The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from October 1996

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from October 1996

Hearing and saying what was said. (problems in translating Arabic to European language)
October 1, 1996... RICHARD M. FRANK THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Presidential Address, delivered at the 206th meeting of the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 19, 1996 Several of the brethren were at me lately to say something,...

Kuwabara's misleading thesis on Bukhara and the family name An. (Kuwabara Jitsuzo)
October 1, 1996... When in late 1923 or early 1924 Chen Yuan (1880-1971) sent to Kuwabara Jitsuzo (1870-1931) in Japan a draft of his article "Yuan xiyuren hua-hua kao" The Sinicization of People from Western Regions during the Yuan), he did not imagine that one...

Writing the history of Arabic astronomy: problems and differing perspectives.
October 1, 1996... This essay concerns the recent publication of tWO books dealing with one of the most important pre-modern Arabic astronomical texts, namely, the theoretical planetary work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), called al-Tadhkira fi ilm al-hay a...

On the Indo-European origins of the retroflexes in Sanskrit.
October 1, 1996... Sir William Jones' powerful and often-quoted observation-based on his study of phenomena furnished by the "exquisitely refined" Sanskrit language "both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" - has long epitomized the statement of the...

Guru Arjan's Ramakali Hymn: the central issue in the Kartarpur-Banno debate.
October 1, 1996... Academic discussion on the text of the Adi Granth so far has been focused on the so-called Kartarpur-Banno debate. That debate started in 1944 when G. B. Singh set about marshalling evidence to challenge the authenticity of the Kartarpur...

The interrogatives employed in Honglou meng and their bearing on the problem of authorship.
October 1, 1996... 1. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to consider the long-disputed problem of the authorship of the well-known eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) from a linguistic point of view - specifically, through an...

Blindness and oversight: some comments on a double portrait of Qianlong and the new sinology.
October 1, 1996... . . . if an interpretation is not untrue to the facts, the only criteria by which it is to be judged are its originality, suggestiveness, and plausibility. (Carrier 1990: 666) I One tangible effect of contemporary debates within the...

Deciphering the Indus Script.
October 1, 1996... Philologists tend to be a cautious and intellectually conservative bunch. On the whole, this is as it should be, since caution tends to produce good textual scholarship. It is not, however, conducive to the kind of intellectual adventurousness...

Nachgelassene Werke, II: Philosophische Texte des Hinduismus.
October 1, 1996... In the introduction to his splendid and still-unsurpassed collection of translations of Buddhist texts, Die Philosophie des Buddhismus, Erich Frauwallner explains some of the problems that the translator faces in making Indian philosophical...

The Life of Buddha: Ancient Scriptural and Pictorial Traditions.
October 1, 1996... In the introduction to The Life of the Buddha, Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky sets out both the objectives of her study and the theses that it will proffer. To the approach of Alfred Foucher who combined pictorial depictions with textual material...

Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture.
October 1, 1996... Milner has written an ambitious book, both challenging and irritating, convoluted and, at the end, unconvincing. Milner believes that the best current strategy for increasing our sociological knowledge is to focus on macro structures and...

Raja Rammohan Ray: The Father of Modern India.
October 1, 1996... This is a difficult book to review, because it contains so much that is valuable and so much that is flawed. It is certainly good to see a young scholar explore Rammohun Roy's Vedanta philosophy, which, despite the book's title, is the subject it...

Subaltern Studies, vol. 8.
October 1, 1996... This eighth volume of Subaltern Studies is distinguished by its dedication to the founder of the historiographical school, Ranajit Guha. Guha is a communist expatriate from Bengal who has spent most of his academic life in English and Australian...

Subject, Voice and Ergativity: Selected Essays.
October 1, 1996... Three papers on Japanese account for roughly one-quarter of the bulk of this collection of eleven studies by as many authors; others treat Nivkh, Evenki, Turkish, Sinhala, Tagalog, Georgian, and Balochi, along with (in the final paper), "many...

Drei Schamanengesange der Ewenki-Tungusen Nord-Sibiriens aufgezeichnet von Konstantin Mixajlovic Ryckov in den Jahren 1905/1909.
October 1, 1996... Since Peter Simon Pallas' eighteenth-century Vocabularia comparativa and Matthias Alexander Castren's nineteenth-century Tungus grammar, many important studies have been written, mostly in Russian, partly in German and English, by devoted...

Makiko's Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto.
October 1, 1996... 1910 was a busy year for Nakano Makiko, mother of sociologist Nakano Takashi, an advocate of the use of personal documents in the study of history and society, who arranged for the publication of this diary in Japan. When Makiko wrote her diary,...

Imperial Rulership and Cultural Change in Traditional China.
October 1, 1996... This handsome conference volume presents ten articles, culled from twenty-three originally read at a 1992 conference sponsored by National Taiwan University. To these, the editors have added an introduction and a final chapter of "Reflections."...

Die Belagerung von K'ai-feng im Winter 1126/27: Nach Kapitel 64-69 des San-ch'ao pei-meng hui-pien, kompiliert von Hsu Meng-hsin.
October 1, 1996... In this work Sabine Werner investigates the events that took place between 1 December 1126 and 9 January 1127 - the latter date marking the end of the Northern Song dynasty. Though occupying only a little more than a month, the siege of Kaifeng...

Economic Structures of Antiquity.
October 1, 1996... Silver's latest study carries forward his earlier inquiries, "Karl Polanyi and Markets in the Ancient Near East: The Challenge of the Evidence," Journal of Economic History 53 (1983): 795-829, and Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East...

The Old Babylonian Loan Contract: Its History and Geography.
October 1, 1996... This book presents a study of the terminology used in Old Babylonian loan contracts, with special attention paid to changes over time and place. The work is extremely detailed and systematic, and seems to have identified all the relevant texts...

Egyptian Historical Inscriptions of the Twentieth Dynasty.
October 1, 1996... Peden's volume goes a long way toward providing reliable up-to-date translations of many of the major historical documents of the Twentieth Dynasty. The texts that he has chosen to translate include both hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyri...

Berichtigungsliste der griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Agypten, vol. 9.
October 1, 1996... In reviewing the previous volume of this series I described its general characteristics and use: the BL records for all Greek documentary papyri and similar objects the reeditions, corrections, and interpretations put forth since the appearance...

Ptolemy of Egypt.
October 1, 1996... Readers of this slender volume, attracted by a jacket blurb promising the story of a "leader of prophetic insight, extraordinary intellect and keen administrative ability," may well be disappointed. For the Ptolemy described herein is a cautious...

Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod.
October 1, 1996... Connections between the oldest surviving Greek literature and ancient Mesopotamian texts are a fascinating but difficult field of study, where the borders between the highly plausible, the possible, and the improbable are not clearly defined. The...

Studien zum Menschenbild der alteren Weisheit (Spr. 10ff).
October 1, 1996... This is a lightly revised and shortened Habilitationsschrift from the Augustana-Hochschule Neuendettelsau. The contents are concerned with the human condition as found in "older wisdom," which is, by general agreement, the primarily pre-exilic...

Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy.
October 1, 1996... It is rare that a collection of conference papers produces a uniformly good volume, but such is the case with the book under review, which contains nine papers given at Utrecht University in 1992. The topic is important. "Jewish" inscriptions...

Narrative in the Hebrew Bible.
October 1, 1996... This volume is part of a series designed to deal thematically with different kinds of material in the Hebrew Bible, using selected biblical passages from a number of books to deepen understanding of the wider theological and historical issues...

Water and Storm Polemics Against Baalism in the Deuteronomic History.
October 1, 1996... The worship of Baal was plainly problematic for biblical authors. This book, which originated as a dissertation at the University of Utah in 1991, seeks to examine how they sought to challenge and discredit that religious tradition, particularly...

The Cultic Calendars of the Ancient Near East.
October 1, 1996... The book begins with an introduction called "Overview and Background" (pp. 3-20). Here the author discusses basic concepts of the calendar and lists the main calendrical systems. After a relatively brief chapter on early Semitic calendars, mainly...

The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. P, fasc. 1.
October 1, 1996... The present fascicle of this ongoing work contains, besides the usual assortment of rarities and hapax legomena, the lemmata for two of the most fundamental and widely attested verbs in the language: pa(i)-, "go" and pai-/pe-/pi-, "give," as well...

Essays on Anatolian Archaeology.
October 1, 1996... In recent years, Anatolian archaeologists have increasingly emphasized understanding the role of environment and natural resources in the development of civilization. Essays on Anatolian Archaeology follows this general trend and provides...

Arrowheads of the Neolithic Levant: A Seriation Analysis.
October 1, 1996... The Neolithic of the Levant was a dynamic period in human prehistory, when major social, economic, and behavioral changes, such as sedentism, the emergence of agriculture, and pastoralism, led to further socio-structural changes that crystallized...

A World Within: Jewish Life as Reflected in Muslim Court Documents from the Sijill of Jerusalem (XVIth Century), 2 vols.
October 1, 1996... Amnon Cohen has gathered, for the years 1530-1601 A.D., hundreds of Shari a court cases from the first 82 sijills of Jerusalem, dealing in one way or another with Jews living in that city during the first century of Ottoman rule in Bilad al-Sham....

Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests.
October 1, 1996... Kaegi's Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests is the first fundamental work on this subject to appear after Fred Donner's Early Islamic Conquests, and the two are related even in their titles. Kaegi's is more concentrated and focuses on the...

Minaret: Symbol of Islam.
October 1, 1996... Jonathan Bloom has undertaken a study of the adoption of the tower in conjunction with the congregational mosque, a study requiring considerable courage, persistence, and erudition because of the rarity of texts bearing directly on the subject....

The Shiis of Iraq.
October 1, 1996... This is a useful book. It tells us something about Iraq's Shi a community, a people about whom we know little, and much of that unreliable. Nakash focuses on several important facts about this group, and thereby we get some significant insights....

Throne of Gold: The Lives of the Aga Khans.
October 1, 1996... The Isma ilis, a major community of Shi i Muslims, number several millions, and an overwhelming majority of them, representing the Nizari branch of the community, currently acknowledge Prince Karim Aga Khan IV as their forty-ninth spiritual...

Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886.
October 1, 1996... Tourists strolling through sleepy Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast today might have difficulty believing that the quaint, white-washed little madina (old town) and the adjacent harbor were once Morocco's chief Atlantic seaport. From the...

An Introduction to the Hadith.
October 1, 1996... This is a book that wears its title rather uneasily, for it contains much advanced material. Burton does offer certain concessions to the title's promise, but ultimately limitations remain. It is very difficult to decide whether the book should...

Muslims, Jews, and Pagans: Studies on Early Islamic Medina.
October 1, 1996... The publication and appearance of Arabic texts from authors of the distant past has given new impetus to the goal of rediscovering the early history of Islam - at least to some scholars. Recognizing that material may be uncovered in texts well...

The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book.
October 1, 1996... This is a work of antiquarianism, not one of professional scholarship. The positive implications of this characterization are the following: Patai has invested considerable energy in tracking down a wide range of materials, both published and...

Names, Natures, and Things: The Alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan and His Kitab al-Ahjar (Book of Stones).
October 1, 1996... S. N. Haq has produced a detailed study of one of the Jabirian alchemical texts, the Kitab al-Ahjar. In the opening chapter of the first section of his book, Haq discusses the complex of problems associated with the Jabirian corpus, paying...

An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs, Syrian Customs and Usages, by Sayyida Salme/Emily Ruete.
October 1, 1996... Rarely is a reviewer so fortunate as to receive a book which is such sheer pleasure to read. Richly illustrated, beautifully produced, the fascinating story of Sayyida Salme, alias Emily Ruete, receives its just due in this volume. A Muslim...

Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti's History of Egypt: Ajaib al-Athar fi'l-Tarajim wa'l-Akhbar.
October 1, 1996... To appreciate fully the publication of a complete English translation of the text of al-Jabarti's Aja ib al-athar, we must place the work within its historiographical context. The major primary sources for the history of Egypt are often very...

The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads.
October 1, 1996... Studies on the Umayyad period are rare and for this reason alone this new work is welcome. Its real value, however, lies in the questions raised by its author regarding the collapse of Hisham Ibn Abd al-Malik's caliphate (105-25/724-43), and,...