The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from January 1993

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from January 1993

China and the trade in cloves, circa 960-1435.
January 1, 1993... INTRODUCTION ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT COMMODITIES in early intra-Asian and Euro-Asian trade was cloves. Cloves originated in the Moluccas, in particular from the islands of Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, Batjan, and Ambon. From these islands...

The interpretive function of 'Shih chi' 14, "The Table by Years of the Twelve Feudal Lords."
January 1, 1993... WHEN SSU-MA CH'IEN (145?-86? B.C.) set out to write a history of the world, he found the traditional forms inadequate. Thus he rejected the unified chronological structure of the Spring and Autumn Annals and the loosely organized collection of...

Generative phonology and analogical change: the case of the Hebrew suffix 'you(r).'
January 1, 1993... 1.1 Tiberian Hebrew evidences a phonosyntactic complex whereby the lexical accent of a word in an intonationally prominent syntactic position may correlate with certain phonological characteristics of that word not present under other (unmarked)...

"Russian intrusion into the guarded domain": reflections of a Qajar statesman on European expansion.
January 1, 1993... IN EARLY 1828, DURING RUSSO-PERSIAN NEGOTIATIONS for the conclusion of the Turkamanchay peace treaty, Mirza Abul-qasim Qaim-maqam Farahani, minister to the crown prince Abbas Mirza, was despatched to Tehran to persuade Fath Ali Shah to pay from...

Veneration of the prophet Muhammad in an Islamic Pillaittamil.
January 1, 1993... THE PILLAITTAMIL TRADITION AND ISLAMIC TAMIL LITERATURE ACCORDING TO TAMIL TRADITION, pillaittamil poems are, par excellence, the poetry of childhood. In fact, the name of the genre means "Tamil [poetry] to or for a child (pillai)." As part of...

A dictionary of Aramaic ideograms in Pahlavi. (Henrik Samuel Nyberg's 'Frahang i Pahlavik')
January 1, 1993... The late H. S. Nyberg's work on the Frahang i Pahlavik (abbreviated here FrPhl) was pursued over many years, and its publication has been eagerly awaited for a long time. It has now appeared, many years after the author's death, thanks to the...

Frahang i Pahlavik.
January 1, 1993... THE LATE H.S. NYBERG'S WORK on the Frahang i Pahlavik (abbreviated here FrPhl) was pursued over many years, and its publication has been eagerly awaited for a long time. It has now appeared, many years after the author's death, thanks to the...

Cuneiform alphabets from Syria and Palestine.
January 1, 1993... This review article continues the stimulating discussions that the reviewer held with the authors at the hospitable Ugarit-Forschung, an institute devoted to Ugaritic studies, during his stays in Munster in 1983(1) and 1987. 1. The Book...

Die Keilalphabete: Die phonizischkanaanaischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit.
January 1, 1993... THIS REVIEW ARTICLE continues the stimulating discussions that the reviewer held with the authors at the hospitable Ugarit-Forschung, an institute devoted to Ugaritic studies, during his stays in Munster in 1983(1) and 1987. 1. The Book...

Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224.
January 1, 1993... Taxing Heaven's Storehouse is an outstanding contribution to Song studies and Chinese economic history at the same time. This study of the duda tiju chamasi (Tea and Horse Administration) presents probably the most profound study of any Song...

Tung Chung-shu, 'Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu': Uppiger Tau des Fruhling-und-Herbst-Klassikers; Ubersetzung und Annotation der Kapitel eins bis sechs.
January 1, 1993... Competition would be fierce were there ever an attempt to award a prize for the most blatant neglect and misunderstanding of an ancient Chinese philosophical text; but if such a contest were held, one can be sure that the Chunqiu fanlu would at...

The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China.
January 1, 1993... How are people led to be good? Societies on our planet have devised a variety of goads and rewards, some religious, some philosophical, some legal. In a wide-ranging study, of admirable clarity, Cynthia Brokaw describes what must certainly be one...

Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis.
January 1, 1993... "The history of Confucianism is the history of the exegesis of the classics, just as that of Christianity is the history of biblical exegesis; the same is also true of Buddhism."(1) This authoritative pronouncement by the late Professor...

Vorderasiatischer Schmuck zur Zeit der Arsakiden und der Sasaniden.
January 1, 1993... This helpful work will be an aid to all working with Parthian and Sasanian jewelry, but it does not present the broad synthesizing overview that one might expect, given the title and the distinguished series in which it appears. Most of the book...

Uch Tepe II: Technical Reports.
January 1, 1993... The three mounds of Uch Tepe in the Hamrin basin northeast of Baghdad were excavated by a joint University of Chicago-University of Copenhagen salvage expedition in 1978 and 1979, under the direction of McGuire Gibson. The focus of the volume...

The Bible in Light of Cuneiform Literature.
January 1, 1993... This is the third volume to issue from the N.E.H. Summer Seminars for College Teachers led by William W. Hallo. The papers espouse a contextual approach, defined by Hallo as a balance between comparison and contrast, in which material from the...

Excavations at Tel Michal, Israel.
January 1, 1993... Large-scale, multidisciplinary archaeological projects have been in vogue in Israel since the 1960s. The justification for having large staffs whose expertise covers a wide range of specialties has been the recovery and analysis of the maximum...

Verbs and Numbers: A Study of the Frequencies of the Hebrew Verbal Tense Forms in the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.
January 1, 1993... This monograph presents a statistical study of the frequencies of verbal tense forms (infinitives absolute and construct, participle, imperative, suffix conjugation, and prefix conjugation) in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles--with the objective of...

Ugarit und die Bibel.
January 1, 1993... This study is intended for serious students of the Bible as well as for specialists in Ugaritology, and there is much here for both. The book begins with a brief sketch of the discovery (1928) and ongoing excavations of the metropolitan and...

Tall al-Hamidiya 2.
January 1, 1993... The first volume of this work was reviewed in JAOS 108 (1988): 304-6, where brief information was given on the location and character of the site and on the organization and purpose of the archaeological expedition. The present volume is as...

Baal Hammon: Recherches sur l'identite et l'histoire d'un dieu phenico-punique.
January 1, 1993... Xella's study of the deity Baal Hammon is the first of a planned series of monographs on Phoenician-Punic religion. That the well-known Italian scholar should present the first volume in French is explained in part by the fact that an important...

Quranic Christians: An Analysis of Classical and Modern Exegesis.
January 1, 1993... "Quranic Christians" is a curiously ambiguous expression. The reader may suppose that he is about to learn of some hitherto unheard-of ancient sect. In fact, he shortly notes that he is to be regaled with the views of several distinguished Muslim...

The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul.
January 1, 1993... This excellent new book by Raymond Scheindlin, professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, complements his previous study of Hebrew secular poetry, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life...

Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria.
January 1, 1993... The mind of Damascus revealed: Commins' study is one in which words are taken very seriously indeed, and real personalities emerge from the amorphous, faceless late-Ottoman period as social theory merged into Arab Nationalism. Commins has...

Orientalisches Mittelalter.
January 1, 1993... The old edition of the Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft was published in twenty-two volumes from 1923 to 1938. It included volumes on Indian, Japanese, Ancient Hebrew, Babylonian-Assyrian and ancient Egyptian literature, but, surprisingly, none...

Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads.
January 1, 1993... As events in the contemporary Muslim world have revealed, the role and functions of authority in Islam remain vital, today as in the past. Thus, understanding the dynamics of Muslim societies requires an appreciation of the multiple ways in which...

An Early Islamic Family from Oman: Al-Awtabi's Account of the Muhallabids.
January 1, 1993... This monograph of the late Professor Hinds consists of a translation of a small part of the much larger work by the little-known Umani historian and genealogist Abu al-Mundhir Salama b. Muslim al-Awtabi al-Suhari, who appears to have flourished...

Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism.
January 1, 1993... The starting point of Nezar Alsayyad's Cities and Caliphs addresses an important problematic in Middle Eastern historiography, namely, the "Muslim city" as a construct of orientalist scholarship. Alsayyad promises to deconstruct this concept with...

Le Voile de nom: Essai sur le nom propre arabe.
January 1, 1993... A medieval Arabic name can be a cornucopia of information. Its several parts, both given (the ism and kunya) and acquired (the nisba and laqab), betray the roots of identity within a family and reflect aspects of the bearer's biography. Which...

The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain.
January 1, 1993... The appearance of secular Hebrew poetry in tenth-century al-Andalus began a tradition that lasted five centuries on the Iberian peninsula. Nor did this tradition end with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, for already in the twelfth century...

Beauty of the Creation (Sena Fetrat).
January 1, 1993... This creation is a beauty, the kind of book one simply has to hold and touch, its mottled blue-and-white rough-textured cover a delight. The slim volume contains the text of the Sena Fetrat in both Geez and Old Amharic, with each in turn...

Authority and Political Culture in Shiism.
January 1, 1993... If the reader is anxious to know what is intended by the terms "authority" and "political culture" as used in the title of this work, the book's editor provides him with a short discussion of the subject in the early pages of the introductory...

Musique et extase: L'Audition mystique dans la tradition soufie.
January 1, 1993... The genres and repertoires of Sufi, or Muslim mystical music are at the point of intersection of religious music, art music, folk music, dance music, music of healing and trance. In several Muslim countries a full understanding of the mutual...

Musique et mystique dans les traditions de l'Iran.
January 1, 1993... The genres and repertoires of Sufi, or Muslim mystical music are at the point of intersection of religious music, art music, folk music, dance music, music of healing and trance. In several Muslim countries a full understanding of the mutual...

Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World.
January 1, 1993... C. A. Qadir's Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World, now available in this paperback edition, is a book that could be appreciated by devout Muslims who view philosophy and science as levels of cosmic understanding that complement the moral...

Arabische Handschriften, Teil II.
January 1, 1993... The present volume forms part of the systematic and detailed description of Arabic manuscripts preserved in German libraries (itself a subdivision of a comprehensive project founded in 1957 that aims at cataloging all oriental manuscripts...

The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq.
January 1, 1993... Samir al-Khalil, now revealed as the pseudonym for Kanaan Makiya, the son of the leading Iraqi architect, Muhammad Makiya (see the remarkable Profile about the two in the New Yorker, Jan. 6, 1992), has written a trenchant study about a strange...

Die Blutezeit der arabischen Wissenschaft.
January 1, 1993... This small volume brings together five papers, four in German (nos. 1, 2, 4, 5), one in English (no. 3), on different Islamic sciences, including philosophy, the science of science. The selections are uneven, yet representative; we find,...

Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350.
January 1, 1993... Given the current avid interest in diversity and the revisionist tendencies of European historians, Janet Abu-Lughod's book, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350, is timely indeed. In it, the author argues against the thesis...

The Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism During the Muhammad 'Ali Period.
January 1, 1993... It is important to note what this book is not. It is not an examination of Egyptian expansion in the reign of Muhammad Ali. There is no discussion of either the diplomatic or the military aspects of Egyptian foreign policy in the early nineteenth...

Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 5, The Philosophy of the Grammarians.
January 1, 1993... This collaborative work--the fifth volume in the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies under the general editorship of Karl H. Potter--contains contributions by Ashok Aklujkar, John G. Arapura, S. R. Bannerjee, S. D. Joshi, Shoryu Katsura, G. B....

Accomplishing the Accomplished: The Vedas as a Source of Valid Knowledge in Sankara.
January 1, 1993... In this concise volume Rambachan continues his important work of sorting out the Advaita Vedanta tradition, particularly by focusing on the continuities and discontinuities between Sankara's Advaita and the Neo-Vedanta of the past century.(1) His...

Thinking Ritually: Rediscovering the Purva Mimamsa of Jaimini.
January 1, 1993... Francis X. Clooney has written an important and insightful monograph on the Indian exegetical "philosophy" called Purva Mimamsa. In it he argues persuasively that the Purva Mimamsa Sutra of Jaimini (ca. 200 B.C.E.) has not been explained, or...

Die Asrayaparivrtti-theorie in der Yogacarabhumi.
January 1, 1993... By Yogacarabhumi (YBh) Sakuma means the well-known encyclopedic work in seventeen bhumis, which have exegetical treatises called Viniscayasamgrahani (VinSg), etc. This huge work is completely available in Tibetan translation in the Tanjur, and is...

The Continuity of Madhyamaka and Yogacara in Indian Mahayana Buddhism.
January 1, 1993... Harris has written a thoughtful and well-argued book. His main theme is that in their initial developments Madhyamaka and Yogacara were not rival schools of Mahayana. This argument is aimed at the last generation of European scholars who often...

Tiruvannamalai, a Saiva Sacred Complex of South India, vol. 1, Inscriptions.
January 1, 1993... This superb and as yet incomplete set of volumes on the South Indian temple center of Tiruvannamalai stands as a reminder of the sort of comprehensive and collective intellectual work that could occasionally be published in other days, but now...

Tiruvannamalai, un lieu saint sivaite du sud de l'Inde, 3 vols.
January 1, 1993... This superb and as yet incomplete set of volumes on the South Indian temple center of Tiruvannamalai stands as a reminder of the sort of comprehensive and collective intellectual work that could occasionally be published in other days, but now is...

The Indo-Aryan Languages.
January 1, 1993... This impressive book surveys a wide subject-matter pertaining to the history and interrelationships of the various Indo-Aryan languages and to the linguistic character of many of them as seen at the present time. It ranges through a century and...

Language Variation in South Asia.
January 1, 1993... The publications of William Bright, until his retirement Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at U.C.L.A., from 1966 to 1987 editor of Language, and in recent years editor-in-chief of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics,...

Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India.
January 1, 1993... Much insight, experience, and wisdom reside in this slim volume, which brings together in a coherent whole revised segments of articles originally published over the two turbulent decades between 1968 and 1987, while the modern Indian state was...

Law and Society in Modern India.
January 1, 1993... This volume contains a collection of thirteen articles by Marc Galanter, the Evuje-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and one of the most, if not the most, prolific writers on modern Indian law and law-related...

Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose.
January 1, 1993... Leonard Gordon has written the definitive biography of Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the most enigmatic personalities of modern India. Within it he has incorporated the biography of Subhas Bose's less famous older brother, Sarat, who studied at...

Living Waters: Scandinavian Orientalistic Studies Presented to Professor Dr. Frede Lokkegaard on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, January 27th 1990.
January 1, 1993... Most of the thirty-three articles in this Festschrift address the issue of the relationship between oriental literary and philological traditions and those of Europe. In the nature of things, then, many of them present general overviews of issues...

God's People in God's Land: Family, Land and Property in the Old Testament.
January 1, 1993... This revised and updated version of Wright's doctoral dissertation (Cambridge University, 1977) is an exegetical study, focusing on Pentateuchal and Prophetic texts, which investigates the realm of property ethics, defined here as, how Israel...

Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim.
January 1, 1993... David Pingree's edition of the Latin Picatrix marks the final stage of a project inaugurated by the Warburg Institute in 1933, with Helmut Ritter's edition of the famous Arabic magical text attributed falsely to Maslama al-Majriti. First...

Arabic Manuscripts in the Libraries of McGill University.
January 1, 1993... The Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu manuscripts preserved in various libraries of McGill University, Montreal, number about 650 volumes and belong to the Osler, Blacker Wood, Islamic Studies and Rare Books collections. Some specimens in...

Studies in Near Eastern Culture and History in Memory of Ernest T. Abdel-Massih.
January 1, 1993... The eighteen studies in this volume dedicated to Ernest Abdel-Massih, the late Professor of Arabic at the University of Michigan, are about evenly divided between Arabic and other fields. The contributions are tied together only in that their...

Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries.
January 1, 1993... The 28 papers in this volume grew out of a symposium held at the University of Toronto in 1986. There is no common thread or theme binding the papers together, but instead, each author was free to address whatever problems attracted his or her...

Harappan Civilization and Oriyo Timbo.
January 1, 1993... The exemplary partnership of the Gujarat State Department of Archaeology and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, under the general direction of Gregory Possehl and M. H. Raval, has produced invaluable evidence on the...

Asien blickt auf Europa: Begegnungen und Irritationen.
January 1, 1993... Europe is not accustomed to seeing itself as an object of curiosity and inquiry by non-European cultures and traditions. For many centuries, Europe has considered itself to be that part of the world which is destined to discover, understand, and...

Essays on the Mahabharata.
January 1, 1993... This substantial volume contains twenty-three articles in all on various aspects of the Mahabharata; however, the first ten of them have been published already in the Journal of South Asian Literature 20.1, 1985, and are republished here with...

L'Enfance de Krishna: Traduction des chapitres 30 a 78 (ed. cr.) du Harivamsa.
January 1, 1993... The author informs us in his preface that the work received its first impulse from a seminar on Krsna directed by Prof. Olivier Lacombe in 1972-73 and subsequent studies of the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana under the guidance of Prof. A. M....

Collected Papers, vol. 2.
January 1, 1993... This volume is the second in an anticipated three-volume set, which will reprint in chronological order the articles of K. R. Norman. In this volume are collected articles from the years 1977 to 1983, numbered as 31 through 52. The articles have...

A Concordance of Buddhist Birth Stories.
January 1, 1993... Those hoping to find in this volume a verbal concordance of the Buddhist birth stories in the usual sense of an alphabetical listing of the principal words from the texts, together with their contexts and citations of the passages in which they...

Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature.
January 1, 1993... Nepali is one of the smaller NIA languages, spoken by approximately 17 million people, around the same number as speak Assamese, and its literature is neither well known nor very old. The "founder-poet," adi-kavi, of Nepali literature,...

Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy.
January 1, 1993... Another valiant attempt to confront the "Other." Or, at least, that was the rationale behind the seminar that led to this volume, held in Honolulu in 1984 under the auspices of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. Larson makes much,...

Samvada: A Dialogue Between Two Philosophical Traditions.
January 1, 1993... This is a very unusual book--perhaps a genuine example of "comparative philosophy" (rather than another jejune debate as to its possibility). It too proceeds from a seminar, held in Poona in 1983, but instead of an international cast, its...

Thirteen Principal Upanisads, vol. II: Mandukya Upanisad with Gaudapada Karikas.
January 1, 1993... Prof. Dave continues here the project he inherited from the late P. B. Gajendragadkar, which has grown from its original task of publishing "Ten Principal Upanisads" to "Thirteen." Dave, now the sole editor and compiler, published volume one,...

International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 4 vols.
January 1, 1993... Readers of this journal will find much of interest in this comprehensive reference work. It covers, of course, the languages and language-families of the world, but also the various theoretical (e.g., discourse theory, formal and functional...