The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from April 2008

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from April 2008

The cultic versus the forensic: Judahite and Mesopotamian judicial procedures in the first millennium B.C.E.(Report)
April 1, 2008... Throughout most periods of ancient Near Eastern history, religious rituals frequently played an important role in the resolution of legal disputes that were brought to trial. It appears that judges would sometimes make use of them arbitrarily...

The imperative forms of Proto-Semitic and a new perspective on Barth's Law.(Report)
April 1, 2008... 1. INTRODUCTION Over a century ago Jakob Barth suggested, (1) in what has come to be known as Barth's Law, that the quality of the vowel following the consonantal pronominal prefix in the G-stem depends on the thematic vowel of the verbal...

Indian disciplinary rules and their early Chinese adepts: a buddhist reality.(Report)
April 1, 2008... This study focuses on the various attitudes of Chinese Buddhist masters toward the introduction of Indian disciplinary rules in a Chinese reality, more particularly in the Chinese society of the fifth to the eighth centuries, a period that saw...

Notes on the Ahl al-Diwan: the Arab-Egyptian army of the seventh through the ninth centuries C.E.(Report)
April 1, 2008... In his foundational study of caliphal armies, Hugh Kennedy provided a thorough, interpretative framework for the profuse evidence relating to the early Islamic military establishment. (1) Repeatedly, however, he necessarily emphasized the...

A new terminus ad quem for 'Umar al-Suhrawardi's magnum opus.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... Attending to the chronological sequence of an individual author's works is a sine qua non of contemporary literary biography, one of the single most important descriptive elements that the critic should attend to in evaluating the oeuvre of any...

The horse in Indo-Iranian mythology.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... With focus on the mythology of the horse, the rituals in which it is involved, and the philological study of the texts (p. 13), Philippe Swennen investigates, comparing and contrasting, the physical description of the (sacred) horse in the...

A new dictionary of the Rigveda.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2008... An updating of Grassmann's Worterbuch zum Rigveda has long been a major desideratum of Vedic studies. In an age of specialization it is hard for us to imagine that a mathematician ("Grassmann's algebra") should have been the unique author of...

Spice, spiced wine, and pure wine.(Essay)
April 1, 2008... The Arabs have coined a proverb ashar min qifa nabki ("more famous than 'Stop, let us weep!'") quoting the first two words of Imru' al-Qays's Mu'allaqa. This Mu'allaqa is known to have several versions, in which the number and order of lines...

Personal exile in the ancient near east.(Report)
April 1, 2008... Personal exile was an ongoing phenomenon in the ancient Near East that had a special dynamic, giving rise to its own political conventions, legal regulations, and literary reflections. While sharing some features with the mass deportations used...

The five Ks of the Khalsa Sikhs.(Report)
April 1, 2008... Sikhism, the world's fifth-largest organized religion, has more than 20 million followers. Many thousands live in New York City. We can spot Sikh men on the street by their turbans and upswept whiskers. New York Times, 18 Sept 2006...