The name of Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī naturally appears frequently in early Buddhist texts, and in the Chinese translations a number of transcriptions and translated versions of the name are well known.1 The former need not detain us: with a few variations in the characters chosen, they represent clearly either Prakritic pajāpadī, pajāpadī, or Sanskrit prajāpatī. One Middle Indian version may be singled out as showing a different development:p***e-*** ***ayuâ-dei, i.e. piyāvadī.2 We shall come back to this later.

The special importance of the Ādi Granth as the defining scripture of the Sikhs has encouraged the production of commentaries whose language and approach reflect changing understandings of the Gurus' teachings over the last four centuries. The oral style of the earlier commentaries which typically demonstrate a catholic inclusiveness towards the wider Indic tradition came largely to be replaced in the twentieth century by the more exclusive approach of Sikh reformist commentators, in part aroused by the dismissive attitudes of the first English translation by Trumpp. Continuing to shape most modern understandings of the scripture, these highly organized commentaries composed in the new idiom of Modern Standard Panjabi are only now beginning to be challenged by new styles of exegesis being pioneered in the Sikh diaspora.

Different readings of the first and the last phrase of the short Middle Persian text Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr are suggested; these show that its beginning and end are not as strange or exceptional as is suggested in its latest edition. In particular, it is argued here that a Middle Persian translation of the title of the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr can be found in the text.

Parmi la trentaine de manuscrits ou de fragments turcs en écriture ouïgoure provenant de la célèbre grotte de Touen-houang dont je prépare l'édition, il y en a deux, sans doute du Xe siècle, écrits à coup sûr par des habitants de Khotan. Il s'agit dans un cas d'une lettre à propos d'événements survenus ‘ici à Khotan’, et, dans l'autre, d'une série de notations écrites à Cha-tcheou (Touen-houang) au dos d'un rouleau de sûtra chinois par un envoyé de ‘l'État d'Or’ (altun el), expression désignant Khotan, bien attestée dans les manuscrits khotanais de Touen-houang.

A Buddhist practice existed whereby a dānapati, patron, had a manuscript of a Buddhist religious text copied, into which at the appropriate place his personal name was inserted with Sanskrit inflexion. In the Buddhist Sanskrit Sitātapatra-sūtra, the ‘Book of the white umbrella’, Stein manuscript S 2529, two personal names are inserted. In lines 45–6 occurs aṣṭānā mahāgrrahāṇā vaidhvasanakara hu ttrū 〈rakṣa rakṣa〉 mama vaṣayānasya ‘O destroyer of the eight great ravishers, hūṃ trūṃ. Protect, protect me Yaṣayāna’. In lines 48, 70, 88, 117 the name is Sīdyākaraca. Here we read:

48 auma svasta〈ka〉ra bavattū mama sīdyākaracasya

70 rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

88 ye ke cai salvā mama sīdyākaracasya ∥

117: rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

Instead of a name in line 122 occurs the word īthanāmasya ‘of so-and-so’.

Däbrä Tabor, the capital of Begemdir and headquarters of Emperors Tewodros II and Yohannes IV, was established, according to tradition, by the remarkable Oromo, or Galla, chieftain Ras Gugsa Mersa who held sway in the province from 1798 to 1825. He was the nephew of Ali Guangul, the founder of a Muslim dynasty, which as the islamisant Spencer Trimingham asserts, ‘became nominal members of the national Church for political reasons’.

The phonological structure of the Vietnamese word as used in the system of Vietnamese word classes established in this paper may be stated in terms of syllables. The syllable is denned as the element of Vietnamese having the prosody of one, but not more than one, of the system of six tones set up for the analysis of the Vietnamese language at the phonological level. The syllabic unit is used to refer to an element of text at the grammatical level of analysis corresponding to the syllable at the phonological level. A study of Vietnamese texts enables the following statements to be made:

Whereas during the earlier part of South Arabian history dating is effected only by reference to the year of office of an eponymous magistrate, from about the 1st century A.D. we begin to find texts dated by a fixed era. The earliest inscriptions so dated are R.3958 of ‘ the year 144 ’, and R.4197b of ‘ the year 172 ’. Although these two texts are in Sabæan dialect, both have associations with the Beiḥān area, and Albright is probably right in suggesting that they do not refer to a ‘ Sabæan ’ era. The majority of the dated texts which are unquestionably Sabæan belong to the 6th and 7th centuries of that era.