When the Tagebuch of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) was published in 1978, it was widely expected that the work would prove to be a mine of information on the life and career of its celebrated author. What was not expected was that so much of this information should consist of bitter criticism and empassioned invective directed against leading personalities in the social and intellectual circles of Budapest and Hungary, particularly in the Jewish community of which Goldziher himself was a leading member. The contrast between the image of the dispassionate and meticulous researcher presented to the public in so many of Goldziher's seminal studies on the religion and culture of Islam, and that of the outraged and sorrowing diarist manifest in the Tagebuch, was most striking.

In the Khotanese Sudhana story it is related that Sudhana will come upon a rākṣasī and must slay her with his sword. The Khotanese text reads at this point kāḍara jse vara ṣṭau raysga vīra jsanauña (Ch 00266.178–9 KBT 28) = kāḍąrinai vara ṣṭāṃ raysgi vī jsanñä (P 2957.118 KBT 37), which Sir Harold Bailey rendered “There he must promptly slay her with his sword” (BSOAS XXIX, no. 3, 1966, 512). MS. P. 4089a presents a variant reading for this line: kāḍara-birre raysaga vīra jsanauña (P 4089a.2–3 KBT 20). In his Dict. p. 287 Bailey renders it “with cut of sword, she must swiftly be slain”. In birre he sees a word attested only here and meaning “with cut”.

The Yūnusiyya is one of those small-scale, largely family-based Sufi orders which proliferated in the later Middle Ages. Little is known of its growth and development. The eponymous founder, one Yūnus ibn Yusuf Ibn Musā'id al-Shaibānī, was a holy man of the type described as majdhūb, which is explained as meaning that he had no shaikh and was self-initiated into the life of devotion and sanctity. He died in 619 (1222–3), approaching ninety years of age, in the district of the Mesopotamian town of Dara, in a village called al-Qunayya. As our source, Ibn Khallikān, adds, “His tomb there is wellknown and an object of pilgrimage”.

In the year 352/963, according to independent evidence and the author's own testimony, the Samanid ruler Manṣūr b. Nūḥ sent an order via his major-domo and closest confidant, al-Fā'iq al-Khāṣṣa, to his minister Abū 'Alī Bal'amī, commissioning the latter to prepare a translation into court Persian of the famous historical annals written in Arabic by Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī. Bal'amī completed this task, producing a book whose popularity in many ways eclipsed that of the original text throughout the Persian-speaking world and beyond (being translated into various Turkish dialects and even, ironically enough, back into Arabic). Unfortunately, exploitation of this source by modern scholars has been hindered both by its identification as a “translation” of Ṭabarī's work and by the lack of a suitable edition of the Persian text. This article attempts to explore these problems and the extent to which they have been rectified by recent studies and editions of this important work.

In this short article marking Sir Harold Bailey's 90th birthday on 16 December 1989 it seems appropriate to take up and develop one amongst the many fruitful insights with which he has enriched our understanding of the languages of India, Iran, and Central Asia.

The history of Qum exhibits a number of features common to urban and rural life in central Persia over the centuries. It also contains features which differentiate it from other towns. Today it is known as a shrine town, but this has not always been its exclusive character. It has had a complex and varied history. In medieval times it was not distinguished from the countryside around it by the existence of a civic identity, any more than were other cities. It bore the same name as the surrounding region. Qum designated both the city and the province of which it was the centre and from which it was not administratively distinct.

In 1961 an extensive collection of Ossetic folklore was published in two volumes in Ordzhonikidze under the title ИронАдæмьι Сфæлдьιстад. The collection includes both Iron and Digoron material and a large section of volume one is devoted to texts from the Ossetic Nart Epos. Among the Digoron Nart texts there is a large number of words and phrases which are difficult to interpret. Three such cases are discussed below.

With the death of Professor Eric Stokes we lost above all a delightful man, unassuming and helpful, intellectually vital and original. He helped inspire a new emphasis upon social and economic history among a whole generation of historians of South Asia. There are many people more appropriate than I to reflect this legacy in a memorial lecture. My only claim to speak may seem to be my continuing admiration for and dependence upon Stokes's work. If I have a wider claim, it must be in the emphasis which I place in my own research upon an empirical study of ideas and their impact; there is some justification for identifying members of the School of Oriental and African Studies with this approach, and it may be associated with us even more in future. If so, our starting-point must be Stokes's great pioneering effort, in The English Utilitarians and India, to identify the intellectual basis of Indian policy-making in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet in South Asian studies generally Stokes has had relatively few followers along that path. Among Cambridge historians this first love (if ever they felt its charms) has tended to be supplanted by a positive distaste for flirtations with the impact of ideas. If Stokes is their model, it is in his role as an analyst of agrarian society, as may be enjoyed in his contribution to the Cambridge Economic History or in The Peasant Armed, and in parts of that arguably transitional collection, The Peasant and the Raj.

When Muslim forces under the Ghurid sultan, Mu'izz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām, made their first major breakthrough into Hindūstān in the 1190s, they brought with them two institutions that had long since taken root in the Islamic world. One was the iqṭā' or assignment of land or its revenue, in some cases in return for military service (sometimes misrepresented as “fief” on the Western European model). The other was the mamlūk, or military slave. Mamlūk status, it should be stressed, bore none of the degrading connotations associated with other types of slavery: mamlūks – generally Turks from the Eurasian steppelands – were highly prized by their masters, receiving both instruction in the Islamic faith and a rigorous training in the martial arts, and were not employed in any menial capacity. The mamlūk institution, whose origins go back to the first century of Islam, came into vogue from the first half of the third/ninth century, as the ‘Abbasid Caliphs built up a corps of Turkish mamlūk guards and their example was followed, with the disintegration of their empire, by the various autonomous dynasties that sprang up in the provinces. Turkish slave officers themselves went on to found dynasties, as in the case of the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids in Egypt and the Ghaznawids in the eastern Iranian world. The institution surely entered upon its heyday in the seventh/thirteenth century, with the military coup of 648/1250 in Cairo: a group of mamlūk officers overthrew the last Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and inaugurated a regime in which slave status was the essential qualification for high military and administrative office.

Since the time South Asia, together with other Asian and African countries, became an integral part of the British Empire, the significance of manuscripts, published works and other artefacts, relating to those regions has stimulated continued appreciation in the United Kingdom, albeit with varying degrees of interest. It is interesting to note that the factors which have contributed in one way or another to the collecting of South Asian I material for British institutions vary in their nature, and thus illuminate the attitudes of different periods. During the entire nineteenth century, the collectors were primarily administrators; for most of the first half of the twentieth century, it was the interest and the needs of British universities that led to the accumulation of substantial holdings in many academic or specialist libraries.

The document which is published here comes from the Michaelides Collection, formerly belonging to G. A. Michaelides and now in the possession of Cambridge University Library. In addition to a substantial number of Arabic papyri this collection also contains Arabic paper documents. The paper documents are very varying in date, ranging from the Fāṭimid to the Ottoman periods. The present document is a petition from the Fāṭimid period. Some Fāṭimid documents of this type have already been published. Several unpublishedFāṭimid petitions have come to my attention. Most of these are from the Cairo Genizah and will be published as part of a corpus of Arabic Genizah documents. I am publishing the present document from the Michaelides collection separately.

The Persian province of Māzandarān has characteristics unique in the land of Iran, even among its Caspian neighbours. The landscape of mountain, forest, ricefield and sea has its special freshness and charm, worlds away from the rocky plateau and searing desert further to the south. Its beauty was appreciated among others by the Safavid Shāh 'Abbās, who built an engineered highroad hidden to-day by the forest above Gālūgāh, and maintained favoured residences at Behshahr and Faraḥābād. For the visiting stranger, the most obvious impression is that created by the perennial Māzandarān cloud, a sea of cotton tufts, as it is often described, rising steadily up the hillsides with the growing heat of the day, to sink back into the valleys with the chill of evening, or fall as soft drizzle through the hours of darkness. When the traveller ascending the mountainside reaches the level of condensation, suddenly he is in a world of total humidity, with streaming perspiration, and water running from the trees and undergrowth. Twenty minutes later he has passed through the cloudbase, and entered the bone-dry world of “Iraq”. Dry sand replaces the treacherous “yellow clay” (zarde gil) beneath his feet, and the cool breeze in an instant evaporates the moisture from his shirt.

C. A. Storey's Persian Literature, A Bio-bibliographical Survey is the lifework of a meticulous and dedicated scholar and its hitherto published sections have proved an indispensable reference work for Persian studies. Its first volume, covering Qur'anic Literature, History and Biography, was published in five fascicules between 1927 and 1953 and was followed in 1958 by the first fascicule of Volume II, devoted to Mathematics, Weights and Measures, Astronomy and Astrology and Geography.

Henry Miers Elliot's first specifically historical work on India appeared one hundred and forty years ago in 1849. Four years later his small book on the Arabs in Sind was published. Between 1866 and 1877 appeared the magnum opus with which Elliot's name has since become identified, the History of India as told by its own Historians (8 vols.), edited, arranged and completed by John Dowson.

In J.R.A.S. 1988/2 Robert E. Frykenberg assails what he calls the “myth” that Macaulay's minute on education in British India was the occasion for a radical change in policy which imposed English education on an unwilling people. He puts forward three main arguments. First, there was no radical change in policy, for the government continued to support “Oriental” education and scholarship as well as English education. Secondly, Macaulay's advocacy of English education was a recognition of the views of “forward-looking gentry in India”. Thirdly, his minute was “one more salvo in a long and running set of encounters in which the positions of some protagonists were often much more blurred than has been properly realised by later generations of historians”. What is new in all this?

Brigitte Groneberg's book is a thoughtful and discursive essay on a number of problems in the grammar, understood in the broadest sense, of a Babylonian dialect. With one comprehensive dictionary complete and another, even more comprehensive, moving in that direction, with a basic general grammar of Akkadian and several survey-grammars of the various historical stages and geographical dialects in existence, it is entirely appropriate that we should have a close study of a chronologically limited and genre-bound corpus of texts which nevertheless broaches wider questions not dealt with by the more general grammars, and approaches them from a viewpoint which is not blind to contemporary developments in general linguistics and literary studies. If this book proposes new answers to questions about the character of the Akkadian language, and suggests new ways of looking at the analysis of forms, syntax and style, then it may be accounted a success, even if not all readers will agree with all the positions taken. In a way, Syntax, Morphologie und Stil … is a successor to Erica Reiner's A Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian, which also brought modern linguistic work – in this case the theory of generative grammar – to bear on its subject, with brilliant results, but concentrated more on a systematic survey of the entire grammar. Groneberg's book is more selective in its aim.