The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from July 1992

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from July 1992

On the status of the Tannaitic Midrashim. (critique of Jacob Neusner's latest contribution to Midrashic studies)
July 1, 1992... The present work by Jacob Neusner is part of a gigantic project of redescription of the history of Judaism in Late Antiquity. Since each volume of this project essentially recapitulates the claims of the whole with different emphases, any...

Bimal Krishna Matilal: a review of two of his last works.
July 1, 1992... B. K. Matilal, one of the world's leading scholars of Indian philosophy, died in Oxford, England of cancer on June 8, 1991. Born in West Bengal on June 1, 1935 and educated at the University of Calcutta and at Harvard, where he earned his...

Contour plowing on east slope: a new reading of Su Shi.
July 1, 1992... Michael Fuller has studied how the poetic voice of Su Shi (1037-1101) evolved from youth through early middle age, attaining its well-known mature form during Su's exile at Huangzhou in his late forties. The detail and emphasis on literary...

The Theology of Aristotle and some other pseudo-Aristotelian texts reconsidered.
July 1, 1992... A collection of contributions to a Warburg Institute colloquium focuses on aspects of the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition in Arabic and Latin. F. W. Zimmermann's paper, occupying almost half the volume, undertakes a radical reassessment of the...

Fa-ummuhu hawiyah: a note on Surah 101:9.
July 1, 1992... It is suggested that the phrase fa-ummuhu hawiyah (Surah 101:9), which is usually translated "His mother shall perish" or "His mother shall be bereft," should be emended to read fa-ummatun hawiyah, which means "Then a steep course downward...

Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies, vol. 4, A Corpus of Ammonite Inscriptions.
July 1, 1992... The inventory of Ammonite inscriptions is steadily growing. In 1983 Kent P. Jackson published The Ammonite Language of the iron Age (Chico, California: Scholars Press) in which he presented the texts then available: 3 inscriptions, 7 ostraca...

Early Egyptian Christianity from its Origins to 451 C.E.
July 1, 1992... The history of Christianity in Egypt, particularly in its earliest stages, has long been an enigma. Specific information regarding the origins of Christianity in Egypt is virtually nonexistent, and legends abound, especially because the papyri...

Reports of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain, Jordan, vol. 1, Bab edh-Dhra: Excavation in the Century Directed by Paul W. Lapp, 1965-67.
July 1, 1992... To begin with a personal note, I first met Paul Lapp in the summer of 1965 during my first visit to Jerusalem. He and his wife, Nancy, were gracious hosts to our travel group, introducing us to the American Schools' facility on Saladin Street...

Studien zu den Stempelsiegeln aus Palastina/Israel, Band II.
July 1, 1992... The book contains six essays that continue the studies of Palestinian stamp seals begun in the first volume of the series.(1) In the foreword (pp. ix-x) Othmar Keel summarizes the main focus of each of the essays. The first essay, which is by...

Balat III: Les Ateliers de potiers d Ayn-Asil.
July 1, 1992... Archaeologists rarely identify and excavate industrial areas, especially potteries, but this volume describes the recent (1983-86) excavation and analysis of a pottery workshop near the Dakhla oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt. Outside the...

Subsistence, Trade, and Social Change in Early Bronze Age Palestine.
July 1, 1992... This volume, a revised and expanded version of the author's Chicago dissertation, is based on the unpublished materials of Profs. Pinhas Delougaz and Helene Kantor at Beth Yerah, on the Sea of Galilee (1952-53; 1963-64), supplemented by Esse's...

The World of Qumran from Within.
July 1, 1992... While some Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts(/fragments) still await publication, much has already been accomplished. This volume contains thirteen essays/articles, twelve of which were published in a variety of journals between 1951 and 1988,...

Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, vol. 2, Poets.
July 1, 1992... The present work constitutes the second part of a proposed three-part collection of the works of Judaeo-Hellenistic literature preserved in fragmentary form. The work is designed primarily as a reference tool and includes introductions, texts,...

Studies in Verbal Aspect and Narrative Technique in Biblical Hebrew Prose.
July 1, 1992... Contending that earlier accounts of verbal aspect in Classical Biblical Hebrew narrative can be improved by using Frithiof Rundgren's theory of an aspectual hierarchy with neutralizations, Eskhult reviews the workings of Hebrew aspect and...

The Music of the Bible Revealed: The Deciphering of a Millenary Notation.
July 1, 1992... Suzanne Haik-Vantoura believes she has deciphered the musical notation known to be expressed by the Masoretic accents of the text of the Hebrew Bible in La Musique de la bible revelee (1978), a book, musical scores, and sound recordings. She is...

Agatharchides of Cnidos, On the Erythaean Sea.
July 1, 1992... The Erythraean or `Red' Sea was the Greeks' name for the passage between the eastern Mediterranean and India, including the Indian Ocean as well as the Red Sea itself, more precisely referred to in antiquity as the Arabian Gulf. Most accounts...

Court, Poetry and Literary Miscellanea.
July 1, 1992... The Assyrians borrowed so extensively from Babylonia in literature, religion, and art that, it is sometimes argued, they never succeeded in creating a truly Assyrian culture. In this volume Alasdair Livingstone undertakes to demonstrate that...

The Armenian Apocryphal Adam Literature.
July 1, 1992... This work, representing the author's unrevised doctoral thesis of 1983, offers an important contribution to the study of later traditions concerning the protoplasts. The three writings investigated (Armenian Adam Cycle, History of the...

La Chute d'Akkade: L'Evenement et sa memoire.
July 1, 1992... The dynasty of Agade ruled Sumer and Akkad for approximately one century, between 2200 and 2100 B.C. Much archaeological and epigraphic data from those hundred-or-so years has been recovered, and yet we know very little about the history of the...

Old Babylonian Legal and Administrative Texts from Philadelphia.
July 1, 1992... Many thanks are due Karel van Lerberghe, the editor of this excellent collection of OB "Sippar" texts from Abu-Habbah and Tell ed-Der. Several groups of texts in the book call for special attention and have been singled out by the editor in the...

Sarepta. (4 vols.).
July 1, 1992... Sarepta I-IV are the first in a series of anticipated final reports on excavations at Sarafand/Sarepta, a low mound on the seashore fifty kilometers south of Beirut. There, from 1969 to 1974 a team from the University Museum of the University...

Life Among Indian Tribes: The Autobiography of an Anthropologist.
July 1, 1992... Anthropological autobiography is an interesting genre for a number of reasons. For example, it provides the reader with interesting facts and accounts about the host society that often do not find their way into the "scholarly monograph," and...

Myths of the Dog-Man.
July 1, 1992... David Gordon White's study of the myths of the dog-man is entertaining and has a serious purpose. The methodology he employs is a modern adaptation of the encyclopedic comparison associated with Sir James Frazer, as White explicitly...

Kabir Legends and Ananta-das's Kabir Parachai.
July 1, 1992... David Lorenzen has rescued from obscurity the collection of legends about Kabir which Ananta-das wrote towards the end of the sixteenth century. This short hagiographic work is the earliest known collection of stories concerning Kabir and for...

The Sacred Marriage of a Hindu Goddess.
July 1, 1992... This reviewer is at pains to do justice to a work as rich as The Sacred Marriage of a Hindu Goddess, a creation that is so evidently the result of a superb, scholarly patience. Certainly there has been patience on the part of the people...

Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion.
July 1, 1992... Norman Cutler's book takes its title not so much from Blake's series of poems, with which the Tamil works he treats have little in common, as from his contention that the Tamil Saiva and Vaisnava hymns involve an "experience" (or enjoyment, as...

India in Early Greek Literature.
July 1, 1992... It has been very encouraging to witness during the last three decades a new interest in examining afresh relations between "India" and the Graeco-Roman world in ancient times. Several books dealing with the subject have lately been published....

Nature and Self: A Study of the Poetry of Su Dongpo with Comparisons to the Poetry of William Wordsworth.
July 1, 1992... When Su Shi (1037-1101) looked over the gunwale of his boat, "100 Dongpos" smiled back at him (Yang, p. 157). William Wordsworth (1770-1850), also gazing down from a boat, saw "weeds, fishes, flowers," among which flickered a single, perplexed...

Rose and Lotus: Narrative of Desire in France and China.
July 1, 1992... Comparative critical studies on Chinese and Western literature are a rarity, as are studies of Chinese literature using the full arsenal of contemporary critical theories. Tonglin Lu has helped fill in both of these lacunae with her study of...

The invention of Li Yu.
July 1, 1992... In his biography cum criticism of the Ming dramatist Li Yu (1610-1680), Patrick Hanan takes on the bugbear of highmindedness. Hanan states, in the introduction, "This book is concerned with the `false' Li Yu and his generally comic permutations...

Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Studies in Honor of Farhart J. Ziadeh.
July 1, 1992... In May, 1987, a conference on Islamic law and jurisprudence was held at the University of Washington to honor Farhat J. Ziadeh on the occasion of his retirement. This volume contains the papers presented at that conference, as well as a brief...

Mikhayil Mishaqa: Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder; the History of the Lebanon in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
July 1, 1992... Mikhayil Mishaqa (1800-1888), who portrayed himself as a self-educated politician (pp. 61ff.), composed a history of the Lebanon in 1873 entitled Al-jawab ala iqtirah al-ahbab. An abbreviated edition was published in Beirut in 1955, based on a...

Texts in Sinai Bedouin Law. (2 parts)
July 1, 1992... These volumes contain a selection of texts relating to the customary law of the Ahaywat tribe of central Sinai. Only five of the 69 texts were originally composed in writing; the remainder were spoken in genuine Bedouin dialect and recorded in...

Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History, 11th-14th Century.
July 1, 1992... It is a great pleasure to welcome the recent publication of two books on Iranian history by Professor Lambton. The first, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia, is an elaboration of five lectures given by the author in 1981 at Columbia...

Qajar Persia.
July 1, 1992... It is a great pleasure to welcome the recent publications of two books on Iranian history by Professor Lambton. The first, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia, is an elaboration of five lectures given by the author in 1981 at Columbia...

Satire in Persian Literature.
July 1, 1992... In the preface to his Satire in Persian Literature, Hasan Javadi points out that he originally planned his book as an anthology of Persian satirical poetry to be used in a course on the social history of Iran. Eighteen years after he began...

Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Theology, Philosophy, and Cosmology.
July 1, 1992... This book attempts to trace the evolution of the conception of God in Islamic philosophy broadly understood, since it includes not only al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina but also Isma ili thinkers, as well as al-Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi. Yet,...

The optics of Ibn al-Haytham: Books I-III, On Direct Vision. (2 vols.)
July 1, 1992... The text of Ibn al-Haytham's Optics, known to the medieval Latin West under the title of Perspectiva or De aspectibus, and whose Latin translation was first published by Friedrich Risner in 1572 A.D., is undoubtedly the most important text on...

Arab History and the Nation State: A Study in Modern Historiography, 1820-1980.
July 1, 1992... This is an interesting and provocative work written by an Arab historian about Arab historians of the modern nation-state. Youssef Choueiri begins his book with the bold statement that "modern Arabic thought has not yet found its historian" (p....

Principles of Samaritan Halachah.
July 1, 1992... Unlike its Jewish counterpart, the Samaritan Halakha has never benefited from ample and detailed treatment. Studies on this subject are quite rare; only a few treatises have been examined in the past, partly for comparative purposes, by...

Ayyubid Metalwork with Christian Images.
July 1, 1992... Christian figures and scenes were a frequent though certainly not a pervasive theme in early Islamic art. But such Christian imagery is especially notable in the decoration of 13th-century inlaid metalwork produced in Ayyubid Mesopotamia,...

Early Arabic Drama.
July 1, 1992... Until recently, drama has played the role of poor stepsister to poetry and the novel in Western studies of Arabic literature. This has, to a certain extent, reflected the situation in Arabic literary criticism itself The relative lack of...

The Khawarezmian Element in the Qunyat al-Munya.
July 1, 1992... Choresmian (or Khwarezmian, the appellation preferred by MacKenzie, cf. BSOAS 54 [1991]: 173) is the ancient language of Choresm, the country south of the Aral Sea. It is one of the Eastern Middle Iranian languages, to which belong Sogdian,...

Dictionary of Post-Classical Yemeni Arabic. (2 vols.)
July 1, 1992... As Wolfdietrich Fischer of Erlangen-Numberg University (and the editor of the Grundriss der arabischen Philologie, vol. 1: Sprachwissenschaft [Wiesbaden, 1982]) is always fond of saying at annual meetings of the North American Conference on...

Religion and Society in Arab Sind.
July 1, 1992... This important book takes a look at a period many might call the Dark Ages of medieval South Asia and sheds much light on society, religion, and history. The geographic focus is on Arab Sind, an area much larger than the present province of...

Socrates in Medieval Arabic Literature.
July 1, 1992... Although this is a short book, it represents a large undertaking. The name of Socrates reverberates through Muslim civilization from early times until today, as it does from classical antiquity throughout the entire history of Christianity and...

The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever.
July 1, 1992... Dominique Barthelemy's 1963 preliminary publication of the Greek Minor Prophets scroll (popularly known as the kaige text, after the characteristic translation of the Hebrew [UNKNOWN TEXT OMITTED] as kaiye, but referred to here as`R') in SVT X...

An Ancient Egyptian Herbal.
July 1, 1992... Plants played an important role in the daily life of the ancient Egyptians. In a lengthy introduction the author describes their many uses. She brings alive the splendor of the ancient Egyptian garden, immortalized in colorful wall paintings...

The New Papyrological Primer.
July 1, 1992... Of all the separate disciplines that serve as pathways for research into ancient Egypt, it is now papyrology that serves its English-speaking neophytes best. They will find in Pestman's new version of an old standby a reliable and even...

Edom and the Edomites.
July 1, 1992... This compact book compiles archaeological and textual studies on Edom and the Edomites into a history of the ancient land and people of southeastern Palestine. This work is necessary and welcome, but unfortunately John R. Bartlett's effort is...

Babylonian Aramaic: The Yemenite Tradition.
July 1, 1992... In this long-awaited volume, Prof. Morag presents the phonology and the vocalization of the verbal forms in the reading tradition of the Babylonian Talmud as preserved in the San a Yemenite Jewish community. This is a noteworthy achievement in...

Naguib Mahfouz, a Bibliography: Arabic, English, French.
July 1, 1992... The interest of scholars and readers in the literary work of Naguib Mahfouz predates the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. By the 1950s Mahfouz was recognized as one of the prominent writers in the Arab world. The Nobel Prize,...

Jemenetisches Worterbuch.
July 1, 1992... The author states in his foreword that Yemen is "one of the least-documented areas of the Arab world," and this is especially true in the field of lexicography." This might have been true in 1989 when this book was published, but with Moshe...

Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought.
July 1, 1992... The present work forms a kind of companion volume to the author's India and Europe, and indeed there are extensive quotations from the earlier work in the first chapter; it is also to a large extent composed of material already published and...

Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of Its Interpretation.
July 1, 1992... This is an English translation of a famous Hindu goddess text and a discussion of the religious roles the text has played and plays in the Hindu tradition. The work represents a continuation of the author's previous research on this text (The...