The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from April 1997

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from April 1997

Ernest Bender, January 2, 1919-April 19, 1996.(Obituary)
April 1, 1997... Ernest Bender died quietly at his home in Edgmont, Pennsylvania on April 19, 1996. He was seventy-seven years old. A life long bachelor, he left no immediate survivors. His many friends, students, and colleagues mourn his passing deeply....

On the authenticity of the "preface" to the collection of poetry written at the Orchid Pavilion.
April 1, 1997... On the 22nd of April, 353, the great calligraphist Wang Xizhi (307?-365?) invited forty-one of his friends to gather in his garden, the Orchid Pavilion, Lanting in the mountains near what is now Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Their aim was to celebrate a...

Modern Arabic.
April 1, 1997... In Modern Arabic, Clive Holes succeeds in detailing present-day Arabic in all of its variety. Yet, in drawing conclusions regarding several important points, he fails to consider fully and objectively some of the data he himself presents in the...

I Nomi di luogo dei testi di Ebla (ARET I-IV, VII-X e' altri documenti editi e inediti).
April 1, 1997... I Nomi di luogo...., when used in tandem with Marco Bonechi's I Nomi geografici dei testi di Ebla, provides the student of Eblean toponymy and topography with a valuable tool for the study of third-millennium Syria. Considerable scholarly...

Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo.
April 1, 1997... For reasons i will try to make apparent further along in this review one should read these two books as a unit. They both treat the phenomenon of change in the Theravada Buddhism preserved and practiced by the Sinhala people of Sri Lanka. Their...

Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka.
April 1, 1997... For reasons i will try to make apparent further along in this review one should read these two books as a unit. They both treat the phenomenon of change in the Theravada Buddhism preserved and practiced by the Sinhala people of Sri Lanka. Their...

Poetique du theatre indien: Lectures du Natyasastra.
April 1, 1997... This work aims at nothing less than the rediscovery of the "theatralite" of the ancient Indian drama - engaging in vivid and representational terms the actual process of staging this long-forgotten art. And not in the dry text-based jargon of the...

New evidence on the early life of Ibn al-Arabi.
April 1, 1997... Apart from the many valuable autobiographical notes to be found throughout Ibn al-Arabi's literary corpus, a certain fanciful impression later developed around this textual/factual core, rather like the legenda aurea of the haloed Christian...

Avian identification of jiu in the Shijing.
April 1, 1997... Under the best of circumstances, accurate identification of avian images in ancient literature is a challenge. In the Shijing it is virtually impossible. However, avian identification of literary species is within the range of possibility. The...

A preliminary survey of some early Buddhist manuscripts recently acquired by the British Library.
April 1, 1997... 1. Introduction; general description of the manuscripts The Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library have recently acquired, with the assistance of an anonymous benefactor, a substantial collection of early Buddhist texts...

Ville royale de Suse VI: Les Figurines de Suse, vol. I: Les Figurines humaines, IVe-IIe millenaires.
April 1, 1997... This volume describes more than 1400 terra-cotta human figurines from Susa dating from the prehistoric period to the end of the second millennium B.C. A second volume is planned to deal with the 800 or more figurines dated from the first...

Archaic Myths of the Orient and the Occident.
April 1, 1997... I. M. Diakonoff is best known to American readers as a scholar of ancient languages and of social and economic history of ancient western Asia. Even the diligent reader of his enormous output may feel initial surprise to meet him on the terrain...

Damaszener Mitteilungen, vol. 5.
April 1, 1997... These two volumes continue the high quality of the series produced by the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut in Damascus. Twenty-four well illustrated articles present subjects ranging in time from the Ubaid down to the recent Islamic period. In...

The Jewish Family in Antiquity.
April 1, 1997... This work includes seven papers - or their derivatives - delivered at the Hellenistic Judaism section of the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature for 1990 and 1991, sessions co-chaired by the editor of the volume. In his...

Labor, Crafts and Commerce in Ancient Israel.
April 1, 1997... The purpose of this study is "to correct widespread misconceptions concerning Jewish economic activities throughout history; to demonstrate Jewish participation in every facet of economic life open to them; and above all, to emphasize the moral...

Archaeological Survey of the Hill Country of Benjamin.
April 1, 1997... In the decade of the 1980s the Israel Antiquities Authority initiated a survey of the central hill country of Israel. Archaeological Survey of the Hill Country of Benjamin presents results from that survey, reporting on some five hundred square...

Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery, vol. 2.
April 1, 1997... This is the second of two volumes containing articles on ancient synagogues. It has two parts. The first part, entitled "The Synagogue's Internal Aesthetics," contains four articles, including two by Asher Ovadiah. The first, on "Art of the...

Traditional Techniques in Classical Hebrew Verse.
April 1, 1997... This book supplements Watson's previous work, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984; henceforth CHP). The terms "verse" and "poetry" in the two titles refer to the same body of literature. The new volume...

Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters.
April 1, 1997... James M. Lindenberger is well known for his excellent commentary, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar,(1) and his translation, The Tale of Ahiqar.(2) The present work is part of a series (SBL Writings from the Ancient World) whose intent is to aid the...

A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, 2 vols.
April 1, 1997... Since the 1960s histories of the religion of Israel have been in eclipse. R. Albertz' two volumes mark an important revival of the genre, now aided by the explosion of archaeological and textual information from the ancient Near East and a newer...

Magische Texte aus der kairoer Geniza, vol. 1.
April 1, 1997... This publication of new magical texts from the Cairo Geniza was undertaken by a highly competent research team and resulted in an excellent edition of fascinating texts. The transcription, based on the published plates, is highly accurate, the...

Bibliography of the Septuagint/Bibliographie de la Septante (1970-1993).
April 1, 1997... Bibliographical research is obviously fundamental to serious scholarship and, especially, in a field such as Septuagint studies which covers so many diverse disciplines, each specific and technical in itself. Therefore, all whose research touches...

Sem Cam Iafet: Atti della 7(super a) giornata di studi Camito-Semitici e Indoeuropei (Milano, 1(super o) giugno 1993).
April 1, 1997... The alphabetically arranged contributions in this most welcome volume represent the published proceedings of a 1993 Hamito-Semitic-Indo-European conference held in Milan. Francesco Aspesi presents speculative connections on Greek melo- "solemn...

Ugarit and the Bible: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Ugarit and the Bible, Manchester, September 1992.
April 1, 1997... The proceedings of this conference, organized by members of the Departments of Religions and Theology and of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester, have been edited and published with admirable speed. This review will concern...

Gilgamesh, o la angustia por la muerte (poema babilonio).
April 1, 1997... This is the second edition of the first Spanish translation of Gilgamesh, made directly from the original Akkadian.(1) Until now, only the Hittite version had received such an honor (A. Bernabe, Textos Literarios Hetitas [Madrid: Alianza...

The Geography of Ananias of Sirak (ASXARHA COYC), The Long and the Short Recensions: Introduction, Translation and Commentary.
April 1, 1997... This imposing volume makes available in English for the first time an important geographical source plausibly dated to the early seventh century C.E., which forms a link in the chain from Ptolemy and his Greek successors to later Arab cultivation...

Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, vol. 9.
April 1, 1997... The last volume of Muqarnas to be edited by its founder, this issue reflects the broad range of his interests. It covers a gamut of topics by art-, architectural-, and social historians, scientists, archaeologists, and curators - a fair sampling...

The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture.
April 1, 1997... This book is a reworking of the author's doctoral dissertation, which won the Malcolm Kerr dissertation award from the Middle East Studies Association in 1991. It reconstructs the history of the Cairo citadel from its founding under the Ayyubids...

Une Lecture mu tazilite du Coran: Le Tafsir d'Abu Ali al Djubbai (m. 303/915) partiellement reconstitue a partir de ses citateurs.
April 1, 1997... Al-Jubba i (d. 303/915) is commonly held to be the greatest of the Mu tazilite exegetes. His present reputation in this regard is due in large part to the fact that he was not merely the founder of what proved to be the predominant school of the...

An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy: Kitab Tad dil Hay at al-Aflak of Sadr al-Sharia.
April 1, 1997... Medieval Muslim astronomers criticized the models of planetary motion invented by Ptolemy (fl. 150 A.D.) on the grounds that they violated the principle of uniform circularity. This held that the position of any celestial body must be the product...

La Quietude de l'intellect: Neoplatonisme et gnose ismaelienne dans l'oeuvre de Hamid ad-Din al-Kirmani (Xe/XIe s.).
April 1, 1997... Caught up in the research for a book of my own on the great Ismaili philosopher-da i, Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, but bemoaning the lack of modern investigation and writing about him, I suddenly find on my desk this impressive new study by Daniel de...

Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society.
April 1, 1997... The appearance of a comprehensive treatment of a social phenomenon, wide in its sweep and complex in its ramifications, stimulates more than passing interest. That the author of this work did not live to see the finished product of his labors...

L'Agriculture nabateenne: Traduction en arabe attribuee a Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Ali al-Kasdani connu sous le nom d'lbn Wahsiyya.
April 1, 1997... In the nineteenth century there was probably no single Arabic text that engendered more sustained debate among Orientalist scholars than the magical and agricultural Kitab al-Filaha al-Nabatiyya (Nabatean Agriculture). For the past twenty-five...

The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World.
April 1, 1997... The production of an encyclopedia is an enormous project. This one involves the coordination of some four hundred fifty contributors who have written about seven hundred fifty articles complete with bibliographies. The work covers the whole of...

Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought.
April 1, 1997... Little is known about the life of Xu Gan (A.D. 170-217), a scholar-official who was immortalized as one of the "Seven Masters of the Jian'an Period" (referring to the final reign of the Han, 196-220). Xu Gan established his name with shi and fu...

Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian.
April 1, 1997... Some books are so bad that the reviewer scarcely knows where to begin detailing their faults, or if there is even reason to bother. Most books, like most lives, are a mix of high intention and expedient compromise, of tempting promise and...

How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics.
April 1, 1997... For some thirty-five years now Calvert Watkins' published work has dealt extensively with philological and linguistic issues arising out of close readings of texts in a wide range of Indo-European languages, particularly those of the Anatolian,...

Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta.
April 1, 1997... While the voice of Paul Hacker (1913-78) was barely noticed during his lifetime due to his personality and his confrontational interactions with his colleagues and contemporaries, after his death in 1978, first in small circles in Germany and...

Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through Vedanta.
April 1, 1997... This is the first of two collections of essays on Hinduism in the twenty-five-volume World Spirituality series. Its companion, volume seven, scheduled to appear in 1996, intends to cover the "post-classical" period to the present. Professor...

Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts.
April 1, 1997... Purana Perennis grew out of a conference on the puranas held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in August 1985, a conference of which Velcheru Narayana Rao was the true adhvaryu (dixit David Knipe in his concluding remarks). The essays...

The Hindi Oral Epic Tradition: Bhojpuri Loriki.
April 1, 1997... Bhojpuri Loriki is the fourth in a series of texts recorded by Shyam Manohar Pandey, being preceded by The Hindi Oral Epic Loriki (1979), The Hindi Oral Epic Canaini (1982) and The Hindi Oral Epic Lorikayan (1987). This Bhojpuri version,...

The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea.
April 1, 1997... Traditional histories of the Indian Ocean tend to be treasure boxes full of precious details. Very often this makes it difficult to see the nature of long-term developments. McPherson's book is different. It does not flood the reader with...

Indian Epigraphy from Kara-tepe in Old Termez: Problems of Decipherment and Interpretation.
April 1, 1997... The Buddhist cave monastery site of Kara-tepe at Old Termez in southern Uzbekistan, together with the closely adjoining site of Fayaz-tepe, provides one of the most important sources of information on the spread of Buddhism during the Kusana...

Bibliographic Dictionary of Orientalists Native [to the former Soviet Union], from 1917 [to the Present].
April 1, 1997... The work under review is the second revised, expanded and improved edition of the Biobibliographical Dictionary originally published in 1975 in one volume. The first edition is now long out of print. The new edition in two volumes is...