The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from July 1994

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from July 1994

Abu Tammam and his 'Kitab al-Shajara': a new Ismaili treatise from tenth-century Khurasan.
July 1, 1994... In 1965 Arif Tamir, a Syrian Ismaili scholar of no small accomplishment in terms of works written and edited, published in Beirut a text called Kitab al-idah, which he claimed was the work of Abu Firas Shihab al-Din al-Maynaqi - a prominent...

The view from the province: Syrian chronicles of the eighteenth century.
July 1, 1994... History is little studied by the literati of Aleppo. They give themselves no concern about other countries, and know little or nothing of distant states or of the revolutions of the great Empires in the Western world. They are in general but...

Civavakkiyar's 'Abecedarium Naturae.'
July 1, 1994... 0. INTRODUCTION No one who reads even a small fraction of Hindu religious literature can fail to notice how often and conspicuously sacred formulas, or mantras, appear in the texts of this vast corpus. Debates on the exact nature and purpose...

A fragment of the 'Pancavimsatisahasrika Prajnaparamita-sutra' from eastern Turkestan.
July 1, 1994... INTRODUCTION In the Central Asian Collection of the Manuscript Archive (St. Petersburg Branch, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences)(1) there are many fragments belonging to the Prajnaparamita literature.(2) During the...

A comparative study of the 'Pancavimsatisahasrika Prajnaparamita.'
July 1, 1994... It is a well-known fact that manuscripts of the Pancavimsatisahasrika Prajnaparamita (PV) exist in both a revised and unrevised form. The former are those of the revised text that has been divided on the basis of Maitreya's Abhisamayalamkara (AA)...

Pharyngealization in early Chinese.
July 1, 1994... In the past three or four decades there has been a great deal of ferment in the field of Chinese historical phonology. Many new and exciting proposals have been put forth and new reconstructions of early stages of the language have been...

The art of lamentation in the works of Pan Yue: "Mourning the Eternally Departed."
July 1, 1994... Pan Yue (247-300) excelled in the writing of shi poetry, fu, and dirges (lei), and the high literary standard evident in his works has earned him a place of dinction in Chinese literature.(2) Literary critics in their praise laud his works on...

The I-w verbal class and the reconstruction of the early Semitic preradical vocalism.
July 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION It is a truism of linguistic research that synchronic irregularities - deviations from the general pattern of a given linguistic system - frequently afford insights into patterns no longer extant in the system. In the case of...

A new volume of texts from Hellenistic Uruk.
July 1, 1994... Hellenistic archival texts were first excavated at Uruk by W. K. Loftus between 1849 and 1852. In the intervening years, many hundreds more have come to light as the result of both controlled and uncontrolled excavations at the site. Today, these...

Early Mesopotamian land sales.
July 1, 1994... I. ELTS The appearance of ELTS marks an important milestone in the study of third-millennium Mesopotamia. Promised for forty years, this study expanded from a planned edition of seven inscriptions on stone to an edition of fifty-seven...

Notes on Tripolitanian neo-Punic.
July 1, 1994... In 1960 O. Brogan and J. M. Reynolds published seven newly discovered inscriptions from Roman Tripolitania, among them the dedication of a fortified farmhouse (Gasr Isawi) on the Wadi Migdal.(1) The Latin text of eight lines is inscribed within a...

Adab al-Muluk: Ein Handbuch zur islamischen Mystik aus dem 4./10. Jahrhundert.
July 1, 1994... Adab al-Muluk, a hitherto unknown "Handbook of Islamic Mysticism," now available in Bernd Radtke's edition, was discovered some thirty years ago as part of a collective manuscript belonging to the Khanaqah-i Ahmadi in Shiraz. This Sufi maj-muah,...

Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shiite Islam: Abu Jafar ibn Qiba al-Razi and His Contribution to Imamite Shiite Thought.
July 1, 1994... The formative period referred to in the title covers the years 260-329/874-941, which the Shiites call the period of the Minor Occultation. The crisis was a profound one - the disappearance of the Imam led to numerous splits in the Imamite Shiite...

Follower and Heir of the Prophet: Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624) as Mystic.
July 1, 1994... The book under review is the result of the author's doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1989 to the University of Leiden. It deals with the mystical thought of the Indian Muslim Sufi, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, one of the most celebrated figures in...

Ibn Baskuwal (m. 578/1183): Kitab al-Mustagitin bi-llah (En busco del socorro divino).
July 1, 1994... Abu l-Qasim Khalaf b. Abd al-Malik al-Khazraji (494-578/1101-83), known as Ibn Bashkuwal (Son of Pascual) was a well-known religious scholar who spent most of his life in Cordoba. After a few years of public service during his youth he retired...

Three Shadow Plays by Muhammad Ibn Daniyal.
July 1, 1994... The appearance at last of this long-awaited volume is an event of considerable significance to students of medieval Arabic literature. The art of the Arabic shadow play, in which articulated cut-out figures, sometimes very elaborate ones, were...

Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World.
July 1, 1994... The standard view that modern Arabic imaginative literature is essentially an import from the West has rarely been questioned in the case of drama. While narrative fiction may claim some sort of antecedents in Arabic folk literature such as the...

An Introduction to Persian.
July 1, 1994... Wheeler Thackston's elementary Persian textbook was first published in 1978, revised and reissued in 1983 by the Near Eastern Department at Harvard, and is now available (with, optionally, an audio cassette of its Persian sections) in clear...

A Grammar of Contemporary Persian.
July 1, 1994... Lazard's Grammaire du persan contemporain has been out since 1957, and has never been surpassed. This translation, with revisions by the author, will at last provide English-speaking students of literary and spoken Persian with a comprehensive...

A Basic Vocabulary of the Bedouin Arabic Dialect of the Jbali Tribe.
July 1, 1994... This book is the result of the author's pioneering fieldwork (1990-92, but interrupted by the Gulf War) near al-Tur and Wadi el-Feyran, southern Sinai (Egypt), under the sponsorship of the Japanese Ministry of Education. Nishio presents some...

Early Arabic Grammatical Theory: Heterogeneity and Standardization.
July 1, 1994... That this review has taken so long to appear is entirely due to the large number of mistakes the book contains, creating a genuine problem of conscience for a reviewer constitutionally unable to respond to such carelessness in a work of...

Mysticism and Language.
July 1, 1994... Mysticism and Language is a sequel to other works edited by Steven Katz which deal with mysticism: Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford, 1978) and Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford, 1983). As the title indicates, this collection...

The Kubjikamatatantra, Kulalikamnaya Version: Critical Edition.
July 1, 1994... Work on the Kubjikamatatantra (hence KMT) was started at the Instituut voor Oosterse Talen of the University of Utrecht in 1972 (cf. K. van Kooy: "A Critical Edition of the Kubjikamatatantra," BSOAS 26 [1973]: 628). At that time the Institute was...

A Vaisnava Interpretation of the Brahmasutras: Vedanta and Theism.
July 1, 1994... The truly magnum opus of Rampada Chattopadhyay (1872-1956) is the 2,200-page Brahmasutra-o-Srimad Bhagavata, in Bengali (published posthumously in 1978). There he argued most importantly the unusual thesis (which he traces to Mahaprabhu Sri...

Studies on Indian Medical History: Papers Presented at the International Workshop on the Study of Indian Medicine Held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 2-4 September, 1985.
July 1, 1994... This collection of scholarly studies covers a wide variety of approaches, from Sanskrit philology through medical history to Tibetan studies, pharmacognosy, and psychiatry. The historical sources used range from ancient Sanskrit manuscripts and...

The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists.
July 1, 1994... Most of the papers collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on Food Systems and Communication Structures, organized in 1985 at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, by R. S. Khare and the late Professor M. S. A....

Inscriptions of the Paramaras, Chandellas, Kachchhapaghatas and Two Minor Dynasties, part 1, Introduction.
July 1, 1994... This first part of the seventh volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (CII) was published thirteen years after the second part of the same volume, containing the inscriptions of the Paramaras (reviewed in JAOS 105 [1985]: 786-87). Part 3,...

On Verbal Accentuation in the Rigveda.
July 1, 1994... Klein wishes to refine certain observations we owe to Berthold Delbruck (1888), Hermann Oldenberg (1906), George Dunkel (1979, 1988), Heinrich Hettrich (1988), and others. He summarizes his views conveniently in section 14. Verbs are accented (a)...

Studies in Sanskrit Syntax: A Volume in Honor of the Centennial of Speijer's Sanskrit Syntax.
July 1, 1994... The present volume is devoted to encouraging and facilitating the study of Sanskrit syntax. The editor presents revised versions of fourteen papers read at two symposia that he organized to bring together scholars in various fields working on...

Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism.
July 1, 1994... This comprehensive, meticulously researched study of the life and thought of the scholar monk Kuei-feng Tsung-mi (780-841) shines a well-deserved spotlight on a multi-faceted thinker who was, by any standard, a major player on the intellectual...

New Leaves: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Edward Seidensticker.
July 1, 1994... Edward Seidensticker, in whose honor this Festschrift was compiled, spent over a decade in postwar Japan pursuing a variety of occupations. Following a brief stint in the Foreign Service, he opted for a career as a journalist and teacher-scholar...

Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels.
July 1, 1994... Sources, the author says (p. xvii), is "designed to complement David N. Keightley's Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (Berkeley, 1978)." Its purpose is "to make explicit the methodological assumptions...

Wisdom in Akkadian Literature: Expression, Instruction, Dialogue.
July 1, 1994... A study of wisdom in Akkadian literature is to be welcomed on many counts. The harvest of interpretive studies of Akkadian literature is still meager; so much basic work remains to be undertaken. The texts referred to as "wisdom literature" are...

The Ur III Temple of Inanna at Nippur: The Operation and Organization of Urban Religious Institutions in Mesopotamia in the Late Third Millennium B.C.
July 1, 1994... Publishing a major Near Eastern excavation is a long and complex task, and as all too often happens, this book is, in part, an interim report on work undertaken in the 1950s in which the author, for chronological reasons, was not available to...

Babylonia 689-627 B.C.: A Political History.
July 1, 1994... The volume under review presents a history of Babylonia from 689 to 627, a period when the country was disunited and subject to Assyria. The book consists of nine chapters, five of which contain a very detailed reconstruction of political events....

The Shemshara Archives, 2: The Administrative Texts.
July 1, 1994... The history of northern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium B.C. is currently a flourishing topic of research: the Habur triangle, the heartland of Samsi-Addu's state, is, in archaeological terms, one of the most intensively investigated...

Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour.
July 1, 1994... The present work grew out of a series of five lectures delivered by the author at Columbia University in 1985. The plan of the book is to establish as precisely as possible the date and geographic setting of Zoroaster and then to proceed with an...

Persia and the Bible.
July 1, 1994... The purpose of this book is stated implicitly in the preface: "... to inform readers of the Bible about [the] important Persian background" of "the exilic and postexilic Old Testament books... " (p. 11), so "that readers of such books as Daniel,...

Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel.
July 1, 1994... This book is composed of three works of non-standard size, longer than articles, shorter than books. It thus serves a useful purpose, and it serves as a useful model for others to consider when publishing their research: one need not always cut a...

Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis.
July 1, 1994... John Van Seters characterizes the Yahwistic source ("J") as a work of history produced in the Exile. Covering Genesis here, he promises a sequel dealing with succeeding "J" texts. As in his earlier studies, Abraham in History and Tradition and In...

Techniques and Assumptions in Jewish Exegesis before 70 CE.
July 1, 1994... This reworked Cambridge Ph.D. thesis represents a project conceived on a vast scale and carried out with enormous diligence. The premise of the author was that one could collect all of the extant rabbinic literature likely to have originated...

A Manual of Hebrew Poetics.
July 1, 1994... Alonso Schokel's Manual presents the major features of ancient Hebrew poetry in a format designed for the student. A "translation and adaptation by the author and Adrian Graffy" of a Spanish original published in 1987, it distills Alonso...

Speaking of Speaking: Marking Direct Discourse in the Hebrew Bible.
July 1, 1994... This book is concerned with the identification of direct discourse (DD) in Biblical Hebrew and with the features which introduce or otherwise mark it. It presents a comprehensive description of these features, supporting the detailed study of the...

A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew Handbook: Answer Keys and Study Guide.
July 1, 1994... This volume is intended as a companion to C. L. Seow's A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1986), reviewed by E. M. Cook in JAOS 110 (1990): 337-38. Begun at the suggestion of Professor Seow, the volume under review...

Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times.
July 1, 1994... Donald Redford is one of the few contemporary scholars who has the background to synthesize the history and culture of the ancient world, from the Aegean to Mesopotamia, from neolithic times to the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth-century B.C. This...

Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism.
July 1, 1994... A new generation of scholars of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, is building upon the foundations left by the field's founder, Gershom Scholem. Of these students, there is an older group, including Joseph Dan and the late Isaiah Tishby, who have...

The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice.
July 1, 1994... This volume is a significant revisionist approach to ancient Egyptian magic. As a result of a methodical analysis of both the textual and archaeological records, Ritner concludes that the boundaries between ancient Egyptian magic, religion, and...

The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander's Conquest.
July 1, 1994... A history of ancient Palestine with 906 pages of text is certainly an event for Oriental and Biblical Scholars alike. The wealth of detailed information collected by the author (who did not live to see the completion of his work) is astonishing,...

Berichtigungsliste der griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Agypten, vol. 8.
July 1, 1994... The BL, as it is familiarly known to papyrologists, has since the first volume (published in fascicles 1913-22) been one of the cornerstones of the orderly edifice of this discipline and a central tool of bibliographic control. It records for all...

Life in a Multi-Cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond.
July 1, 1994... This volume publishes the proceedings of a symposium held in Chicago in September 1990 as a prelude to the Fourth International Congress of Demotists. It comprises forty-four contributions ("chapters"), representing most of the papers given; a...

Es kundet Dareios der Konig ...: Vom Leben im persischen Grossreich.
July 1, 1994... H. Koch's lavishly illustrated monograph aims to give a vivid picture of the life at the Persian court at Persepolis using the evidence of the Persepolis Fortification Texts (hereafter PFT), and by describing the major archaeological sites....