The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from January 1994

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from January 1994

"Doing" early Islamic history: Brooklyn baseball, Arabic historiography, and historical memory.
January 1, 1994... Mindful of the historic event that we commemorate this evening, I have chosen for my remarks the subject of history itself. To be more precise, I have decided to speak about "Doing Early Islamic History" with specific references to "Brooklyn...

The power of places: a northern Sung literatus tours the southern suburbs of Ch'ang-an.
January 1, 1994... The eleventh-century Yu ch'eng-nan chi [UNKNOWN TEXT OMITTED] (A Record of Travel South of the City Walls) belongs to a subclass of travel literature known as fang-ku [UNKNOWN TEXT OMITTED] accounts of "visits to antiquities." This particular...

Speaking with a forked tongue: diplomatic correspondence between China and Japan, 238-608 A.D.
January 1, 1994... China designed the mutually acceptable format for diplomatic correspondence among Asian countries. Although seemingly an embodiment of a China-centered world order, such correspondence was in fact utilized by both China and other Asian...

A Mesopotamian proverb and its Biblical reverberations.
January 1, 1994... A Mesopotamian proverb, "The tallest man cannot reach heaven; the widest man cannot cover the mountain (or earth')," uses themes and phrases found throughout cuneifonn l iterature to express the limitations of human existence. Traces of this...

The Sattada Srivaisnavas.
January 1, 1994... INTRODUCTION The Distinctiveness of Srivaisnava Hinduism lies not only in the fact that it gives special attention to the female mode of the godhead (sri), but also in its claim to inspiration by both the Sanskrit Veda and the...

Pyramids, prophets, and progress: ancient Egypt in the writings of Ali Mubarak.
January 1, 1994... 1. INTRODUCTION In the efforts of modern societies to articulate authentic definitions of community identity, the ancient past has variously been affirmed, neglected or rejected.(1) Most states of the modem Middle East have museums,...

The Classical Tibetan Language.
January 1, 1994... The publication of a new and impressive attempt at a d hardly proves that h was zero: the question that must first be asked is, how else could the Tibetans have rendered foreign diphthongs except by using h? All these problems about h have...

Discovery of lost eloquence: new insight from the Mawangdui "Zhanguo zonghengjia shu."
January 1, 1994... The discovery in 1973 of the "Zhanguo zonghengjia shu" [UNKNOWN TEXT OMITTED] manuscript ("A Text of the Strategists in the Warring States") among others from the Mawangdui [UNKNOWN TEXT OMITTED] tomb, sealed in 168 B.C., has been of great...

The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism of 'Dream of the Red Chamber,' 'Water Margin,' and 'The Journey to the West.'
January 1, 1994... Stone and jade play a central role in the symbolism of the Dream of the Red Chamber (hereafter Dream). While stone imagery also occurs in the two other novels mentioned in the title of the book under review, it certainly does not hold the same...

T'ien-fei hsien-sheng lu, Die Aufzeichnungen von der manifestierten Heiligkeit der Himmelsprinzessin: Einleitung, Ubersetzung, Kommentar.
January 1, 1994... One of the di majores in the Chinese pantheon is the Goddess of Seafarers," better known as T'ien-fei, T'ien-hou, or Ma-tsu. Temples dedicated to this deity of Fukien origin can be sighted all along the China coast, in Hong Kong and Macao, on...

Studies on the Hasmonean Period.
January 1, 1994... This stimulating collection of essays is (with some updating, to be sure) two removes from the original essays, all of which appeared in Hebrew at various times between 1963 and 1976 and which were collected in a Hebrew volume in 1980. No...

A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, vol. 1, Alaph-Dabath.
January 1, 1994... A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, vol. 1: alaph-Dalath. by Terry C. Falla. New Testament Tools and Studies, 14. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. Pp. xl + 136 + [21]. HFI 110. The Key is an "analytical concordance" of the Peshitta gospels, where...

Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew.
January 1, 1994... Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew. Edited by Walter R. Bodine. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Pp. x + 323. $34.50. This volume consists of sixteen weighty (for the most part) chapters on various linguistic aspects of Biblical (Tiberian)...

Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel.
January 1, 1994... Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel. Edited by G. Anderson and S. Olyan. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991. Pp. 217. 27.50[pounds], $47.50. The present volume is a collection of eight studies on various aspects of cult and religion in Biblical...

Sennacherib's Palace without Rival at Nineveh.
January 1, 1994... In this book, a revision of his 1985 dissertation, Russell first builds a convincing reconstruction of Sennacherib's Southwest Palace at Nineveh and then analyzes the results in order to write "an appreciation of Assyrian palace decoration as a...

Sargonic Inscriptions from Adab.
January 1, 1994... Le livre de Yang Zhi a pour objet premier l'edition des textes administratifs paleo-akkadiens d'Adab se trouvant a Chicago et demeures inedits depuis la publication d'un choix de documents par D. D. Luckenbill, Inscriptions from Adab, OIP 14...

Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur and the Archive of Mannum-mesu-lissur.
January 1, 1994... E. Stone, dans le cadre de son travail sur la societe de Nippur a l'epoque paleo-babylonienne, preparait une etude sur l'adoption lorsqu'elle apprit que des contrats supplementaires figuraient dans le lot d'inedits decouvert par D. Owen a...

Before Writing, vols. 1-2.
January 1, 1994... Before Writing marks the end of over two decades of work in which Denise Schmandt-besserat has developed her theories about the meaning of the "small clay objects" which we - thanks to her labors - now associate with the word "token." Her...

Scarab Seals from a Middle to Late Bronze Age Tomb at Pella in Jordan.
January 1, 1994... The University of Sydney expedition to Pella in the northern Jordan River valley uncovered a triple-chambered tomb (labelled Tomb 62) at the northeast comer of Tell el-Husn, a mound located south of the main tell. The tomb's rich assortment of...

Tell el-Hesi: The Site and the Expedition.
January 1, 1994... This summary volume of the first four seasons of renewed excavation at Tell el-Hesi is divided into four major parts. Part I deals with the site and includes chapters on the physical environment of the site and work at the site conducted by...

The So-called "Great Satrap's Revolt," 366-360 B.C.: Concerning Local Instability in the Achaemenid Far West.
January 1, 1994... According to Diodorus Siculus (XV.90-93), the satraps Ariobarzanes of Hellespontine Phrygia and Orontes of Armenia rose up in rebellion against the Great King in 362-361 B.C.E., supported by Mausolus of Caria, Athens and Sparta, the Greek...

The Heritage of Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of Erik Iversen.
January 1, 1994... The eleven essays in this commemorative volume treat three subjects - ancient Egyptian art and literature and their subsequent reception in Europe - in which the honoree has demonstrated a keen interest. Aware of the fact that the pharaonic...

Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography.
January 1, 1994... Callimachus (ca. 303-240 B.C.) was perhaps the most important figure in Greek literature of the third century. He was active at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus and is especially well known for his poetic works, although only a portion of...

Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs.
January 1, 1994... This is a book about the cultural confrontation of two worlds - the Islamic East and the European-American West - that primarily concentrates on the age of the great international expositions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Zeynep...

Les Trois Vies du Sultan Baibars: Choix de textes et presentation.
January 1, 1994... This is a lavish, large-format, slip-cased book with many beautiful color reproductions. The quality of its print, paper, and color give a good deal of sensuous pleasure. The book celebrates "l'histoire magnifique d'Al-Malik Al-Zahir Baibars,...

The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate.
January 1, 1994... Of the many issues relating to Palestine which are subjects of contention, few have been more salient than that of population. Whether it was a question of the growth in the Jewish population of the country via immigration, or the growth and...

Papers from the Third Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, vol. 3, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics.
January 1, 1994... The two volumes under review are the third and fourth in a series containing the proceedings of the Annual Symposium Arabic Linguistics, organized by Mushira Eid of the Middle East Center, University of Utah. The symposia were held in Salt Lake...

Papers from the Fourth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, vol.4, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics.
January 1, 1994... The two volumes under review are the third and fourth in a series containing the proceedings of the Annual Symposium Arabic Linguistics, organized by Mushira Eid of the Middle East Center, University of Utah. The symposia were held in Salt Lake...

Islamic Names.
January 1, 1994... What is in a name? Scholars who work in the medieval and modem Islamic world know only too well that a simple question like this hides an elaborate set of problems. One has only to look at social-historical work, like that on conversion by...

Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, vol.1, issues 1-3.
January 1, 1994... The launching of the new journal, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (AAE), is very welcome, and its successful appearance in this attractive format is a tribute to the energy and vision of its editor, the young American scholar, Daniel Potts,...

Israel Oriental Studies, vol. 11, Studies in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetics.
January 1, 1994... The learned studies on medieval Arabic poetics comprising this challenging volume are presented by the editor as emanating from the period following publication of G. J. H. van Gelder's Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the...

The Jihad and its Times: Dedicated to Andrew Stefan Ehrenkreutz.
January 1, 1994... Students of pre-modern Islamic history are obligated to Professor Ehrenkreutz for his penetrating studies of the monetary history of the medieval Islamic world, as well as several significant articles on some of the larger issues in the...

Saladin and the Crusaders: Selected Annals from Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar by al-Umari.
January 1, 1994... Ibn Fadlallah al-??Umari's 27-volume encyclopedia has long been recognized as a major source for the history of the Islamic world and beyond in the later Middle Ages. On the other hand, the annals comprising the "historical section," found at...

Eine Stadtgeschichte Alexandrias von 564/1169 bis in die Mitte des 9./15. Jahrhunderts: Verwaltung und innerstadische Organisationsreformen.
January 1, 1994... In her introduction the author defines her book as a historically oriented monograph on the city of Alexandria from the beginning the Ayyubid period to the mid-15th century. The choice of this specific period is due to the fact that it included...

Change within Tradition among Jewish Women in Libya.
January 1, 1994... In the 1940s the Jewish population of Libya was probably about 36,000. (In the book under review, Rachel Simon suggests only 20,000 but that is considerably lower than other reliable estimates.) In the late forties, this number began to drop,...

Moriz Winternitz: Kleine Schriften, 2 vols.
January 1, 1994... After studying Indology in Vienna under such great figures as Georg Buhler and Eugen Hultzsch, Moriz Winternitz (1863-1937) spent ten years (1888-98) in Oxford as a librarian and research scholar under F. Max Muller. The rest of his scholarly...

Konditionalsatze im Satapathabrahmana.
January 1, 1994... This volume is a welcome addition to the recent proliferation of painstaking, philologically grounded, monographic treatments of Vedic syntactic phenomena. The work it most resembles is Heinrich Hettrich's massive 1988 Untersuchungen zur...

Dharmakirti's Theory of Hetu-centricity of Anumana.
January 1, 1994... The author, Ms. Mangala Chinchore, states in the introduction that "roughly speaking, the present work is directed at articulating and assessing the worth of Dharmakirti's theory of anumana as presented in his Hetubindu, although references to...

Shankara and Indian Philosophy.
January 1, 1994... The author of this book, a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow (Russian Academy of Sciences), sets out to show that the Advaita Vedana of Sankara embodies a coherent world view, and one that differs in essential ways from...

Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking.
January 1, 1994... Mohanty tells us that this is the first of a projected pair of books: this one deals with what he terms "theoretical reason," while the second, to come, will discuss "practical and aesthetic reason in Indian thought." Although portions of the...

Die Kalang: Eine Volksgruppe auf Java und ihre Stamm-mythe: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte Javas.
January 1, 1994... It is good to realize that they are still among us: the collectors and compilers who continue their work in sturdy silence. They prefer to spend their days of scholarship in painstakingly assembling data, references, notes, glossaries, indices,...

Der tibetische Text, vol. 3, Udanavarga.
January 1, 1994... The Udanavarga, in Tibetan Ched du brjod pa'i tshoms, which Dharmatrata (Chos skyob) compiled not later than the fourth century A.C., consists of some thirty-two chapters with an uneven number of stanzas. Its subject matter is largely...

Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture, vol. 2, North India, period of Early Maturity, c. A.D. 700-900.
January 1, 1994... This is the fourth set of volumes of the American Institute's Encyclopaedia to appear, and the second set to deal with architecture in northern India.(1) Like the previous volumes, this one is also the result of a collaborative effort. Edited...

Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900.
January 1, 1994... In this wide-reaching study, Susan Bayly describes the varied historical experience of converts to two west Asian monotheisms, Islam and Christianity, in predominantly Hindu India. She focuses on the two southernmost states, Kerala and...

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
January 1, 1994... In the years since Anderson's Imagined Communities first appeared (1983) it has become a classic in several disciplines, bringing its author from the lesser known field of Southeast Asian studies into a brighter and broader academic limelight....

Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's 'The History of British India' and Orientalism.
January 1, 1994... Majeed's book of essays on James Mill, William Jones, and Orientalism is a welcome relief from much of the present historiography on Anglo-Indian civilizational interaction under British colonialism. In the first place, Majeed has gone back to...

Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau, Conducted During 1978-1982 under the Direction of J. Maxwell Miller and Jack M. Pinkerton.
January 1, 1994... This report of an archaeological survey of 443 sites in the Kerak plateau in southern Jordan, conducted between 1978 and 1982, contributes significantly to the advancement of knowledge. In chapter 1 (pp. 1-22), J. Maxwell Miller discusses the...

To the Euphrates and Beyond: Archaeological Studies in Honour of Maurits n. vaN. Loon.
January 1, 1994... Two Festschrifts presenting papers in the area of Syrian archaeology to two prominent archaeologists in that field have recently appeared. The first, in honor of Maurits van Loon, is a collection of papers by his former students and...

Resurrecting the Past: A Joint Tribute to Adnan Bounni.
January 1, 1994... Two Festschrifts presenting papers in the area of Syrian archaeology to two prominent archaeologists in that field have recently appeared. The first, in honor of Maurits van Loon, is a collection of papers by his former students and...

Mozan 2: The Epigraphic Finds of the Sixth Season.
January 1, 1994... Ce court rapport consiste dans une breve presentation du projet de fouilles a Tell Mozan, dans le Habur, non loin de Tell Brak et Chagar Bazar. La decouverte majeure de la sixienne campagne consiste dans la decouverte d'un niveau...

The Unity of the Hebrew Bible.
January 1, 1994... Winston Churchill is credited with the observation that England and the United States are two countries divided by the language that they hold in common. What "English" does for those two countries "the unity of the Hebrew Bible" does for D. N....

Scripture in Context, vol. 4, The Biblical Canon in Comparative Perspective.
January 1, 1994... This volume originated in a set of papers presented to a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Yale University in 1990. Its principal concern is, according to the introduction, with questions of canon. At a general level, this...

Difference and the Future of Turkish Literary Studies.
January 1, 1994... "Study of Ottoman literature," observes Victoria Holbrook, "has been discouraged by a British Orientalist legacy received in this country." Her diagnosis is accurate, although one could point to numerous other factors as well. Dr. Holbrook is...

The Eighteenth Century in India: Its Economy and the Role of the Marathas, the Jats, the Sikhs and the Afghans.
January 1, 1994... Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869-1912), a Bihar-born Maharashtrian who spent most of his life in Bengal, excelled as a teacher and writer in both Marathi and Bengali. An active public worker, his blending of rural roots and urban experience, of...

Three Views of Europe from Nineteenth Century Bengal.
January 1, 1994... Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869-1912), a Bihar-born Maharashtrian who spent most of his life in Bengal, excelled as a teacher and writer in both Marathi and Bengali. An active public worker, his blending of rural roots and urban experience, of the...

The Mauryas Revisited.
January 1, 1994... Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869-1912), a Bihar-born Maharashtrian who spent most of his life in Bengal, excelled as a teacher and writer in both Marathi and Bengali. An active public worker, his blending of rural roots and urban experience, of the...

A Concise History of Indo-Pakistan.
January 1, 1994... It has become something of a cliche to observe that history is a contested subject, the outlines and content of which are in constant flux. In recent years significant reinterpretations of and orientations toward South Asian history and culture...

Sangitasiromani: A Medieval Handbook of Indian Music.
January 1, 1994... This is a big, beautiful, and expensive book with a wealth of detailed information on ancient and medieval Indian musical science as understood in the early fifteenth century A.D. The Sangitasiromani (Crest-jewel of Music) was commissioned by...

In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism.
January 1, 1994... This collection of essays offers a thorough exploration of Buddhist notions of memory (smrti), showing the diverse . modes and uses of memory in both the fundamental religious practices of mindfulness, with attendant shades of meaning, and the...

Philosophy of Sri Madhvacarya.
January 1, 1994... B. N. K. Sharma's scholarly energies show no signs of abating, though he now approaches his eighty-fifth year. He has recently, we understand, undertaken a translation (abridged and more philosophically focused for the modern reader) of...

August Hermann Francke und die Westhimalaya-Mission der Herrnhuter Brudergemeine.
January 1, 1994... This work seems to depart somewhat from the format of the usual Verzeichnis volume, in that it focuses on the life and labor of one man, who was a missionary to the westem regions of Tibet (Ladakh, etc.) in the decades preceding the First World...

Panels of the 7th World Sanskrit Conference.
January 1, 1994... Five more volumes of proceedings of the Seventh World Sanskrit Conference have now been published by Brill, at prices that continue to amaze. For anyone hardy enough to acquire them all (to date), the montant (as the French say) is 705 Dutch...

Wayang Beber: Das widerentdeckte Bildrollen-Drama Zentral Javas.
January 1, 1994... Occasionally, scholarship rises to the status of an art-form. This gorgeous publication is not only the last, and, obviously, very complete, word on the remarkable survival named in its title, but succeeds in representing that nearly lost art...

Istoricheskie zapiski (Shi Tsi), vol. 6, Syma Tsyan.
January 1, 1994... This sixth volume of Viatkin's Russian translation of the Shih chi covers chapters 41-60 (the last twenty of its "Hereditary Houses"). This means that he has now transiated approximately 62% of the total work, and thus has forged ahead of his...

The Classical Theatre and Art Song of South Fukien.
January 1, 1994... This is a work of enormous and unparalleled erudition, a unique combination of textual study and fieldwork seldom encountered in the study of Chinese performing literature. The foci of the book are three rare Ming editions, preserved in...