The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from January 1996

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from January 1996

Confucian piety and individualism in Han China.
January 1, 1996... Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently... "ideas" have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. Max Weber, The Social...

CT 13.33-34 and Ezekiel 32: lion-dragon myths.
January 1, 1996... INTRODUCTION This article examines two combat myths often left out of discussions of divine-conflict stories, discussions which tend to favor the better-known Mesopotamian tale of Marduk fighting Tiamat and the Canaanite tale of Baal, Anat,...

The problem of Ferdowsi's sources.
January 1, 1996... Though Ferdowsi's sources have disappeared, there has been a general consensus that his major source was a written composite translation from Pahlavi texts commissioned by Abu Mansur Abd al-Razzaq, who was governor of Tus during the first twenty...

Strategies of interpretation: Samkara's commentary on 'Brhadaranyakopanisad.'
January 1, 1996... 1. INTRODUCTION The aim of this article is to explore Samkara's theological method with reference to one of his greatest, yet little studied, commentaries.(1) I shall try to demonstrate the close link that exists between certain of Samkara's...

Original insights never fully present: Chan/Zen/deconstruction.
January 1, 1996... Like many readers who will be curious about Bernard Faure's new book, I approach it as a person with a basic knowledge of Chan/Zen Buddhism but not as a scholar of religion; I come to the book also with a specific quest for insights on those who,...

The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism.
January 1, 1996... Like many readers who will be curious about Bernard Faure's new book, I approach it as a person with a basic knowledge of Chan/Zen Buddhism but not as a scholar of religion; I come to the book also with a specific quest for insights on those who,...

Are there Tannaitic parallels to the Gospels?
January 1, 1996... This book is a disgrace to its author and a disgrace to its publisher. The scholarship is shoddy, the writing repetitious, the tone vituperative, and the argumentation flawed. "Do not think these harsh judgments exaggerated or abusive. They are...

Are There Really Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels? A Refutation of Morton Smith.
January 1, 1996... This book is a disgrace to its author and a disgrace to its publisher. The scholarship is shoddy, the writing repetitious, the tone vituperative, and the argumentation flawed. "Do not think these harsh judgments exaggerated or abusive. They are...

The 'Organon' of Aristotle in the medieval oriental and occidental traditions.
January 1, 1996... From the very outset, the Organon of Aristotle had a strong impact on logical studies, both in the West and in the East. The joint effort of numerous scholars, ever since the publication of the second volume of the celebrated CAG series in 1883,...

Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and Medieval Latin Traditions.
January 1, 1996... From the very outset, the Organon of Aristotle had a strong impact on logical studies, both in the West and in the East. The joint effort of numerous scholars, ever since the publication of the second volume of the celebrated CAG series in 1883,...

Altaic influences on Beijing dialect: the Manchu case.
January 1, 1996... INTRODUCTION Chinese(1) has been characterized as being resistant to outside influence. It has been assumed that if there is any borrowing between Chinese and neighboring languages, the direction is nearly always from Chinese to the other...

Prosody or pharyngealization in old Chinese? The origin of the distinction between Type A and Type B syllables. (response to Jerry Norman, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 114, p. 397, 1994)
January 1, 1996... It is a pleasure to welcome Jerry Norman(1) to the small group of scholars who are now prepared to reject the ubiquitous yod of Karlgren's reconstruction of Old Chinese, which was taken for granted by Li Fang-kuei and is still adhered to by...

Al-Amin's designated successor: the limitations of numismatic evidence.
January 1, 1996... Until recently, relatively little has been written on the relationship between numismatic inscriptions and Abbasid imperial policies.(1) The case I will analyze is a dirham minted in Damascus with the Muslim date 194 and inscribed with the laqab...

Al-Mu afa b. Imran and the beginnings of the tabaqat literature.
January 1, 1996... In a recent volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, al-Mu afa b. Imran al-Mawsili (d. ca. 185 A.H.) is credited with a Kitab Tabaqat al-muhaddithin, which is said to be the earliest biographical dictionary in Arabic.(1) No authority...

Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China.
January 1, 1996... Oscar Wilde, who wrote that it is better to be beautiful than to be good, would have appreciated this book. It is a handsome volume, collecting some eighty-three pieces of travel writing by fifty authors, followed by over one thousand notes,...

The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period.
January 1, 1996... At a time when gender studies are gaining increasing visibility in historical, anthropological, and literary research, Patricia Ebrey's book on female perspectives of Sung-dynasty family life is most welcome. Writing in a personal and engaging...

The Hittite Mediopassive Endings in -ri.
January 1, 1996... In the chapter introducing this work (pp. 1-43), Yoshida sets out the problem which he is to investigate and the course which he will follow in his investigation. The present mediopassive verb forms of Hittite are marked at times by the...

Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vols. 1-2, 3d ed.
January 1, 1996... The long awaited third edition of this chronological handbook (the first edition appeared in 1954 as Relative Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, the second in 1965 as Chronologies in Old World Archaeology) has finally been published. We have...

Isin-Isan Bahriyat, vol. 4, Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen: 1986-1989.
January 1, 1996... This volume continues the publication of the German excavations at Isin, southern Iraq. It gives the results of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh campaigns and is a collaborative effort written by various members of the expedition. After a brief...

The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe: Contemporary Perspectives.
January 1, 1996... The papers collected in this volume were delivered at the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London, on May 8 and 9, 1992, celebrating the centennial of the birth of Vere Gordon Childe, probably the foremost archaeologist of the...

Studien zur urgaritischen Lexikographie, mit kultur- und religionsgeschichtlichen Parallelen, pt.I: Baume, Tiere, Geruche, Gotterepitheta, Gotternamen, Verbalbegriffe.
January 1, 1996... This book is not the first contribution of Kjell Aartun to the often demanding study of the Ugaritic lexicon. Aartun's lexicographical studies previously appeared in 1968, 1984, and 1985 (cf. p. 4). In his new book no fewer than ninety-eight...

Among the Host of Heaven: The Syro-Palestinian Pantheon as Bureaucracy.
January 1, 1996... This work is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation, accepted in 1987 at the University of Chicago. The study interprets the pantheon in the Ugaritic texts and in Philo of Byblos' Phoenician History as a bureaucracy, more...

Old Testament Textual Criticism: A Practical Introduction.
January 1, 1996... This volume is intended as a textbook of Old Testament (OT) textual criticism. In the foreword, Bruce K. Waltke states that Brotzman when preparing his manuscript did not have available Emanuel Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible...

Bible Handbook, vol. 2, The World of the Old Testament.
January 1, 1996... Volume one of the Bible Handbook, The World of the Bible (1986), provided an admirable overview of, and introduction to, the whole of the ancient Near East. This volume focuses on the history and literature of one small but important area of the...

Early Israelite Wisdom.
January 1, 1996... Although the title Early Israelite Wisdom suggests an introduction or survey of this topic, the book is actually a critique of various theories about wisdom literature with only a few constructive insights. Weeks's purpose is to challenge what he...

Biblical Dan.
January 1, 1996... Biblical Dan is a translation of the Hebrew original, Dan: 25 Years of Excavation of Tel Dan. Biblical Dan, which has been "edited, revised and augmented," and includes an additional chapter on the Aramaic stele found in 1993, consists...

Priests, Prophets and Scribes: Essays on the Formation and Heritage of Second Temple Judaism in Honour of Joseph Blenkinsopp.
January 1, 1996... This volume focuses, as does much of the laureate's work, on the early Second Temple Period, the sixth to fourth centuries B.C.E., so little known but so crucial in the transition of biblical "Israel" to post-biblical "Judaism." The first of its...

The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid, 18-21, March, 1991, vols. 1-2.
January 1, 1996... These volumes are one of a number of recent significant collections of articles generated from conferences on Qumran studies. For the scholar attempting to stay abreast of the rapid developments in this field, these collections are vital, and the...

The Walls of Jerusalem: From the Canaanites to the Mamlukes.
January 1, 1996... For students of Jerusalem, Wightman's publication of the 1964-66 excavations at the Damascus Gate, The Damascus Gate, Jerusalem: Excavations by C.-M. Bennett and J. B. Hennessy at the Damascus Gate (Oxford: B.A.R., 1989), should be well known and...

Eine Tora fur den Konig Talmai: Untersuchungen zum Ubersetzungsverstandnis in der judisch-hellenistischen und rabbinischen Literatur.
January 1, 1996... The volume under review is a shortened version of a dissertation presented to the Freie Universitat Berlin in 1991. As its title suggests it deals with changes made in the LXX for King Ptolemy according to Rabbinic sources. These 13 (or 15 -...

Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash.
January 1, 1996... Since Hermann Strack's Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash first appeared in translation in 1931, it has been the premier reference volume in English for all those who wish to wade into the sea of rabbinic scholarship. Because Rabbinics is...

A Key-Word-in-Context Concordance to Targum Neofiti: A Guide to the Complete Palestinian Aramaic Text of the Torah.
January 1, 1996... The concordance to Targum Neofiti is the second volume published by the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project. The need for such a concordance has long been felt in the study of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, and the volume under discussion...

The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization.
January 1, 1996... The Uruk phenomenon has always posed a challenge by virtue of the absoluteness and extreme clarity of its attributes: the homogeneity across large spaces and the new qualitative and quantitative horizons cry out for explanation in terms more used...

Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in Birmingham City Museum, vol. 2, Neo-Sumerian Texts from Umma and Other Sites.
January 1, 1996... In this second volume of the Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in Birmingham City Museum, P. J. Watson has completed the publication of the Ur III tablets formerly in the Sir Henry Wellcome Collection. The first volume contained 139 tablets from...

Abu Ma sar: The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, Together with the Medieval Latin Translation of Adelard of Bath.
January 1, 1996... The works of the ninth-century Arab astrologer Abu Ma shar (Albumasar) enjoyed great popularity and were very influential in medieval Western Europe because of and through their Latin translations. Their influence extended even to the field of...

Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan.
January 1, 1996... Until recently, the study of popular culture and science in medieval Islamic countries was virtually impossible because of the inaccessibility of source material. But now this situation has dramatically changed thanks to the renewed interest of...

Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Hellmut Ritter Microfilm Collection of the Uppsala University Library, vol. 30.
January 1, 1996... Of the various German scholars who were able to explore the riches of Istanbul's Islamic manuscript collections in the early decades of this century, Hellmut Ritter was undoubtedly the most productive. More than a score of articles published...

Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections.
January 1, 1996... The importance of documentary evidence to the study of medieval Islamic law, administration, fiscal policy, and chancery practice has been acknowledged on all sides for decades, but the integration of this material into modern scholarship has...

The Poetry of Ibn Khafajah: A Literary Analysis.
January 1, 1996... Ibn Khafajah (1058-1139), the famous poet of al-Andalus, lived an apparently uneventful life, uninvolved in the politics of his time. Around the age of 64, he decided to collect his Diwan, with his own preface in which he explains by whom his...

Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia, vol. 1, The Poetry of ad-Dindan, A Bedouin Bard in Southern Najd.
January 1, 1996... This, the first volume to appear of what will be a three-volume work on the oral poetry and narratives of Arabia, is devoted to a study of the poetry of an illiterate Bedouin of the southern Najd, nicknamed al-Dindan, a word meaning "tune" or...

Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam.
January 1, 1996... This well-produced volume is based on the Gifford Lectures given by Professor Schimmel at Edinburgh in the Spring of 1992, with the addition of calligraphy by Dr. Shams Anwari-Alhoseyni of Cologne. It offers the discerning reader the sweep of...

Ritual, Politics, and the City of Fatimid Cairo.
January 1, 1996... Focusing on processions, protocol, architecture, and urban geography, this work explains court ritual in Fatimid Egypt (358-567/969-1171) as an expression of political and religious authority which both reflected and shaped the complex...

Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam.
January 1, 1996... During the past two decades great changes have taken place in the comparative scholarly study of very similar genres of what might be called "popular religious" literature in both the Jewish and Islamic traditions. One may interpret these changes...

Pronouncing Arabic, vol. 2.
January 1, 1996... Readers may recall my enthusiastic reception of Mitchell's Pronouncing Arabic, vol. 1 (JAOS [1992]: 127-28), an exceptional book. This book, years in the making, is even better, being the end-product of a lifetime of fieldwork and careful...

Encyclopedia Iranic, vol. 6, Coffeehouse-Dara.
January 1, 1996... General information on the scope and contents of the Encyclopaedia Iranica (EIr), which covers all aspects of Iranian history and civilization from pre-historic times to the present, has been sufficiently provided by a multitude of reviewers of...

The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 4, Kiskindhakanda.
January 1, 1996... This is the fourth in the superb series of translations of the books of the Ramayana of Valmiki. The previous three volumes have been uniformly significant contributions to our knowledge of this important epic. This one maintains that standard....

Sekoddesa: A Critical Edition of the Tibetan Translations.
January 1, 1996... This work is in the field of Buddhist Tantra, in particular the Kalacakra-tantra, for which the Sekoddesa is the canonical "initiation" (abhisekha) section, and has the additional importance that three commentaries are preserved in Tibetan...

Terminologie der fruhen philosophischen Scholastik in Indien: Ein Begriffsworterbuch zur altindischen Dialektik, Erkenntnislehre und Methodologie, vol. 1, A-I.
January 1, 1996... This is the first volume (covering a, a, i) of Oberhammer's ambitious project to identify and explain the key vocabulary of the brahmanical and Buddhist philosophical systems, from the earliest sutra texts to the works of the Buddhist philosopher...

Grammatik des Alttamil unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der Cankam-Texte des Dichters Kapilar.
January 1, 1996... Recent interest in Old Tamil grammar has given rise to several books, among them C. Akattiyalinkam's multi-volume Cankatamiz (1985-) and V. S. Rajam's A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry (1992). Lehmann's grammar, based on his 1991...

When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others.
January 1, 1996... When God is a Customer: what a title! These are words that challenge and expand our understanding of both poetic art and devotional culture within the greater world of Hindu India. Scholars of South Asian literature and devotional culture have...

Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India.
January 1, 1996... For the past quarter century Stewart Gordon has played a significant part in the modern historiography of pre-colonial Maharashtra and of the Marathas and their raj. Gordon's pen has yielded some of the most imaginative and stimulating...

The Ruhela Chieftaincies: The Rise and Fall of Ruhela Power in India in the Eighteenth Century.
January 1, 1996... The Ruhelas (still perhaps better known in the anglicized form, "Rohilla") were Afghan immigrants to the trans-Gangetic districts to the east and northeast of Delhi. Immigration began under the Delhi Sultans, but was particularly encouraged under...

The Arya Samaj as a Fundamentalist Movement: A Study in Comparative Fundamentalism.
January 1, 1996... This book is really two separate books. The first two chapters (corresponding to part I) are one book, and the next two chapters (corresponding to most of part II) deliver the second. At the very end comes the brief chapter five, which carries...

Devotion Divine: Bhakti Traditions from the Regions of India: Studies in Honour of Charlotte Vaudeville.
January 1, 1996... Fifteen scholars congregate here to pay honor to Charlotte Vaudeville, the scholar most renowned especially for her works pertaining to bhakti literature and practices. No wonder that most of the tributes in the present volume are also related to...

Auspicious Wisdom: The Texts and Traditions of Srividya Sakta Tantrism in South India.
January 1, 1996... The title "Auspicious Wisdom" is a precise literal translation of "Srividya," the name of the best known esoteric, Tantric, tradition of south India (although it is not limited to the south). The Great Goddess (one of whose preferred names is...

Thought Couplets in The Tale of Sinuhe: Verse Text and Translation with an Outline of Grammatical Forms and Clause Sequences and an Essay on the Tale as Literature.
January 1, 1996... This study of Sinuhe contains five sections. There is a hieroglyphic verse text which establishes the normative division into lines of poetry, a literal translation, a list of grammatical forms and clause sequences found in the text, a series of...

Where Can Wisdom Be Found? The Sage's Language in the Bible and in Ancient Egyptian Literature.
January 1, 1996... Interest in possible interconnections between the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature and the ancient Egyptian literary genre of "teachings" (sb y.t) began with Adolph Erman. He observed similar statements found both in The Teachings of Amenemope, a...

Targumic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections.
January 1, 1996... The numerous studies of the past four decades dealing with various targumic manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah have had a considerable impact on sundry targumic texts. Such studies demonstrate the importance of a reference work such as the one...

The Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, vol. 5, Tell el-Hesi: The Muslim Cemetery in Fields V and VI/IX (Stratum II).
January 1, 1996... Tell el-Hesi, located slightly northeast of Gaza, was first excavated by the great English archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie in 1890. The impressive mound dominated the surrounding plain, and he spent six weeks at the site. He believed it to be...

Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science, Texts and Studies, vol. 16, Sabur Ibn Sahl, Dispensatorium Parvum (al-Aqrabadhin al-Saghir).
January 1, 1996... The scientific study of Arabic pharmacy, as Kahl observes in his introduction to this important text, is in a somewhat "awkward position" due to such problems as "lost or corrupt sources, inaccurate transmissions, unreliable preliminary studies,...

L'Epistola degli Ihwan al-Safa.
January 1, 1996... This is the first part of a proposed Italian translation of the corpus of the Ikhwan al-Safa. The translation is accurate and reads gracefully. Naturally, I find certain passages where I would have chosen other words, but that choice does not...

Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages.
January 1, 1996... At first glance, this volume - a collection of essays already published elsewhere as articles - nevertheless has a measure of unity, and allows the articles to explore in greater detail aspects of the subject not fully covered in the author's...

The Udana Translated from the Pali.
January 1, 1996... This is the third translation of Udana into English. Masefield's is preceded by F. L. Woodward's (1935) and recently by J. D. Ireland's (1990). It is, in fact, the fourth translation, once the earliest, by K. Seidenstucker (1920), is added, which...

A Pali Grammar.
January 1, 1996... It is certainly not an easy task to convert a grammar originally written for scholars into a book useful as reference also by beginners, and all the more so, if the grammar is nearly a century old. In spite of these obvious difficulties, Norman...

Money, Markets and Trade in Early Southeast Asia: The Development of Indigenous Monetary Systems to A.D. 1400.
January 1, 1996... Robert Wicks offers us a penetrating study of the numismatic history of Southeast Asia in the premodern period. To protect his analysis from a tendency to read backwards from later documents, his study is limited to pre-fifteenth century travel...

The Tale of Prince Samuttakote: A Buddhist Epic from Thailand.
January 1, 1996... In The Tale of Prince Samuttakote, Thomas John Hudak offers us a useful translation of a Thai poetic version of the tale of Buddha's previous incarnation as Prince Samutthakhoot, one of the fifty apocryphal jataka tales known as pannyatsachadok....

Fundamentalism and Gender.
January 1, 1996... Among the burgeoning library of books and articles on the cross-cultural study of fundamentalism, why should a reader turn to this one? John S. Hawley describes what is distinctive about this volume in these terms: "We [the participants in the...

The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations.
January 1, 1996... This book, intended as a companion volume to The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction, by Richard Robinson, as revised by Willard Johnson, contains a well-written account of the main tenets, belief systems, rituals, and practices in daily...

Samkara-Mandara-Saurabha: Eine Legende uber das Leben des Philosophen Samkara: Text, Ubersetzung, Einleitung, vol. 153.
January 1, 1996... Samkara-Mandara-Saurabha is a dissertation accepted by the University of Heidelberg in 1990. The present edition will benefit all students of India who have an interest in the formation of legends and in the particular genius of India to...

The Bahagavad Gita: A New Translation with Commentary. vol. 39.
January 1, 1996... In addition to his translation and brief explanatory notes interspersed in the text, Professor White's book has a general index. This index includes a selection of Sanskrit terms in transliteration that refer the reader to their translated...

Marathi Reading Course.
January 1, 1996... This book is intended for "the adult research student in a hurry." Originally written in 1972, it was revised and refined over the decades that Raeside used it in teaching Marathi at S.O.A.S. Its compact format, its practical approach to grammar,...

Tattvabindu by Vacaspatimisra, with Tattvavibhavana by Rsiputra Paramesvara.
January 1, 1996... Navrang continues its project of making out-of-print works in renowned Sanskrit series again available with Ramaswami Sastri's edition of the Tattvabindu, published originally as no. 3 of the Annamalai University Sanskrit Series, in 1936. This...