The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from January 1997

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from January 1997

Little Kongdoms in Kalinga: Ideologie, Legitimation und politik regionaler Eliten.
January 1, 1997... What this German dissertation is about is handily stated at the beginning of the English summary on p. 317: The goal of this thesis was to test the applicability of the model of the little kingdom in a regional context in South Asia in order to...

A Badaga-English Dictionary.
January 1, 1997... To review a work like this is not an easy task. To do full justice to a dictionary of this kind one should (and could) comment on almost any one of its entries. Some of the comments would be positive, some would attempt to add to our knowledge,...

Observations on the Tarsus seal of Puduhepa, Queen of Haiti.
January 1, 1997... A reading of the cuneiform legend on a royal seal from Tarsus is proposed. In 1937 Hetty Goldman published a bulla found at Tarsus bearing the impression of a royal seal.(1) It shows the name of the queen under the winged disk, between...

Avestica 1: a perfect participle: vaoxuuanho.
January 1, 1997... It has been repeatedly pointed out by Karl Hoffmann that the "prolegomena" and critical apparatus of Karl E Geldner's edition of the Avesta (Avesta the Sacred Book of the Parsis, 3 vols. [Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 188695]) were as important as...

On the meaning of "Hatem" in Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan.
January 1, 1997... In the literature on Goethe's West-Eastern Divan from the date of its first publication in 1819 to its most recent edition in 1994 - all accompanied by detailed commentaries and a great variety of critical studies - there is a striking omission:...

Zur Geschichtsschreibung des Chronisten: Literarisch-historiographische Abweichungen der Chronik von ihren Paralleltexten in den Samuel- und Konigbuchern.
January 1, 1997... This monograph is a revised 1989 doctoral dissertation for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In it Kalimi sets forth a major aspect of the Chronicler's historiography, viz., the ways in which the Chronicler deliberately deviates from his...

Establishment Violence in Philo and Luke: A Study in Non-Conformity to the Torah and Jewish Vigilante Reactions.
January 1, 1997... This is a revised version of the author's dissertation presented in 1991 to the University of Trondheim for the degree of Doctor Artium. In it Seland uses evidence from Philo, notably De Specialibus Legibus 1.54-57, 1.315-18, and 2.252-54, to...

Studies in Biblical Law: From the Hebrew Bible to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
January 1, 1997... Seven of the eleven chapters in this volume have been published previously either in Hebrew or English between 1975 and 1994. The author states that there is no particular theme to the collection other than his own interest in certain topics....

Der Amunhymnus des Papyrus Leiden I 344, Verso. (3 vols.)
January 1, 1997... This impressive three-volume study marks the culmination of the Leiden Museum's commendable efforts, over more than a century and a half, to publish all of their Egyptian literary papyri. Sadly too, it is also the final published work of the...

The Demography of Roman Egypt.
January 1, 1997... Although historians of the ancient Near East have shown increasing interest in applying the methods of social science to their data, this has proven difficult in such disciplines as demography because of the generally incomplete nature of the...

Dualism in Transformation: Varieties of Religion in Sasanian Iran.
January 1, 1997... The book under review offers far more than its title suggests. It is, in fact, a succinct condensation of the wide-ranging knowledge and precious insights of Professor Shaul Shaked during many decades of research. Certain themes, central to...

Damaszener Mitteilungen, vol. 7.
January 1, 1997... This beautifully produced volume contains ten articles concerning topics from the Paleolithic down through the medieval Islamic periods. These are arranged chronologically. Two contributions concern pre-Hellenistic periods. Sultan Muhesan gives a...

Uruk Kleinfunde, III: Kleinfunde im Vorderasiatischen Museum zu Berlin: Steingefasse und Asphalt, Farbreste, Fritte, Glas, Holz, Knochen/Elfenbein, Muschel/Perlmutt/Schnecke.
January 1, 1997... This volume is the third in the series of final publications of the small finds from the German excavations at Warka from 1912 through 1985. It is divided into two parts: stone vessels, by Lutz Martin (in collaboration with Marlies Heinz); and...

Imperial and Administrative Records, part I: Palace and Temple Administration.
January 1, 1997... Being an Assyrian specialist is often like working a huge jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces are missing and others somewhat mashed. Occasionally a box of new pieces arrives in the mail, filling in gaps, making it clear that some pieces don't...

Cuneiform Documents from the Chaldean and Persian Periods.
January 1, 1997... The collection of the World Heritage Museum of the University of Illinois (henceforth WHM) contains approximately 1750 cuneiform tablets, of which 113 texts from the Chaldean and Persian periods (using the author's terminology) are published in...

Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of The Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel.
January 1, 1997... The phrase "illness and health care" was carefully chosen by Hector Avalos to avoid using the term "medicine" in his title. He is also careful in insisting on making a distinction between "disease" and "illness," as I have also for some years,...

Ethical Theories in Islam.
January 1, 1997... Ethics is not an easy subject to study in the context of Islamic civilization. In the West, because Christianity developed within a culture imbued with Greek philosophy and had constantly to grapple with it and adapt itself to it, ethics is well...

The "Arabick" Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England.
January 1, 1997... When people think of the impact of Islamic civilization on the Latin West they usually think of the period of the tenth to twelfth centuries that produced the immense collection of texts (mainly scientific and philosophical) that were translated...

The Bujh Niranjan: An Isma ili Mystical Poem.
January 1, 1997... The primary languages of literary expression by Muslims in the Subcontinent have generally been assumed to be Arabic, Persian, and then Urdu. Though recognition has been afforded to writings in Bengali, Punjabi, and Sindhi, among others, most...

Der heilige Krieg (Gihad) aus der Sicht der Malikitischen Rechtsschule (Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani).
January 1, 1997... Behind this title is an edition of the chapter on jihad from Kitab al-Nawadir wa-l-Ziyadat ala ma fi l-Mudawwana by Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 386/996), with a lengthy editorial preface. The book's purpose is neither to analyze the Maliki...

Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning.
January 1, 1997... Writers of architecture survey books inevitably have to make some choices with regard to method of presentation and degree of coverage. Broadly speaking, long periods are presented chronologically in order to present logically and lucidly large...

Bedouin, Village, and Urban Arabic: An Ecolinguistic Study.
January 1, 1997... This book consists of four chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of Arabic "ecolinguistics," by which term the author refers to the interaction between the different types of language typical of bedouin, village, and urban communities. The...

All the King's Falcons: Rumi on Prophets and Revelation.
January 1, 1997... "How should one organize the material found in nearly 60,000 verses of his [Rumi's] work?" wondered Annemarie Schimmel in the foreword to The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (London 1978), xiii. By way of response, she...

Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi.
January 1, 1997... Publications on Rumi have been numerous enough that a casual glimpse at recent bibliography on Islamic mysticism might lead one to conclude that he was the only truly noteworthy mystic Islam ever produced. Proliferation of scholarly and popular...

The Wellsprings of Wisdom: A study of Abu Ya qub al-Sijistani's Kitab al-Yanabi Including a Complete English Translation with Commentary and Notes on the Arabic Text.
January 1, 1997... The author of the tenth-century Kitab al-Yanabi, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani, is a prominent figure of the early Is-mailiyya. He is also, for the time being, the earliest author of this school whose work can be studied in the original, and not only...

Spanish Hebrew Poetry and the Arabic Literary Tradition: Arabic Themes in Hebrew Andalusian Poetry.
January 1, 1997... This book is a study of the relationship of the poetry of the Hebrew Golden Age in al-Andalus (tenth to twelfth centuries) to Arabic poetry; its core is a survey of the poetic themes and motifs in Hebrew Andalusian literature that have been...

Arabisches Volkstheater in Kairo im Jahre 1909: Ahmad IlFar und seine Schwanke.
January 1, 1997... An accomplished Arabic dialectologist and an equally accomplished historian of Middle Eastern drama have joined forces here to publish a fascinating collection of dramatic texts in Egyptian colloquial Arabic from the early twentieth century....

God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period 1200-1550.
January 1, 1997... This is a felicitously conceived interpretive essay on groups of antinomian dervishes that flourished, principally in Ottoman Turkey, on the margins both of organized Sufism and of society in general, between the thirteenth and mid-sixteenth...

The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature.
January 1, 1997... With this volume, Sabry Hafez, a noted literary critic in the Arab world and currently lecturer in Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), has produced a substantial and serious work containing important...

World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts. (4 vols.)
January 1, 1997... These four volumes are an introduction to the collections, both public and private, of Islamic manuscripts in 106 countries and the Vatican. Approximately 5,000 collections are documented, though "collection" is perhaps not quite the right word....

Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900-1989.
January 1, 1997... The Gayo are one of the principal ethnic groups of the isolated lacustrine plains and riverine valleys of Central Acer district in north Sumatra, in the vicinity of Lake Tawar. Sundered by topography from contact with Europeans until the first...

The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857.
January 1, 1997... It would seem by now that everything that could be written on the 1857 rebellion in colonial India has been written. From simple sepoy mutiny to first war of independence, with stops at Muslim and Hindu conspiracies, the events of 1857 have been...

The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship.
January 1, 1997... Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, two Cambridge anthropologists, have written a carefully argued, challenging, and highly recommended book on ritual theory. The Jain daily temple puja, which they observed at length at the Dadabari Jain temple...

Gupta Gold Coins with a Garuda Banner. (2 vols.)
January 1, 1997... Numismatics is essentially a science of observation and classification. The more you observe and the more you classify, the more you learn. Whether it is a hoard or a treasure, a small or large private or public collection, a series issued by an...

Vom Moksopaya-Sastra zum Yogavasistha-Maharamayana: Philologische Untersuchungen zur Entwicklungs- und Uberlief-erungsgeschichte eines inndische Lehrwerks mit Anspruch auf Heilsrelevanz.
January 1, 1997... The three volumes under review together constitute a major philological and historical study of a little-understood and, until recently,(1) much-ignored Indian philosophical/religious text, the Yogavasistha-Maharamayana (= Y; better known as...

Bhaskarakanthas Moksopaya-Tika, 2. Prakarana (Mumuksuvya-vahara).
January 1, 1997... The three volumes under review together constitute a major philological and historical study of a little-understood and, until recently,(1) much-ignored Indian philosophical/religious text, the Yogavasistha-Maharamayana (= Y; better known as...

Bhaskarakanthas Moksopaya-Tika: Die Fragmente des 3. (Utpatti-) Prakarana.
January 1, 1997... The three volumes under review together constitute a major philological and historical study of a little-understood and, until recently,(1) much-ignored Indian philosophical/religious text, the Yogavasistha-Maharamayana (= Y; better known as...

Orbis Indicus: Essays in Honor of Gerhard Oberhammer.
January 1, 1997... This weighty volume honors Gerhard Oberhammer on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. A collection of thirty-one essays by colleagues and former students in the field of Indology, it is a companion to Hermeneutics of Encounter,(1) which...

The Powers of Art: Patronage and Indian Culture.
January 1, 1997... This volume results from a conference patronized by the Indian and U.S. governments and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. As a part of the 1985 "Festival of India in America," nineteen scholars and patrons of art presented papers...

Prolegomena to the First Two Tibetan Grammatical Treatises.
January 1, 1997... Zusammengefasst wurden in zehn Abschnitten die revidierten Fassungen von insges. elf Aufsatzen, erschienen oder eingereicht zwischen 1980 und 1992, namlich [section]1 Introduction: On the Utility of the Tibetan Grammarians. In Tibetan History...

Gebel El-Zeit, 1: Les Mines de galene.
January 1, 1997... The Gebel el-Zeit contains ancient galena mines (though petroleum deposits might have been expected at a location known as the "Mountain of Oil"). The French conglomerate known as TOTAL (Compagnie francaise des petroles) had, in fact, been...

The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade.
January 1, 1997... M. E. Aubet (who also publishes under the name M. E. Aubet Semmler) has written the best general book on the Phoenicians ever published. Originally in Spanish, Tiro y las colonias fenicias de Occidente (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 1987), it...

Ancient Metal Axes and Other Tools in the Royal Ontario Museum: European and Mediterranean Types.
January 1, 1997... John W. Hayes is known to the world of Mediterranean archaeology as the pre-eminent authority on Late Roman and Early Byzantine pottery. It is safe to say that no one has ever known so much about that pottery, not even those ancient potters who...

Studio Historiae Ardens: Ancient Near Eastern Studies Presented to Philo H.J. Houwink ten Cate on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday.
January 1, 1997... The recipient of this Festschrift has labored in the vineyard of ancient Anatolian studies for almost forty years. As may be seen in the bibliography of his works (1960-1994 and several items in press) compiled by J. Jie and presented here, he...

Zu einigen Neufunden hethitischer Konigssiegel.
January 1, 1997... In 1990, while digging in the remains of a building in the Upper City near the rock outcropping known as Nisantepe, the German archaeological team at the Hittite capital of Bogazkoy/Hattusa came upon a deposit of more than three thousand sealed...

Tistrya, part 2: The Iranian Myth of the Star Sirius.
January 1, 1997... This is the companion volume to the author's Tistrya, part 1: The Avestan Hymn to Sirius, published in 1990. That volume contained the text and translation of the hymn (Yast 8 of the Avesta) with a philological commentary. In this volume, Panaino...

Lower Galilee during the Iron Age.
January 1, 1997... This comprehensive study of the lower Galilee by Zvi Gal grew out of a small-scale survey that he conducted in the region in the mid-1970s. Drawing upon topographical, ecological, and archaeological data (both survey and excavation), he has...

Vows in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East.
January 1, 1997... References to vow, oath, and curse in the Hebrew Bible and other literature of the ancient Near East frequently exhibit confusion due to the semantic ranges of these terms in modern Western languages. H. C. Brichto makes a similar point...

The Temple Scroll and the Bible: The Methodology of 11Qt.
January 1, 1997... Swanson's book is accurately titled. It is exclusively about the methodology employed in the composition of the Temple Scroll. That the focus is entirely on the Bible is due to the fact, unique among Dead Sea documents, that the Scroll is a...

Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel: A Literary Comparison.
January 1, 1997... The volume under review is substantially the text of a dissertation, only slightly revised with a view to publication. It consists of a detailed comparison of the Aramaic text of Daniel 2-7 and the Septuagint (LXX) version. The choice of these...

Pharaoh's Workers: The Villagers of Deir el Medina.
January 1, 1997... In this volume Leonard Lesko makes available the proceedings of a symposium held at Brown University. Six essays are equally divided between sections on social and economic concerns and spiritual and intellectual matters. Deir el Medina was...

Tevaram: Ayvuttunai (Tevaram: Etudes et glossaire tamouls).
January 1, 1997... This (third) volume of indices, glossary, and other supplementary materials complete the scientific edition of the Tamil Tevaram by Francois Gros and T. V. Gopal Iyer, handsomely published by the French Indological Institute in Pondichery. For...

A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji.
January 1, 1997... This is a "history of dialogue in a colonial political field," specifically of how Fiji Indian public political discourse moved from anti-colonial politics to (internal) religious debates in the early 1930s. In the first decades of the...

Researches in Indian and Buddhist Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Professor Alex Wayman.
January 1, 1997... This Festschrift, dedicated to one of the most original and controversial scholars of our day, contains a number of important papers by a distinguished panoply of Indianists. The papers testify, in their seriousness, to the respect in which the...