The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from July 1997

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from July 1997

A second look at the 'Towa Sanyo': clues to the nature of the Guanhuah studied by Japanese in the early eighteenth century.
July 1, 1997... In an earlier article, I examined the phonology of the Towa sanyo [Chinese Text Omitted] and demonstrated that despite a Wu dialect-like cast, the sound system of the language represented in the text is actually a form of Mandarin.(2) Further to...

The Lu-school reading of "Guanju" as preserved in an eastern Han fu.
July 1, 1997... "Guanju" [Chinese Text Omitted] ("The Calling Ospreys") is the first poem in the Shi jing [Chinese Text Omitted] or Classic of Songs, an anthology at the core of the classical Chinese canon.(1) As the first poem in that collection, "Guanju" holds...

Who inspired Panini? Reconstructing the Hindu and Buddhist counter-claims.
July 1, 1997... The tradition of Paninian Grammar as it has reached us clearly believes that Panini was inspired by Mahesvara/Siva to write his grammar, and that he received at least the first fourteen sutras, which are traditionally called Sivasutrani or...

Tadmin, "implication of meaning," in medieval Arabic.
July 1, 1997... 1. INTRODUCTION The concept of tadmin as a semantic, and to a lesser extent grammatical, phenomenon has received only sporadic attention by Western scholars. In 1934 the Arabic Language Academy of Egypt (henceforth referred to as ALA) devoted...

The chronology of Capernaum in the early Islamic period.
July 1, 1997... Capernaum, on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, is the site of an ancient village and a monumental stone synagogue. The synagogue, surrounded by a Roman-Byzantine village, is located on property in the custody of the Franciscan order. To...

Agent-less indirect adjectival verb forms in Egyptian and Arabic: the case of jrrw n.f. and maf ul lahu, "for whom one acts."
July 1, 1997... Wolfgang Schenkel Tubingensi sexagenario Past discussions of those peculiar Egyptian verb forms that are sufficiently defined by the three terms "agent-less," "indirect," and "adjectival" have focused on three issues: their location in the...

Graphs, words, and meanings: three reference works for Shang oracle-bone studies, with an excursus on the religious role of the day or sun.
July 1, 1997... The three works under review should do much to open up the field of Shang oracle-bone inscriptions to scholars with general sinological training. All those who, without immersing themselves in the challenges of epigraphic interpretation, wish to...

Virasaivism, caste, revolution, etc. (examination of the medieval and modern Karnataka and the Virasaiva movement)
July 1, 1997... Western understanding of what Virasaivism is and of its place in Indian religious history and modern South Indian society is rather limited, in spite of its socio-religious relevance in southern India. In recent years it has become better known...

On studying medieval Arabic logic.
July 1, 1997... This book was originally a doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1992. It is a very solid piece of scholarship, and does great credit to the author and to the University of Leiden. It has been included in the series Islamic Theology, Philosophy,...

Arabs, Persians, and the advent of the Abbasids reconsidered.
July 1, 1997... The Abbasid revolution, as R. Stephen Humphreys has observed, is "one of the very few topics in Islamic historical studies" to have "engendered a substantial scholarly literature."(1) That literature continues to expand rapidly, as evidenced...

Zippalanda and Ankuwa: the geography of Central Anatolia in the second millennium B.C.
July 1, 1997... The recently published book Zippalanda: Ein Kultzentrum im hethitischen Kleinasien appears at a very appropriate time and is bound to spur further research into a variety of interesting questions related to Hittite history and geography. As the...

Remarks on the Vedic intensive.
July 1, 1997... This book, which represents a revised version of Christiane Schaefer's 1989 doctoral dissertation, addresses various problems of the intensive, a fascinating, but rather neglected category of the Vedic verb. It consists of two parts of more or...

Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics in Honor of Charles J. Fillmore.
July 1, 1997... The Jubilar whose sixty-fifth birthday this volume celebrated is best known for his 1968 paper, "The Case for Case."(1) This captured the imagination of a generation that until then had rarely heard "meaning" mentioned in connection with...

Libro dei monti e dei mari (Shanghai jing): Cosmografia e mitologica nella Cina antica.
July 1, 1997... During the past fifteen years Sinology has been enriched by the work of an exceptional group of scholars with connections to Italian universities and to the recently founded Scuola di Studi sull'Asia Orientale in Kyoto. Under the able direction...

Beitraze zur Sudasienforschung, vol 163, Parisiksa und Sarvasammatasiksa: Rechtlautlehren der Taittiriya-Sakha.
July 1, 1997... The utilitarian impulses of linguistic analysis are nowhere as clear as in the phonological literature attached to the various Vedic schools. Existing in partial independence of the vyakarana tradition, these treatises have as their purpose to...

Kali's Child: The Mystical and Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna.
July 1, 1997... Westerners have been interested in Ramakrishna (1836-86) since his best-known follower and founder of the Ramakrishna Movement, Swami Vivekananda, represented Hinduism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Most of the...

Hanuman in the Ramayana of Valmiki and the Ramacaritamanasa of Tulasi Dasa.
July 1, 1997... Catherine Ludvik's Hanuman in the Ramayana of Valmiki and the Ramacaritamanasa of Tulasi Dasa is a well-researched volume that contains an abundance of information on the popular monkey deity of Hinduism, and an interesting analysis of the...

Ganapati: Song of the Self.
July 1, 1997... Catherine Ludvik's Hanuman in the Ramayana of Valmiki and the Ramacaritamanasa of Tulasi Dasa is a well-researched volume that contains an abundance of information on the popular monkey deity of Hinduism, and an interesting analysis of the...

The Home of the Dancing Sivan: The Traditions of the Hindu Temple in Citamparam.
July 1, 1997... We are very fortunate to have this study of one of the great Hindu temples of south India. The Chidambaram temple (I will employ Anglicized spellings rather than Younger's Tamilized ones) has long held a unique and important position in the...

Living Liberation in Hindu Thought.
July 1, 1997... The nucleus of this volume comes from a panel organized by Andrew Fort at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November 1989 on the topic of liberation while one lives (jivanmukti) within the Hindu religious traditions. The...

Contributions on Tibetan Language, History and Culture: Contributions on Tibetan and Buddhist Religion and Philosophy.
July 1, 1997... This reprint of the proceedings of the third meeting of the Csoma de Koros Symposium, held at Velm, Austria, in September of 1981, consists of forty-eight papers by invited participants, including five by Tibetans. The diversity of the subjects...

Yuktisastikavrtti: Commentaire a la soixantaine sur le raisonnement ou Du vrai enseignement de la causalite par le Maitre indien Candrakirti.
July 1, 1997... The Yuktisastika (YS) of Nagarjuna is a philosophical treatise consisting of sixty verses intended for elucidating by reasoning (yukti) the doctrine of pratityasamutpada. This work is not extant in the original Sanskrit as such, but no less than...

The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia.
July 1, 1997... The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia is divided into three chapters. The first, "The Popular Tradition: Inclusive Syncretism," describes "ideal action"; a number of rituals, ceremonies, and festivals, such as Kathina, the consecration of a Buddha...

Cambodian Linguistics, Literature and History: Collected Articles.
July 1, 1997... The collection of Judith Jacob's previously published articles is impressive for the scope and depth of knowledge it represents. As the title implies, the volume is organized into three sections: linguistics, the longest with twelve articles;...

The Tai Dialect of Lungming: Glossary, Texts, and Translations.
July 1, 1997... The collection of Judith Jacob's previously published articles is impressive for the scope and depth of knowledge it represents. As the title implies, the volume is organized into three sections: linguistics, the longest with twelve articles;...

The People of the Alas Valley: A Study of an Ethnic Group of Northern Sumatra.
July 1, 1997... The work under review is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, which was completed at Oxford University in 1990 under the esteemed social anthropologist Rodney Needham, who has contributed a very brief preface. Briefly stated,...

The Making of Early Medieval India.
July 1, 1997... This is a collection of nine articles previously published by the author between 1973 and 1986, with an extended introduction written especially for the book. The chapters present case studies of social and economic change occurring between the...

Antiquities of Northern Pakistan: Reports and Studies, vol. 3.
July 1, 1997... The discovery of a vast quantity of antiquities in the valley of the upper Indus and adjoining parts of the Northern Areas of Pakistan began in 1979, and to date a total of nearly thirty thousand engraved images and over five thousand...

The Ragas of Early Indian Music: Modes, Melodies and Musical Notations from the Gupta Period to c. 1250.
July 1, 1997... The classical music of India is undoubtedly one of the subcontinent's greatest cultural achievements, and arguably its most significant cultural export to the rest of the world. Yet whilst it is widely assumed that both Hindustani (North Indian)...

Hanns Oertel: Kleine Schriften, 2 vols.
July 1, 1997... Despite their title, the volumes under consideration contain, with three exceptions only, the major Indological publications of an important scholar whose academic career was nothing short of bizarre. Born in 1868 in Germany, Oertel spent nearly...

The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East.
July 1, 1997... The Book in the Islamic World is a collection of papers given at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in November of 1989. The papers were part of a conference which was itself part of a series of conferences and expositions the Library...

Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond.
July 1, 1997... Zeidan's book is a major contribution to the growing library of works on Arab women writers. As the title implies, its particular value lies in the amount of detailed information that is provided about the earliest stages in the developmental...

The Judeo-Persian Poet Emrani and His "Book of Treasure": Emrani's Ganj-name, a Versified Commentary on the Mishnaic Tractate Abot.
July 1, 1997... This is an excellent contribution to Judeo-Persian studies, a vastly interesting and important part of the field of Jewish languages in which, unfortunately, there are too few scholars at work. At the outset, I must confess to a certain positive...

Sprache und Geschichte, vol. 14, Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad Region.
July 1, 1997... The six papers in this volume discuss the origin of the Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad region, taking into account the historical links and relations between this region and the rest of the Sudanese belt, including Upper Egypt, Libya, and the...

Sylloge Numorom Arabicorum Tubingen: Palastina IVa Bilad as-Sam I.
July 1, 1997... This book is the first of a planned series of perhaps thirty-five volumes that will publish the fifty thousand or so Islamic coins in the collections of Tubingen University, using the Sylloge Numorum Graecorum as a model. The present volume...

The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage, Politics, Society and Economy, vol. 1, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia During the Sixteenth Century.
July 1, 1997... This is an economic study of Ottoman rural society in north-central Anatolia in the sixteenth century that is based on the Ottoman fiscal surveys (or tax registers, Tahrir Defterleri), specifically on the mufassal or detailed registers. Huri...

Kelile u Dimne: Turkische Handschrift T 189 der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha.
July 1, 1997... The version of Kalila wa Dimna most popular among the Turks was the twelfth-century Persian translation by Nasrullah (cited below according to the edition by Abdul-Azim Qarib, Tehran, 1368 A.H. [A.D. 1948-49]). This was translated twice into...

A Syntax of San ani Arabic.
July 1, 1997... This welcome addition to synchronic Arabic dialectology (in Otto Jastrow's Semitica Viva series) is a comprehensive syntactic description of San ani Arabic done along more-or-less traditional lines. I say traditional because there are references...

The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary.
July 1, 1997... The present work consists of a 113-page introduction dealing with technical problems of lexicography, chapters on the semantics of the Arabic borrowings, their chronology and phonology. The latter is written by Alan S. Kaye. Two thirds of the...

Abu Ya qub al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary.
July 1, 1997... This slim volume offers the informed reader interested in better understanding the speculative achievements of Isma ili thinkers an accessible and fairly digestible summary of the thought of the most representative fourth/tenth century...

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A isha bint Abi Bakr.
July 1, 1997... This is not, as the title of Spellberg's work may indicate, a biography of A isha, the "favorite" wife of the Prophet Muhammad, and daughter of his close companion and first successor, Abu Bakr. Rather, it is a wide-ranging thematic treatment of...

Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition.
July 1, 1997... Devin DeWeese's Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde is a tour de force of erudition and meticulous interpretation on a previously much neglected topic - Islamization of Inner Asian peoples - on the basis of an often laconic,...

Roots of Wisdom: The Oldest Proverbs of Israel and Other Peoples.
July 1, 1997... The origin and function of biblical proverbs continues to confound the experts. Claus Westermann joins the ranks of those who view the aphoristic sayings as an oral folk tradition expressing discoveries through observation and analogy. He thus...

The Logic of Incest: A Structuralist Analysis of Hebrew Mythology.
July 1, 1997... This book aims to demonstrate that, in the case of Hebrew mythology, the results of diachronic analysis can be used to complement and give nuance to conclusions reached through independent synchronic study. Kunin's methodological approach first...

Religionsgeschichtliche Beziehungen zwischen Kleinasien, Nordsyrien und dem Alten Testament: Internationales Symposion Hamburg, 17-21. Marz 1990.
July 1, 1997... The eighteen articles gathered in this volume are devoted to religious contacts between Anatolia, Syria, and Israel. Early Israelite religion is usually traced back to Canaan, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, with only few nods in the direction of the...

The Opponents of Third Isaiah: Reconstructing the Cultic History of the Restoration.
July 1, 1997... Most contemporary biblical scholars follow B. Duhm's proposal that the book of Isaiah contains the words of at least three distinct prophets or prophetic groups. Chapters 1-39 preserve some prophecies of Isaiah, son of Amoz, who flourished in the...

Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West; Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon.
July 1, 1997... This very timely volume contains most of the papers originally presented in a colloquium at the 1992 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. The one-page preface by Gitin is no substitute for an editorial overview, which would...

Archaic Administrative Texts From Uruk: The Early Campaigns.
July 1, 1997... This work by the Berlin archaeological-assyriological collegium, done with the skill we have come to expect, brings us another step forward in the tortuous and time-consuming process of interpreting the earliest written records produced by our...

Babylonians.
July 1, 1997... General syntheses of Mesopotamian civilization are rare but welcome, especially by specialists in the field. H. W. E Saggs has produced a brief study of Babylonian history and culture, complementing and updating his previous works on related...

Der Zamyad-Yast: Edition, Ubersetzung, Kommentar.
July 1, 1997... The Zamyad Yast (Yt. 19) is the last substantial text (97 strophes) of the collection of yasts (hymns to individual deities) in the Avesta. From a literary point of view its main interest lies in the stories from the Iranian epic tradition that...

Studia Iranica, vol 17, Sceaux magiques en Iran sassanide.
July 1, 1997... The main strength of this book lies in the attempt, ambitiously undertaken here for the first time, to provide a complete collection, with classification and identification, of Sasanian seals that are likely to belong to the field of magic. In...

Medical and Para-Medical Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections.
July 1, 1997... This useful and nicely produced volume is the outcome of a work of love done by a medical doctor, born in Baghdad, who pursued over the years his interest in the history of Islamic medicine. At the same time, he perfected the rather complex set...

Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Second and Third Series [by William Robertson Smith].
July 1, 1997... In 1991, John Day, himself a biblical scholar of note, discovered in the Cambridge University Library the manuscripts of six lectures that had been delivered more than a century ago by William Robertson Smith, and written in his own hand. The...

Text-Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew.
July 1, 1997... The purpose of this book is to provide scholars of Biblical Hebrew with ready access to a text-linguistic theory and methodology which they may bring to bear on the Hebrew Bible with creative results, but without the necessity of prolonged...

Ugaritic Grammar [Hebrew].
July 1, 1997... Daniel Sivan, a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva and an accomplished researcher in the Northwest Semitic languages of the second millennium B.C.E., has composed a fundamental presentation of the Ugaritic language in the attractive...

Die Nahrung der Herzen: Abu Talib al-Makkis Qut al-qulub, vol. 20, Chapter 32.
July 1, 1997... The second volume of Richard Gramlich's excellent and meticulous German translation of the Qut al-qulub displays the same high standards of scholarship that have been praised in the review of the first volume (see JAOS 115 [1995]: 555-56). This...

On the History of Grammar Among the Arabs: An Essay in Literary History.
July 1, 1997... On the History of Grammar among the Arabs is another in the ongoing efforts to translate Ignaz Goldziher's Hungarian (and sometimes German) writings into English. Goldziher became a legend in his own time and is still one today. By the age of...

The Cult of the Deity Vajrakila.
July 1, 1997... This is a book rich in content that deals with an important figure in a widely practiced ritual by all Buddhist sects in Tibet. The presentation begins with an account of the historic foundation and reveals the author's careful research of all...

Le Theatre de Kalidasa.
July 1, 1997... We have here the first French translation of all three plays done by one hand. Hippolyte Fauche's (Euvres completes de Kalidasa (1859), despite the title, lacked Malavikagnimitra - a lacuna filled by P. E. Foucaux's translation of 1877. Recent...

Taoism Under the T'ang: Religion and Empire During the Golden Age of Chinese History.
July 1, 1997... Doubtless the most widely circulated unpublished sinological manuscript of the past two decades has been T. H. Barrett's chapter for the much delayed second T'ang-dynasty volume of the Cambridge History of China. The first T'ang (or rather,...