2nd and certain 3rd person forms in Semitic languages.

The J(ibbāli), or Śherí, language of Dhofar also exhibits this negative feature, and in much the same series of forms; principally the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional forms of causative verbs, intensive-conative verbs, quadriliteral verbs and passive verbs.

According to Muslim tradition, some time after the spring of Zamzam had been caused by God to gush forth for Hagar and Ishmael following their expulsion into the wilderness by Abraham, it disappeared. Because of the sins of the tribe of Jurhum, which until then had possessed Mecca and the control of its sanctuary (wilāyat al-bayt), Zamzam, the well of the sanctuary, dis-appeared or was hidden, and Jurhum was driven out of Mecca and lost the wilāyat al-bayt. The rediscovery of the well is associated with the grandfather of the Prophet, 'Abd al-Muttahb. At a much later, but unspecified date, we are told, he experienced a dream in which the place of Zamzam was revealed to him. From this time on the well, according to tradition, enjoyed a continuous existence, it being one of the features of the Meccan sanctuary which were taken over when Muhammad adopted the sanctuary for Islam. Zamzam, however, is not the only well associated with the Meccan sanctuary. Muslim tradition knows too of a dry pit inside the Ka'ba which is sometimes referred to as the ‘well of the Ka'ba’.

It has long been argued that the peculiar syntactic traits which typify the modern Semitic Ethiopian languages can be accounted for by the Cushitic substratum, notably the word order of the sentence and the system of qualification (the qualifier-qualified order of elements). It has been suggested that among these languages Tigre is ‘more Semitic’ since (a) it is much less rigid as regards word order, and (b) ‘it may optionally have either the Semitic pattern or the Cushitic one’. A parallel diachronic statement would be that as regards its syntax Tigre was more successful in resisting Cushitic influence or, for some reason, less exposed to it. Here, to avoid the problem of measuring the syntactic features of Tigre in general Semitic terms, Gə'əaz is usually taken as the mode for a Semitic language. In this respect it follows that descriptively Tigre is more Gə'əz-like than the other modern Semitic Ethiopian languages. In spite of the plausibility of such an explanation, it seems to be a matter of scholarly tradition rather than the result of thorough investigation, i.e. the belief that Tigre is the odd man out among its modern relations by virtue of its syntax is an impression rather than a proven observation.

In studies of Islamic architecture dealing with the earliest periods, a natural emphasis has fallen on the mosques of the Holy Cities of Arabia, the Ḥaramayn, whenever the architecture of the Arabian Peninsula has been discussed. In later periods, extensions and restorations in the Ḥaram in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet in al-Madīna have likewise been discussed, but until recent times, little has been said of any other Arabian mosques. As far as mosques beyond the Ḥaramayn are concerned, this neglect has been caused largely by their inaccessibility; but as a result of the imbalance, students of Islamic architecture have been left to judge Arabia by the Prophet's Mosque, which was only truly Arabian at its foundation, and the Ḥaram and the Ka'ba, which were always unique in Islam in terms both of religion and of architecture. As for later extensions and restorations of either mosque, these tell more of the development of Islamic architectural style and taste beyond the Peninsula than of any Arabian religious architectural tradition.

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 letters of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologos, studied and exploited by Byzantinists since they were published for the first time by E. Legrand in 1893, are now available in a new edition by G. Dennis, in which they are translated, accompanied by the appropriate comments and, in most cases, accurately dated. These letters constitute a most valuable contemporary source for the years 1382–1417 because they help to fill one part of the much deplored ‘gap’ in Byzantine historiography. Moreover, they include evidence which sheds light on some details of early Ottoman history, as will appear from the following analysis of Manuel's material dealing with the conflict between the sultan Bāyezīd I and the ruler of Sivas, ḲāḲi Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad in 1391.

One unit of Firthian prosodic analysis is the anaptyctic vowel: ‘such common phenomena as elision, liaison, anaptyxis, the use of so-called cushion consonants or “sounds for euphony” are involved in this study of prosodies. These devices of explanation begin to make sense when prosodic structure is approached as a system of syntagmatic relation’ (Firth, 1948, 57 f.).

The Indo-Iranian linguistic frontier constitutes one of the most complex and interesting language-areas of the sub-continent. Given the nature of the area, it is perhaps inevitable that scholarly attention should have been directed particularly to its remoter corners, where so much that is of historical importance has been preserved, and we certainly have every reason to be grateful for the fascination which such out of the way survivals have held for the minds of several outstanding linguists. It is, on the other hand, a matter for regret that so little has been done by comparison on the languages which flourish in less inaccessible parts of the frontier, particularly on the Indo-Aryan side. The wide distribution of such languages alone, quite apart from their intrinsic interest, demands that they too be accorded adequate coverage if the peculiarly complex language-patterns of the area are ever to be properly understood as a whole. The present article, based largely on material collected during a recent field-trip to Pakistan,1 represents an attempt to fill one such gap in contemporary coverage, by providing descriptions of the extreme north-western extensions of the main body of Indo-Aryan.

Arabic sources have preserved the texts of seven treaties concluded in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century between the Mamluk sultans al-Ẓāhir Baybars and al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn on the one hand, and various authorities in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and in Antioch-Tripoli on the other. Four are given by the Egyptian chancery clerk al-Qalqashandī in his encyclopaedic compilation, Ṣubḥ al-a'shā. This was completed in 814/1412, over 120 years after the extinction of the Frankish states, but the treaties were transcribed (as al-Qalqashandī tells us) from an earlier work by a clerk in Qalāwūn's chancery, Muḥammad b. al-Mukarram. Two of Qalāwūn's other treaties are found in his biography, written by the contemporary chancery clerk, Muḥyi al-Dīn ibn 'Abd al-Ẓāhir (d. 692/1292). Yet another of Qalāwūn's treaties was preserved by the contemporary chronicler, Baybars al-Manṣurī (d. 725/1325).

In an earlier study, ‘Assimilation, and the definite nominal particle in Balti Tibetan’ (Sprigg, 1972), I dealt with vowel harmony in words in which the noun is colligated with the definite nominal particle, a particle that has the constant phonetic form po when in junction with the final syllable of a noun ending in a consonant (-Cpo), e.g. smenpo ‘the medicine’ sman, but variable phonetic features where the final syllable of the noun ends in a vowel: a share in the features of the resulting word-final long vowel, either -o: or -u: according to vowel harmony.

Phonetic adjustment in conversational exchange between Arabs of different nationalities is a fundamental, subtle aspect of Educated Spoken Arabic in Egypt and the Levant (ESA). More often than not educated Arabs adjust to a ‘classical norm’ of a voiceless uvular plosive (q), usually corresponding to a voiced velar plosive (g) or a glottal plosive (ʢ) in most vernaculars of our region, in a conscious or unconscious attempt both to elevate and to ‘koineize’ their speech. What follows attempts, inter alia, to show something of the relationships between the variants of this diaphonemic entity and such extra-linguistic factors as the biographies of collocutors and speech function, and to illustrate the fact that items with [q] serve the purposes of modernization in the area.