The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from April 1996

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from April 1996

More proposed emendations to the text of the Koran.
April 1, 1996... For Franz Rosenthal, the first recipient of the American Oriental Society Medal of Merit, awarded at Madison, Wisconsin, on March 22, 1994. Those who read this journal regularly will be aware that for the past few years I have been conducting...

Dharmaskandhah and Brahmasamsthah: a study of Chandogya Upanisad 2.23.1.
April 1, 1996... I 1.1 Chandogya Upanisad 2.23.1 has been singled out for special attention by Indian theologians and exegetes, as well as by modern scholars, because they consider it to be the vedic basis for and the earliest evidence of the central...

Imagining matriarchy: "kingdoms of women" in Tang China.
April 1, 1996... The title of this essay generates several questions at the outset. Were the "kingdoms of women" (nuerguo, nuwangguo, nuziguo) that were imagined in the Tang dynasty matriarchies in the same sense as were the Amazons - whose very existence has...

Myths of Enki, the Crafty God.
April 1, 1996... Ancient Egytian religion viewed the world through three discrete intellectual perspectives which modern Egyptologists have labeled the theologies of Thebes, Heliopolis, and Memphis.(1) Similarly, the older Mesopotamian Weltanschauungen can be...

Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings.
April 1, 1996... Olga Davidson's book has two parts. The first, "The Poet and His Poetry," contains three chapters: "The Authority of Ferdowsi the Poet," "The Authority of Ferdowsi's Shahnama," and "Ferdowsi's Oral Poetic Heritage." In the first chapter,...

Southern Bactria and northern India before Islam: a review of archaeological reports.
April 1, 1996... Despite a huge and ever-increasing bibliography, the history of northern India from the death of Asoka to the first inroads of the Moslem armies is still imperfectly known. About its social history we can only state that new peoples kept coming...

Archaic Cyprus: A Study of the Textual and Archaeological Evidence.
April 1, 1996... Notre connaissance de l'histoire de l'ile de Chypre durant la periode archaique (750-475 av. J.-C.) est tributaire de la synthese qu'a fait en 1948 Einar Gjerstad de la documentation archeologique recueillie par la mission suedoise qu'il dirigea...

Epilepsy in Babylonia.
April 1, 1996... This book provides something of real value: a new medical text, increasing available information on medical knowledge and illness in the ancient world. The subject of seizures ("epilepsy") is actually very complicated - as a survey of current...

Introduzione alle lingue semitiche.
April 1, 1996... This little volume makes the brave attempt to compress modern Semitology into a few pages - and within the framework of general linguistics. Garbini, a highly accomplished veteran in the field with many publications to his credit, and his former...

Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar.
April 1, 1996... Another textbook of Biblical Hebrew (complete with the usual types of exercises) joins a crowded field: from Jacob Weingreen, A Practical Grammar of Classical Hebrew (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934) to Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel, Vicki...

Essays on Hebrew.
April 1, 1996... This work is a revision of some of Werner Weinberg's published articles on Hebrew. These studies first appeared in such journals as Hebrew Studies, Hebrew Union College Annual, and the Journal of Reform Judaism. Part one, "Historical...

Neuhebraische Grammatik auf Grund der altesten Handschriften und Inschriften.
April 1, 1996... While this reference grammar has the virtues of indicating the exact textual source for almost all examples (geared to the listing of texts and abbreviations on pp. 1-24) and frequently provides phrase- or clause-length illustrations, it is...

The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 1, Aleph.
April 1, 1996... This is the first volume of a projected eight-volume dictionary devoted to all the known classical Hebrew texts from the emergence of the language down to about A.D. 200, the time of the codification of the Mishna. It thus includes all the...

A Witness Forever: Ancient Israel's Perception of Literature and the Resultant Hebrew Bible.
April 1, 1996... This posthumous collection of essays by a Semitist of the old school is an intriguing specimen of semiology, unembellished by the terminology or methodology characteristic of this discipline. Rabinowitz possessed a semiological vocabulary of his...

Female and Male: The Cultic Personnel; The Bible and the Rest of the Ancient Near East.
April 1, 1996... This volume is a catalogue of terms for cultic personnel in Mesopotamian and Levantine sources. (No Egyptian or Hittite terms are included, making the subtitle of the work something of a misnomer.) The four chapters divide the subject matter into...

Approaches to Teaching the Hebrew Bible as Literature in Translation.
April 1, 1996... In 1984, the Modern Language Association distributed a questionnaire to Bible instructors in North American academic institutions soliciting information on the teaching of the Hebrew Bible as literature in translation. The replies covered such...

The Evolution of the Exodus Tradition.
April 1, 1996... This is a translation of the expanded (but not updated) 1987 edition of Masoret ??yesi at misrayim ??bahistalsalutah, first issued by Magnes Press in 1968. I will summarize Loewenstamm's somewhat disjointed observations and conclusions (chapters...

Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing.
April 1, 1996... Dr. Younger's volume can be read with profit by a wide range of scholars: Assyriologists, Hittitologists, Egyptologists, and other ancient Near Eastern specialists; biblical scholars; and all those concerned with historiographic and literary...

Social World of Ancient Israel: 1250-587 B.C.E.
April 1, 1996... This is a selective study of social institutions in the world of ancient Israel. It is divided into two parts: "ancient Israel as villages" (early Israel, 1250-1000 B.C.E.) and "ancient Israel as a state" (monarchy, 1000-587 B.C.E.). Each part...

The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: Jewish and Christian Ethnicity in Ancient Palestine.
April 1, 1996... Historians have often given an account of the history of the Jewish people in the late Second Temple period, a subject of vital interest both to Jews and Christians. Mendels, a professor of ancient history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,...

Monks, Martyrs, Soldiers and Saracens: Papers on the Near East in Late Antiquity (1962-1993).
April 1, 1996... This very enjoyable and engaging book consists, as its title indicates, of a collection of papers (forty in all) written over the last three decades, and dealing with the Near East in Late Antiquity, a term which the author in his introduction...

Sabbath and Synagogue: The Question of Sabbath Worship in Ancient Judaism.
April 1, 1996... McKay, senior lecturer in religious studies at Edge Hill College, Lancashire, investigates the literary and archaeological evidence for the sabbath activities of Jews in the cities and towns of the central and eastern Mediterranean world in the...

Agyptische Handschriften, pt. 4.
April 1, 1996... Compiled by Gunter Burkard and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert, this is the fourth in a projected series of five volumes cataloguing Egyptian papyri and papyrus fragments in German collections. The initial volume dealt with the papyri of the Illahun...

Novum Testamentum Aethiopice: Die Katholischen Briefe.
April 1, 1996... This volume (hereafter, KathBr) was published posthumously for its author, Josef Hofmann, by Siegbert Uhlig. In the course of his work on the traditions of the Ethiopic versions of the New Testament (see the items listed on p. 20), Hofmann, in...

Historical Phonetics of Amharic.
April 1, 1996... The national language of Ethiopia, Amharic, as well as the other Ethiopian Semitic (also known as Ethio-Semitic) languages, are of particular interest to the Semitist, as well as the general linguist. In addition to their obvious Semitic...

The Knowledge of Life: The Origins and Early History of the Mandaeans and Their Relationship to the Sabians of the Qur'an and to the Harranians.
April 1, 1996... This is a reworked dissertation submitted to the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of the Victoria University of Manchester. The book has eight chapters, reasonably divided between material pertaining to the Mandaeans and to the Harranians....

An Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic: An Elementary Grammar of the Language.
April 1, 1996... Of all books probably the most difficult to review fairly is an elementary foreign language textbook. Such books contain no new information, so criticism must center on presentation, method, appearance, legibility, and so forth. Actually most...

A Millenium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century.
April 1, 1996... This is a very useful, generally admirable and somewhat irritating book. It is useful in that it meets a real need. Hitherto no anthology of Persian classical poetry, aimed specifically at an anglophone audience, with notes and an introduction in...

Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century.
April 1, 1996... With this volume, Irfan Shahid continues the theme of his two publications of 1984: Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs, and Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, which together create a landmark in...

Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence.
April 1, 1996... In the history of Oriental Greek, the Corpus dionysiacum is a literary monument the influence of which has transcended barriers of language, culture, time, and tradition. And, in the period covered by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was a...

Arab Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine.
April 1, 1996... This extremely valuable collection of reprints is poorly served by its title. In eleven articles, originally published between 1983 and 1989, Griffith sets out to examine not so much the nature of ninth-century monastic life in Palestine but...

Honor.
April 1, 1996... Anthropologists of the Mediterranean region have written much on the topic of honor, but as Frank Stewart says, they have rarely done so with adequate precision. This essay is not only an admirable example of analytical skill, it also displays an...

Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period.
April 1, 1996... Over the past decades scholars have turned increasingly to examining how classical and medieval historians in the West thought about the past. A number of important studies (too many to name here) have shown how early historians constructed...

Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric.
April 1, 1996... While Shards of Love deals mainly with European literary history, the issues it raises - of how narratives of literary history have been, and might be, written - concern all of us who study literature (and not least the literatures of the Middle...

Religious Polemic and Intellectual History of the Mozarabs: c. 1050-1200.
April 1, 1996... This volume represents a valuable addition to an underrepresented field of medieval Iberian history. As the author states in his introduction, "unlike the Mudejars and Spanish Jews, who have been the subjects of very extensive study in our times,...

Morality in the Guise of Dreams: A Critical Edition of Kitab al-Manam by Ibn Abi al-Dunya.
April 1, 1996... Among the many works(1) of the Baghdadi author Ibn Abi 'l-Dunya (d. 281/894) is the K. al-Manam, "The Book of Dreams." It is not, as the title might suggest, an oneirocriticon, but an edifying treatise, and thus in line with other works by the...

Strange Bedfellows: Mut'at al-nisa' and Mut'at al-hajj, a Study Based on Sunni and Shi'i Sources of Tafsir, Hadith, and Fiqh.
April 1, 1996... A recent Reuters news report told of Algerian Islamic militants who slit the throats of two sisters who refused to accept proposals of term-restricted marriages. It continued: "The practice of what is known in Arabic as zawaj al-mutaa, which...

The Physical Theory of Kalam: Atoms, Space and Void in Basrian Mu'tazili Cosmology.
April 1, 1996... The primary focus of the present study is explicitly restricted to "one component of kalam cosmological speculation, namely physical theory" (p. 2), and, at that, within a fairly narrow scope. The work is based principally on Ibn Mattawayh's...

An Ayyubid Notable and His World: Ibn al-'Adim and Aleppo as Portrayed in His Biographical Dictionary of People Associated with the City.
April 1, 1996... The great biographical dictionaries of the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods have generally served historians of Islam in one of two ways. Because they preserve so much material otherwise lost to us, they have proven very fertile ground for...

Women in the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation.
April 1, 1996... While Islam is frequently perceived as a patriarchal religious system in which women occupy a subservient or secondary role, it is nonetheless true that the basic textual resources, the Quran, Hadith, and, in this case, Quranic commentary...

Ibn 'Asim, Kitab al-Anwa' wa-l-azmina, al-Qawl fi l-suhur (Tratado sobre los anwa' y los tiempos; Capitulo sobre los meses).
April 1, 1996... One of the more valuable compilations of pre-Islamic and early Islamic meteorological lore in Arabic is the anwa text of the Andalusian scholar Abu Bakr Abd Allah b. Husayn b. Ibrahim b. Husayn b. Asim (d. 403/1013). A unique manuscript copy from...

The Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources.
April 1, 1996... Gary Leiser has rendered yet another service to the nonturcophone scholarly world by providing annotated English translations of two important monographs by one of the greatest modern Turkish historians, Mehmed Fuad Koprulu (d. 1966). The first...

Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.
April 1, 1996... Among major Islamic architectural types, it is perhaps the palace which, more than any other genre, has stubbornly resisted serious and systematic study. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which are the absolute rarity of...

An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783.
April 1, 1996... Aksan's book investigates one of the neglected, "in-between" areas of Ottoman history. Ahmed Resmi Efendi (hereafter A.R.E.), whose career and literary output form the principal focus of her work, flourished in the period after the close of the...

Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions, Waqf, and Architecture in Cairo (16th and 17th Centuries)
April 1, 1996... Doris Behrens-Abouseif's latest study is a welcome addition to the growing but still small corpus of secondary literature on pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman Egypt. The author uses her expertise in late Mamluk architectural history to demonstrate...

The Arabic Dialect of Qift (Upper Egypt): Grammar and Classified Vocabulary.
April 1, 1996... Nishio is no stranger to Arabic dialect studies. His 1992 book on the Bedouin Jbali dialect of southern Sinai is a major contribution (see my review, JAOS 114 [1994]: 471-72). There have not been many recent linguistic investigations of...

Men's Folk Songs in Judeao-(sic) Arabic from Jews in Iraq.
April 1, 1996... Iraqi Jewry is fortunate to have the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Centre, which serves as a museum, research institute, and cultural community center all combined in one. This book is the ninth in the series "Studies in the History and Culture of...

Loan Verbs in Maltese: A Descriptive and Comparative Study.
April 1, 1996... This is a masterly piece of work, in which an all but exhaustive corpus of Maltese loan verbs has been subjected to stringent analysis, and the results set forth in a highly disciplined progressive form, leading to clear and far-reaching...

The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542-3).
April 1, 1996... This book has its origin in a series of lectures given by Professor Bosworth at Columbia University. He is no stranger to the history of the Saffarids. His article on the armies of the Saffarids appeared in 1968, and in the same year he laid the...

The History of Lazar P'arpec'i.
April 1, 1996... This is a welcome addition to Thomson's series of translations of Armenian historical sources, bringing them into the wider scholarly domain - the more so because of the importance of the events it records. Composed at the end of the fifth...

The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environments in the History of the Middle East, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500.
April 1, 1996... Most modern accounts of Middle Eastern history are constructed around the rise and fall of dynasties or states. The paradigm they employ, implicitly or explicitly, for the history of the Islamic Middle East, in particular, is familiar enough....

Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage.
April 1, 1996... The main questions addressed by Elad in this exemplary study are the following: 1) What was the character of early Muslim Jerusalem as perceived and propagated by the rulers and scholars of (mainly) the Umayyad period? 2) How accurately have...

Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526-1858).
April 1, 1996... The wealth of existing Mughal architecture in north India and Pakistan is illustrated by two remarkable recent books. The book under review is a comprehensive synopsis, enlarging upon the author's Encyclopaedia of Islam article. The other, by...

The Broken World of Sacrifice.
April 1, 1996... Readers of J. C. Heesterman's earlier writings will not be surprised by the central thesis of this book. The author has already devoted much work to the reconstruction of a hypothetical pre-Vedic sacrificial religion centered around such...

Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste.
April 1, 1996... The next time you run into a neo-Hindu chauvinist - say on a train between Varanasi and Lucknow, or at a health food store in New Mexico - who delivers an impromptu (and unwanted) lecture on the unity of all the peoples of ancient India and the...

Das brahmanische Totenritual nach der Antyestipaddhati des Narayanabhatta.
April 1, 1996... The goal of this 1989 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Heidelberg was "auf Grund der Ubersetzung eines Handbuches das brahmanische Totenritual ausfuhrlich und verstandlich zu dokumentieren" (p. 18). The manual the author chose to achieve...

The Nominal Sentence in Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan.
April 1, 1996... The main theme of this volume is the study of the "transition of a verbal adjective from one syntactical category to another" (p. 4). Even though "this kind of development, namely the influence on the verbal system, of the use of an originally...

A Comprehensive and Critical Dictionary of the Prakrit Languages with Special Reference to Jain Literature, vol. 1.
April 1, 1996... This volume is the first fruit of a project begun in 1987 with the intention to bring out within "about ten years" (p. v) a complete dictionary of Prakrit in three volumes. Though this may sound ambitious, it is encouraging and impressive that...

A History of Indo-European Verb Morphology.
April 1, 1996... My criticism of this book begins with its title. This is not a "history" but a "prehistory," and therein lies the difficulty. Quoting from an earlier book of his on PIE noun inflection, Shields states that "there are very few unique solutions to...

Languages and Scripts.
April 1, 1996... This book is not what it would appear to be from its title, namely a survey of the languages and scripts of India, categorized according to some appropriate set of linguistic criteria. Rather, the book contains something unusual and...

The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia.
April 1, 1996... The book consists of ten articles, originally presented at a conference held at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University in April 1989, on "The Concept of Lila in South Asia." The book also contains an introductory...

The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition.
April 1, 1996... Over the past twenty years, books on the Hindu Goddess have become something of a cottage industry in the West. Ranging from detailed anthropological treatments of regional traditions, to critical translations of fundamental sources on the...

Chinnamasta: The Aweful (sic) Buddhist and Hindu Tantric Goddess.
April 1, 1996... This is a short but very interesting study of the goddess Chinnamasta as she appears in Hindu and Buddhist Tantric traditions. A revised version of Benard's Ph.D. thesis from Columbia University, Chinnamasta is the first monograph to examine the...

Dadu Lieder.
April 1, 1996... Monika Thiel-Horstmann (now Boehm-Tettelbach) was recently appointed Professor of Modern Indian Studies at the University of Heidelberg after an impressive career which stretched from Sanskrit studies to important work in medieval Indo-Aryan...

Aspects of Nepalese Traditions: Proceedings of a Seminar Held under the Auspices of Tribhuvan University Research Division and the German Research Council, March 1990.
April 1, 1996... To study and preserve the unique cultural diversity of Nepal and to document the rapid changes brought on by modernization was the aim of the "Nepal Research Programme," established in 1980 by the German Research Council (Deutsche...

Dravidian Studies: Selected Papers.
April 1, 1996... In every branch of scholarship there are several works which represent, so to say, an indispensable and permanent foundation of that particular discipline. In Dravidian studies, these works include, among others, R. Caldwell's Comparative Grammar...

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic.
April 1, 1996... Haun Saussy's The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic is a study in comparative rhetoric. Its rules of argumentation, its intellectual commitments, and its overall coherence are within the discursive norms of comparative literature. Like much of...

The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes.
April 1, 1996... Abundantly illustrated, this handsome volume publishes the papers delivered at the fifteenth Percival David Foundation Colloquy on the Art and Archaeology of Asia, held in June 1990 at S.O.A.S. The topic central to all of the papers is how far...

Education and Society in Late Imperial China: 1600-1900.
April 1, 1996... This eagerly awaited volume is the product of a conference on Ming- and Ch'ing-period education, principally funded by the A.C.L.S. and held in Santa Barbara in June of 1989. The conference organizers, Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, have...

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.
April 1, 1996... This book, originally published as a series of essays between 1978 and 1980, attempts to undercut the standard account of the origins and development of modern Japanese fiction. According to that account, modern fiction in Japan derived from...

The Writings of Koda Aya, A Japanese Literary Daughter.
April 1, 1996... Koda Aya (1904-1990), the daughter of the well-known literary scholar and writer, Koda Rohan, has been virtually ignored by Western students of modern Japanese literature. According to the blurb accompanying the book under review, only one of her...