A traveller in distress vows to God, piously but apparently pointlessly, that he will never eat elephant flesh. Subsequently, the oath would seem to be his perdition, yet in the end he is saved because of it, unlike his fellow travellers. This entertaining story is told by al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) in two almost identical versions. It is also found in other sources, both Arabic and Persian, among them translations or adaptations of al-Tanūkh¯ (by ‘Awfī and Dihistānī), works on lives of the Sufis (Abū Nu‘aym, Jāmī), a travelogue (Ibn Baūa), anthologies (al-Damīrī, al-‘Āmilī), and a collection of mystical and moral tales in verse (Rūmī). These versions, spanning at least six centuries, differ in the name of the protagonist, plot, language, style, length, ‘outlook’, and quality. In general, it will be argued, travelling has done the story little good: unlike al-Tanūkhī's tale, its beginning is happier than its ending.

Older Khotanese Saka has the word jsei'ṇa-, jseiṇa-, jsäṇa-, superlative jsei'ndama-, later Khotanese jseiṇa-, jsaiṇa-, jseṇa-, jseṃṇa-, jsiṃṇa-, jsiṇa- ‘small’, of size rendering Sansk.

This study takes a new look at a number of obscure passages in the Aramaic incantation bowls and related texts discussed in Christa Müller-Kessler's article “More on puzzling words and spellings in Aramaic incantation bowls and related texts”, published in BSOAS 75/1, 2012, 1–31. Among the words discussed are ברזא ‘wild boar’, מנוביא ‘wailing’, מסחיפתא ‘overthrower (type of demon)’, ספסיפא ‘burning’ and פרהזני ‘protectors’, all new to the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic lexicon, ככא ‘tusk’ and תברי “‘broken’ sounds of the shofar (as a maleficent force)”, which show new meanings for previously attested lexemes, and the new plural form שולניתא ‘maidservants’. Additional evidence for the words or expressions פגיתא ‘attack (a type of demon)’, אידיורא ‘helper’ / אידיורותא ‘help’, חי חי מץ (a divine epithet), מרוביא (a type of demon), נירבא (a hard metal) and שיפורי ‘shofars (a type of demon)’ is also adduced and a preliminary edition of the magic bowl Nippur 12 N 387 is presented.

The paper discusses a group of dhāraṇīs associated with the seven days (saptavāra) of the week, with each dhāraṇī being recited on a specific day. The visual forms of the dhāraṇīs were represented in miniature paintings in manuscripts of the saptavāra texts and in woodcarvings on the struts of two Newar Buddhist monasteries in Kathmandu. The paper shows that even though two members of the saptavāra group were originally male, eventually all members came to be conceived of as feminine in Nepal. It further provides evidence that the group is likely to have become known in Nepal by at least the late sixteenth century.

The recent publication of The Cambridge Encylopedia of the World's Ancient Languages provides an occasion for assessing the present state of our knowledge of ancient languages. Any assessment, however, will inevitably be influenced by methodology and point of view, depending upon whether the reader is a linguist or a philologist. The present author would broadly define the difference in the following way, at least as far as ancient languages are concerned: linguists tend to focus on the rules of language and general theories about language which can be generated from these rules, while philologists, although concerned with formal grammar, tend to scrutinize the textual evidence upon which a grammar is based. These two approaches are sometimes difficult to reconcile.

The Persian term khargāh is first attested at the beginning of the fourth/tenth century. It has often been translated as “hut” or “pavilion”, but a comprehensive overview of the historical, geographical and poetic sources points to a more precise definition. Three main conclusions can be established. First, from the beginning the term exclusively referred to the trellis tent (commonly known as yurt) first identified in a Turkic milieu in Inner Asia. Second, khargāh entered the Arabic and Persian languages through the Sāmānid court and quickly replaced the Arabic expression al-qubba al-turkiyya which was previously used to refer to this kind of tent. Third, the presence of the trellis tent in Muslim courts predates the arrival of the nomadic Saljuqs in the fifth/eleventh century. The trellis tent, associated with the cloth enclosure (or sarāparda), was already a status symbol under the Sāmānids and Būyids in the fourth/tenth century. Thus this study, which lies at the crossroads of lexicography and the history of technology, provides new elements towards a better understanding of Central Asian cultural influence on the wider ‘Abbāsid world.

This article deals with the identification and interpretation of two rare Middle Persian words. Firstly, some attestations of the as yet unrecognized word <hs’lyh> hassārīh are discussed, showing that it means “direction”. Then, a semantic analysis of its underived counterpart hassār is carried out, as a basis for an etymological proposal. Finally, it is argued that hassār descends from Old Persian *haçā-sāra- “(having the head) in the same direction”, and a possible reconstruction of the semantic development of the word is provided.

The death of Marcel Cohen on 5 November 1974 was a grievous loss to linguistic scholarship, and to the study of Hamito-Semitic, above all of Ethiopian languages. Indeed, Hamito-Semitic studies owe to him their ‘ennoblement’ during the first half of this century. In Ethiopian studies Marcel Cohen acquired a pre-eminent position and became one of our masters along with Ludolf and Dillmann, Praetorius, Mittwoch and Littmann, Guidi and Conti Rossini, who had preceded him since the seventeenth century.

This paper introduces the exchange of letters in early Sufism, analyses the significance of these exchanges, and examines these documents not for their general literary qualities or for theoretical discussion of appropriate conduct but, rather, for actual data relating to personal and interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the crucial need for creating a corpus of Sufi letters and pieces of correspondence. The discussion is divided into methodological and conceptual-historical perspectives. The methodological perspective includes a survey of sources, the question of transmission, letter fragment usage by later authors, and a reconstruction attempt of the actual circumstances of these documents. The conceptual-historical perspective analyses content, rhetoric, argumentation forms, and self-representation.

The India Office Library MS Ch ii 003 contains 73 folios of a medical text written alternatingly in Sanskrit and Khotanese. The folios are numbered from 44 to 116. Although the text ends in the middle of a Sanskrit recipe, the beginning of the text has survived. As no title and no colophon are extant and as the text has not been traced elsewhere H. W. Bailey assigned the text the convenient label Jwaka-pustaka ‘The Book of Jivaka’. The text begins as an exposition made by the Bhagavant to the famous physician Jīvaka, called elsewhere in Khotanese ‘the king of physicians’.

In the Northern Church of the Negev town whose name has been preserved by the local Arabs as Ruḥeibe, on a flagstone still in situ in the south-westernpart of the atrium, Loc. 523, the following inscription was carefully and clearly inscribed:

One of the fundamental innovations of the early Church was the abolition of an ancient, venerable institution—divorce, the practice of which was as widespread as marriage itself. The explicit ban on divorce found in the Gospels ran counter to legal systems of the known world, with one notable exception: among the sectarian group whose rules are enshrined in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a stance against divorce can be verified, implying that a legal innovation of early Christianity can be tracked back to its origins in Sectarian Judaism.

By the time Christianity was emerging, marriage and divorce had already co-existed for a long time; in Mesopotamia marriage contracts had for two millennia been anticipating the possibility of divorce, with litigation governing the dissolution of marriage and division of properties. The best evidence, however, for the precursors to late Hellenistic (i.e. pagan, Jewish, and Christian) legal practice derives from a group of Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts dating from the seventh to third centuries B.C.

Marau Sound lies at the south-east end of the island called Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. There is no native name for the Sound as a whole, and it received its present name owing to the fact that the island which lies at the eastern entrance to the Sound is called Marau, i.e. Island. Other islands in the Sound are named Peura, Sinamairuka (Sinamailuka), Tawaihi, Marapa. The last-named island, Marapa (Malapa), is the “ home of the dead ” for the peoples of the South-East Solomons. The local native name for the hill districts above the Sound is Kera. The name which was given both to the Sound, and to the coastal districts of the mainland near, by the first white visitors in modern days, Bishops G. A. Selwyn and J. C. Patteson, is Gera, which is the name used of the Sound by the people of San Cristoval. The people of the Sound are immigrants from Wairokai, Waisisi, Wairoha, and Uhu on the west coast of Big Mala, and their language is closely allied to that of Oroha, Little Mala, and Areare, the language spoken at Wairokai, etc. It is probable that the first migration from Mala to the Sound settled at Marau, the island at the eastern entrance. There is a ghost called Huu ni nima connected with Marau Island, who is said to have led the migration. War and fighting are said to have been the reasons which led to the migration. The present Mala people were already occupying the islands in the Sound at the time of the visit of the Spanish explorers in 1568, as is shown by the fact that they acted as guides and took the Spaniards to the neighbourhood of Wairokai and Waisisi.