The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from October 1992

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from October 1992

Interpreting Tirukkural: the role of commentary in the creation of a text.
October 1, 1992... INTRODUCTION NOW, WHEN THEORIES OF TEXTUAL interpretation and interpretive practice are so much on the minds of literary scholars, it comes as no surprise that textual commentary of various kinds has become a topic of compelling interest for...

Analects 12.1 and the commentarial tradition.
October 1, 1992... THE TWELFTH CHAPTER of the Analects opens with the disciple Yan Yuan questioning Confucius about Goodness (ren).(1) The Master responds that "to ke ji and return to propriety (li) is Goodness. If for a single day a man could ke ji, then all under...

The death of Empress Zhen: fiction and historiography in early Medieval China.
October 1, 1992... 1 LET US BEGIN WITH the curious and anonymous "Ji" ("record," or "note") found prefaced to Cao Zhi's (192-232) "Luo shen fu" |Rhapsody on the Goddess of the Luo~ in Li Shan's (d. 689) Wen xuan |Selections of Refined Literature~ commentary:...

The negation of the non-verbal clause in early Syriac.
October 1, 1992... 0. Introduction The last quarter century has seen a notable increase in studies of the Semitic non-verbal clause (NVC). This is a promising development: though its structure is far from simple, the NVC is relatively more transparent than the...

Controversy in a tradition of commentary: the academic legacy of Al-Sakkaki's Miftah Al-Ulum.
October 1, 1992... INTRODUCTION THE SCHOLARSHIP OF THE ISLAMIC Middle Ages presents an imposing edifice of texts and formats of presentation. The basic books of the traditional curriculum are numerous enough, but they are overwhelmed by the works written about...

Science and the occult in the thinking of Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya.
October 1, 1992... I. INTRODUCTION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY, A POPULAR BELIEF in the occult was seen by some to endanger the religious basis of Islamic society. During the previous centuries, especially the tenth and eleventh, the great challenge to the Sunni umma...

Alfred Hillebrandt reconsidered.
October 1, 1992... THE PRESENT VOLUME IS no. 28 of the by now more than thirty books of the series of collected articles, Kleine Schriften, of Indianists from the German-speaking countries.(1) In the quarter-century since its inception, this series has proven to be...

The old Akkadian royal inscriptions: notes on a new edition.
October 1, 1992... INTRODUCTION Scholars in the field of Assyriology have long desired a new edition of the royal inscriptions of the Old Akkadian kings. H. Hirsch's edition (Hirsch 1963), while valuable, was incomplete, for it gave the texts only of inscriptions...

Reading the Quran with Richard Bell. (Koran)
October 1, 1992... BORN IN SCOTLAND IN 1876 AND educated at Edinburgh, receiving degrees in both Semitic studies and divinity, Richard Bell(1) came to some prominence in the field of the study of the Quran and early Islam with the publication in expanded form of...

Kabbir in Biblical Hebrew: evidence for style-switching and addressee-switching in the Hebrew Bible.
October 1, 1992... The word kabbir "strong, mighty" appears in the Bible in the following passages: Isa 10:13, 16:14, 17:12, 28:2, Job 8:2, 15:10, 31:25, 34:17, 34:24, 36:5. Because the root kbr is relatively common in Samalian,(1) Old Aramaic,(2) and Middle...

The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People.
October 1, 1992... The Polynesians as a people have captured the public imagination since their earliest contacts with the West at the end of the eighteenth century. However, other than that they were supposed to have led a carefree and idyllic tropical existence,...

The Burmese Polity, 1752-1819: Politics, Administration, and Social Organization in the Early Kon-baung Period.
October 1, 1992... When the British annexed Burma in 1885-86, it eliminated the last, Konbaung, dynasty of Burma. This book is a study of the early part of that dynasty, focusing on the first six reigns (out of eleven), beginning with Alaungpaya's in 1752 and...

Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia.
October 1, 1992... We tend to think of Ramayana and Mahabharata as books, but this is an impoverished perspective. In their origins, during most of their histories and for the vast majority of the millions of people who have been acquainted with them, the great...

For the Lord of the Animals, Poems from the Telugu: The Kalahastisvara Satakamu of Dhurjati.
October 1, 1992... For the Lord of the Animals is a welcome addition to the growing body of poetic translations from the rich classical literatures of India's Dravidian languages. In this volume V. Narayana Rao, an eminent scholar of Telugu literature, and Hank...

Meditation in Sankara's Vedanta.
October 1, 1992... This book is an attempt to assess Samkara's views regarding the place of yogic practices in general and meditative exercises in particular in the overall scheme for acquiring the liberating knowledge of Brahman, the issue at the heart of his...

Encyclopaedia of Puranic Beliefs and Practices, vol. 5.
October 1, 1992... This is the final installment of a five-volume enterprise undertaken with the support of the University Grants Commission from 1975 till 1980. The first volume (A-C, pp. 1-370) appeared in 1986; it was followed, in remarkably rapid succession, by...

Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras.
October 1, 1992... In this massively revised, updated, and long-awaited publication of his 1964 doctoral thesis, Andre Padoux presents a wonderfully detailed and insightful account of the fundamental notions of mantrasastra according to the texts of the...

Mind Only: A Philosophical and Doctrinal Analysis of the Vijnanavada.
October 1, 1992... In his introduction the author summarizes the contents of his book: "The texts of the Vijnanavada which I discuss in some detail are the first chapter of the Madhyanta-vibhaga |MV~, the Trimsika |Trims.~, the Tri-svabhava-nirdesa |TSN~, the...

The Realm of Awakening: Chapter Ten of Asanga's Mahayanasangraha.
October 1, 1992... This important text of the Buddhist master Asanga has been known to Western scholarship for some time by the French translation by Etienne Lamotte: La Somme du Grand Vehicule d'Asanga (Mahayanasamgraha), 2 vols. (Louvain, 1938-39). Lamotte for...

An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices.
October 1, 1992... In proposing to write a new introductory text on Buddhism, an author sets a difficult task. The vastness of the topic demands radical selection both in content and in method; heuristic considerations constrain ideal intentions; pedagogical...

The Buddhist Heritage.
October 1, 1992... This book is a collection of papers that, for the most part, were originally delivered as part of a symposium of the same name held in 1985 at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. According to the editor's...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo.
October 1, 1992... This is the first English translation of the popular Bardo Thotrol of Tibetan Buddhism since the pioneer work of W. Y. Evans-Wentz and Kazi Dawa-Samdup in 1927. The Evans-Wentz edition will always be valued for its extensive outline of the steps...

The Pradyumna-Prabhavati Legend in Nepal: A Study of the Hindu Myth of the Draining of the Nepal Valley.
October 1, 1992... The geological fact that about thirty thousand years ago the Kathmandu valley was a Pleistocene lake has precipitated a vast literature in especially Sanskrit, Nevari and middle Indo-Aryan languages which deal with the divine or semi-divine...

Jagatprakasamallas Muladevasasidevavyakhyananataka.
October 1, 1992... The geological fact that about thirty thousand years ago the Kathmandu valley was a Pleistocene lake has precipitated a vast literature in especially Sanskrit, Nevari and middle Indo-Aryan languages which deal with the divine or semi-divine...

A Grammar of Limbu.
October 1, 1992... The Limbus are a people who live in the hills of eastern Nepal, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling district of Bengal. Because of their migration throughout the Himalayas and to the various countries of the subcontinent, their total population is...

A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition: Hindi-Hindustani Grammar, Grammarians, History and Problems.
October 1, 1992... This book is a detailed discussion of what its author calls the Hindi grammatical tradition. Beginning with the unpublished manuscript of Ketelaar (1698), now thought to be the earliest attempt at a grammatical description, Bhatia discusses in...

An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj.
October 1, 1992... We have long needed a history of British architecture in India that combined an aesthetic sensitivity with sociological analysis, and sympathy for Indian nationalist sentiment with an appreciation for the good which the West brought to India....

Imagining India.
October 1, 1992... In the foreword to a recent book on the contribution of Orientalism to the discovery of ancient India, the late A. L. Basham paid the following tribute to British Orientalists: India is greatly indebted to this small band of gifted amateurs who...

The Message of the Mind in Neo-Confucianism.
October 1, 1992... This book presents W. T. deBary's account of the development of certain aspects of Neo-Confucianism, particularly ideas associated with the label hsin hsueh (Learning of the Mind) and their relation to what he terms orthodoxy from the fifteenth...

Sanctioned Violence in Early China.
October 1, 1992... "Early China," for the author of this book (a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Cambridge University), extends approximately from 722 B.C. (first year of the Tso chuan history) to A.D. 220 (last year of the Han empire). Within these almost ten...

The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery.
October 1, 1992... To read Robert Eno's The Confucian Creation in Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery and not come across numerous interpretations and conclusions that one disagrees with strongly is not to have read it very carefully. Eno...

I trattati nel mondo antico: Forma, ideologia, funzione.
October 1, 1992... Under the auspices of the Seminario di Antichistica of the Istituto Gramsci, scholars interested in ancient treaties met in Rome in 1986 for a conference which bore the same title as the book under review, Treaties in the Ancient World: Form,...

Tell el-Hesi: The Persian Period (Stratum V).
October 1, 1992... Palestinian archaeology began in 1890 at Tell el-Hesi (perhaps ancient "Eglon") with brief soundings by the legendary W. M. F. Petrie, followed by the first American excavations in Palestine, directed by Frederick J. Bliss in 1891-92. The 25-acre...

Upon This Foundation: The Ubaid Reconsidered, Proceedings from the Ubaid Symposium, Elsinore May 30th-June 1st 1988.
October 1, 1992... The volume resulting from the Elsinore conference of the Ubaid consists of 17 papers, discussion generated by them, an introduction and two conclusions (the first by senior scholars H. T. Wright and R. McC. Adams and the second by the volume...

Bar-Ilan Studies in Assyriology Dedicated to Pinhas Artzi.
October 1, 1992... Pinhas Artzi was born in Hungary and got his training there. He was educated both at the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest and in Assyriology under Antal David. (J. Aistleitner filled the formal position of dissertation adviser.) He moved to Israel...

Hymnen und Gebete der Religion des Lichts: Iranische und turkische liturgische Texte der Manichaer Zentralasiens.
October 1, 1992... Between the years 1902 and 1914, the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin sponsored four archaeological expeditions to the Turfan oasis region of Chinese Turkestan. One of the signal surprises of this exploratory work was the...

Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet.
October 1, 1992... Six of the British Museum's 64-page pamphlets in the "Reading the Past" series have been gathered into hard covers: Cuneiform, by C. B. F. Walker, pp. 14-73 (1987); Egyptian Hieroglyphs, by W. V. Davies, pp. 74-135 (1987); Linear B and Related...

The Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System.
October 1, 1992... This book, originally a University of Cambridge doctoral dissertation,(1) is divided into two unequal parts. Part 1 is a survey of the theories accounting for the forms and functions of the so-called Waw-consecutive forms in Classical Hebrew,...

The Forging of Israel: Iron Technology, Symbolism, and Tradition in Ancient Society.
October 1, 1992... Paula McNutt (hereafter M.) states early on in her work on The Forging of Israel, that she has set out to answer the question: "What kind of impact did the introduction of iron technology have on ancient Israelite culture, and how is the impact...

Linguistic Evidence for the Northern Origin of Selected Psalms.
October 1, 1992... How does one go about isolating two forms of a language? A normal minimum requirement is a group of data (oral or written) from each of at least two different sources, to be defined according to the requirements of the situation or according to...

Die Fruhgeschichte Israels in Bekenntnis und Verkundigung des Alten Testaments.
October 1, 1992... The so-called "historical credos" in Deut 26:5-9, Josh 24:2-13, and elsewhere have had an illustrious career in twentieth-century biblical scholarship. Since Gerhard von Rad in 1938 defined these texts as the earliest confessions of Israelite...

The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Israel.
October 1, 1992... In a book dealing with the sociology of pottery, one anticipates learning about the organization, institution, and development of that sector of society that produces pottery for use and distribution throughout the society as a whole. This slim...

Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archeological Approach.
October 1, 1992... Dans l'introduction (pp. 11-47), l'auteur evoque rapidement les diverses positions actuelles sur l'existence d'ecoles dans le royaume de Juda et se propose de resoudre ce probleme a l'aide d'un modele socio-archeologique. Ayant defini l'ecole...

Claudius Ptolemaus. Der Sternkatalog des Almagest: Die arabisch-mittelalterliche Tradition, Teil II: Die lateinische Ubersetzung Gerhards von Cremona; Teil III: Gesamt-konkordanz der Sternkoordinaten.
October 1, 1992... These two handsome volumes are the second and third in a series of three volumes devoted to the project of the Ptolemaic star catalogue in medieval times; the first, devoted to the Arabic translations from Greek was discussed by the present...

Quellenuntersuchungen zu den "Maqatil at-Talibiyyin" des Abu l-Farag al-Isfahani (gest. 356/967): Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der mundlichen und schriftlichen Uberlieferung in der mittelalterlichen arabischen Literatur.
October 1, 1992... The case deserves to be defended against its advocate. Although it may not be obvious, the study of classical Arabic literature cannot dispense with research into the sources used by the authors of the works preserved. This is not just an...

Ahmad b. Ali b. Masud on Arabic Morphology, Marah al-Arwah, part 1: The Strong Verb, As-Sahih.
October 1, 1992... The Arabic grammatical tradition is one of the most impressive monuments of Islamic scholarship. The interests of medieval grammarians went beyond the linguistic structures that make up the Arabic language. The best--or perhaps most...

Sammlung arabischer Handschriften aus Mauretanien: Kurzbeschreibungen von 2239 Handschrifteneinheiten mit Indices.
October 1, 1992... The progress in developing finding aids for Arabic- and Arabic-script manuscripts from West Africa has long been quixotic, and the existence, much less accessibility, of Mauritanian material within that region has been one of the best kept...

Current Progress in Chadic Linguistics: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chadic Linguistics, Boulder, Colorado, 1-2 May, 1987.
October 1, 1992... This volume contains fifteen papers from the third (not fourth, as the editor maintains in his introduction) of its kind Chadic linguistics meeting in Boulder, Colorado, in 1987. The topics of the papers tend to show the increasing attractiveness...

Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change.
October 1, 1992... Tibi's book is a fascinating study of Islam using the Geertzian model of religion as a cultural system. He argues for a dynamic, mutually affective relationship between the cultural and historical dimensions of a society. In particular, this book...

The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times.
October 1, 1992... This is the companion volume to Professor Stillman's The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1979). Where the former volume dealt with the history of Arab Jewish communities from the...

Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture.
October 1, 1992... This book contains a collection of 113 poems recorded between 1968 and 1988 among different Bedouin tribes living in Sinai and the Negev. In addition to the 55 poems composed in Sinai and the 26 composed in the Negev, the collection includes 32...

Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature.
October 1, 1992... This work is subdivided into two sections: "Prolegomena" and "Case Studies". The latter are, as the author notes, based on previously published materials. Such collections often fail to coalesce into a unified, carefully focused presentation. In...

The Muslims of America.
October 1, 1992... The Muslims of America addresses a wide variety of issues that are important to those concerned with the development of Islam in America. It is a book that scholars of this topic will use repeatedly as a reference. The reader will find...

Mensch und Tier vor dem Konig der Dschinnen: Aus den Schriften der Lauteren Bruder von Basra, Ihwan as-Safa.
October 1, 1992... The appearance of the "Dispute between Man and the Animals" for the second time in German and in an important collection, Die philosophische Bibliothek, devoted to major works of Western and Eastern thought, indicates the particular significance...