The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from October 1997

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from October 1997

Martyrdom and the Sikh tradition.
October 1, 1997... In the early days of my life I heard much about Shahid Bhagat Singh and Baba Dip Singh in dhadhi gatherings. Wherever there were such gatherings I used to attend. I've always listened to [dhadhi] songs. Listening to them gave me a lot of...

The art of black and white: wei-ch'i in Chinese poetry.
October 1, 1997... Wei-ch'i is the oldest and one of the most popular board games in China and other East Asian countries. Although the time of its origin cannot be set with certainty,(1) reliable anecdotes about the game date back to 548 n.c.(2) The game spread...

Journey into desire: monkey's secular experience in the 'Xiyoubu.'
October 1, 1997... 1. A DIFFERENT KIND OF JOURNEY As its title indicates, the seventeenth-century short novel Xiyoubu or Supplement to the Westward Journey, draws its inspiration from the sixteenth-century masterpiece Xiyouji or Records of the Westward...

The grand vizier and the false Messiah: the Sabbatai Sevi controversy and the Ottoman reform in Egypt.
October 1, 1997... In 1651, the son of a jewish commercial agent was expelled from the Ottoman port of Izmir (ancient Smyrna), located in what is today southwestern Turkey, for publicly pronouncing the name of God. By 1658, he and his followers had launched a...

A new reference work on seal-amulets.
October 1, 1997... Othmar Keel's Einleitung to his forthcoming corpus of all seal-amulets discovered in Palestine is far more comprehensive than the title indicates. The book is almost breathtaking in its scope and, while it is not oriented toward evidence from...

Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palastina/Israel: Von den Anfangen bis zur Perserzeit, Einletung.
October 1, 1997... Othmar Keel's Einleitung to his forthcoming corpus of all seal-amulets discovered in Palestine is far more comprehensive than the title indicates. The book is almost breathtaking in its scope and, while it is not oriented toward evidence from...

Pahlavi kirrenidan: traces of Iranian creation mythology.
October 1, 1997... The occurrences of this etymon are examined for the light they throw on the Iranian mythologies of creation. Pahlavi contrasts two of the verbs it uses for acts of creation along familiar dualistic lines. The ahuric term, brehenidan, replaces...

Qiu Ying's other patrons. (16th-century painter)
October 1, 1997... The Suzhou painter Qiu Ying (ca. 1494ca. 1552), known today as one of the Four Great Masters of the Ming dynasty, depended upon commissions from patrons for his livelihood. Earlier research has already identified his three "sustaining" patrons,...

The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta: A Comparative Study in Religion and Reason.
October 1, 1997... This volume aims to bridge the gap between two important intellectual discourses, and to argue for their affinity. First, there is Advaita, the non-dualist school of the Indian Vedanta, a long tradition of exegesis and systematic theology and...

Asceticism.
October 1, 1997... We moderns are relentlessly preoccupied with ourselves. We are not surprised that our friends employ a regular therapist along with the family doctor and dentist. We have invented countless "anonymous" groups that range from Overeaters Anonymous...

Analysis to Synthesis: The Development of Complex Verb Morphology in the Dravidian Languages.
October 1, 1997... It is a great pleasure to review a book on Dravidian (Dr.) linguistics that is highly original, thought-provoking, witty and, what is more, marks a great advance in the development of the subject. Its author sets out to analyze the genesis of...

Die Bhavani von Tuljapur: Religionsgeschichtliche Studie des Kultes einer Gottin der indischen Volksreligion.
October 1, 1997... It is not an easy task to discuss, within the limits of a review, every detail of this complex Ph.D. dissertation, probably one of the last dissertations inspired by the late Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer. The dissertation is complex because the...

Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa and the Mahabharata: A New Interpretation.
October 1, 1997... This book, which is based on a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Chicago, is an overview of Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa's role in the Mahabharata that alternates between cataloging the ways Vyasa is presented, on the one hand, and...

Gatha Sri Adi Granth and the Controversy.
October 1, 1997... Several years ago I became aware that an academic analysis of the Sikh scriptures had led me onto some exceedingly delicate ground. I therefore decided that, as an outsider, I should refrain from such analysis and leave the task exclusively to...

The Mongolian Tanjur Version of the Bodhicaryavatara.
October 1, 1997... In a snake year, 1305-6, the Sa-skya monk Chos-kyi 'od-zer translated the seventh-century Indian Santideva's long poem, the Bodhicaryavatara (A Guide to the Path to Enlightenment), from its Tibetan translation into Mongolian prose, and this was...

Origins of the Bronze Age Oasis Civilization in Central Asia.
October 1, 1997... This volume embodies the results of a project undertaken over several years by the author to clarify the origins and the development of what he calls the Bronze Age Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). The term had been coined by V....

Antike Technologie: Die sabaische Wasserwirtschaft von Marib, vol. 3, Untersuchungen der sabaischen Bewasserungsanlagen in Marib.
October 1, 1997... The Marib dam has fascinated generations of scholars and continues to do so to this day. Michael Schaloske's study, originally submitted in 1991 as a Ph.D. thesis to the Faculty of Agriculture of the Rheinisch Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at...

The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. P.
October 1, 1997... The qualities which I praised in my review of the previous fascicle(1) are again much in evidence: accurate and thorough documentation, generally judicious analyses and interpretations, and remarkably clear organization and readability. Since we...

The Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places, 2d ed.
October 1, 1997... The first edition of this work (M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, J. Sanmartin, Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, pt. 1: Transkription,(1) Alter Orient und Altes Testament 24 [Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, 1976]) was a comprehensive transcription of...

The Late Bronze Egyptian Garrison at Beth Shan: A Study of Levels VII and VIII, 2 vols.
October 1, 1997... Between 1921 and 1933 the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a series of excavations at the site of Beth Shun under the successive directorships of C. S. Fisher, A, Rowe, and G. M. FitzGerald. However, despite the...

The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora.
October 1, 1997... The purpose of this important book (a revised dissertation) is announced in the subtitle. Rutgers sets out to replace the prevailing notion, that the Jews of ancient Rome lived in isolation from their surroundings, with a more nuanced picture of...

Studies in The Sermon on the Great War: Investigations of a Manichaean-Coptic Text from the Fourth Century.
October 1, 1997... This book focuses on a thirty-five-page text which forms the second of four parts of a Coptic manuscript belonging to the Chester Beatty Library, first edited in 1934 by H. J. Polotsky under the title Manichaische Homilien (Stuttgart: W....

Love and Joy:Law, Language, and Religion in Ancient Israel.
October 1, 1997... Imbued with Muffs' infectious love and joy for the biblical text - its language, imagery, emotion and message - this volume is an intellectual delight for all who study the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context. The eight essays represent...

The Extramural Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Cyrene, Libya, vol. 5, The Site's Architecture, Its First Six Hundred Years of Development.
October 1, 1997... The excavations of Cyrene in the Libyan Pentapolis, on a promontory opposite Greece midway between Alexandria and Carthage, have all the character of an heroic enterprise. The city's fortunes declined suddenly from those of a major urban center...

Studies in Hebrew and Ugaritic Psalms.
October 1, 1997... This volume, dedicated to the memory of the author's mentor, Samuel E. Loewenstarnm, is a revised and enlarged version of a study first presented in Hebrew in 1989 concerning triplet words in the Bible and in ancient Semitic literature. The...

Two Nations Under God: The Deuteronomic History of Solomon and the Dual Monarchies, 2 vols.
October 1, 1997... The aim of these two volumes is to offer a critical examination of the texts in I-II Kings describing the Israelite monarchy from Solomon to Josiah. The author is quite proficient in textual criticism and endowed with a good amount of common...

A Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New Testament, According to the British and Foreign Bible Society's Edition, Based on the SEDRA Database, 6 vols.
October 1, 1997... George Kiraz, well known for his recent efforts in adapting the Syriac language to the computer,(1) has now produced a computer-generated Key Word in Context (KWIC) concordance of the Syriac New Testament in six volumes, meant to be used by both...

The Glazed Steatite Glyptic Style: The Structure and Function of an Image System in the Administration of Protoliterate Mesopotamia.
October 1, 1997... This book is a revised version of the author's 1989 doctoral dissertation written at Columbia University under Edith Porada. It originated, as the author tells us (p. xi), from a study of the glyptic material from Tall-i Malyan - a site in...

Ricerche sui sigilli a cilindro Vicino-Orientali del periodo di Uruk/Jemdet Nasr.
October 1, 1997... This study of the earliest cylinder seals of the second half of the fourth millennium B.C., begins with an introductory section summarizing the development of the field, the various studies relating to these seals and the necessity for a new...

An Early Neolithic Village in the Jordan Valley, part 2, The Fauna of Netiv Hagdud.
October 1, 1997... Tchernov has written a most important final report on the fauna from the small PPNA Jordan Valley settlement of Netiv Hagdud. It is all the more impressive for the relatively short gap between the end of fieldwork and the publication (eight...

Repertoire geographique des textes cuneiformes, vol. 6.2, Die Orts- und Gewassernamen der hethitischen Texte.
October 1, 1997... Hittite historical geography was until recently a highly speculative discipline, with only a handful of place-names fixed out of many hundreds mentioned in the texts. The situation has somewhat improved in the last decade due to several fortunate...

Sippar-Amnanum: The Ur-Utu Archive, vol. 1.
October 1, 1997... In 1656 B.C. Inanna-mansum, the kalamahhum-priest ("chief lamentation priest") of Annunitum in Sippar-Amnanum, bought a 225 [m.sup.2] house. The seller, one naditu of Shamash named Lamassani. had bought the house eleven years earlier from a...

Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture.
October 1, 1997... This long-awaited English version of an already famous work appears in a two-volume format, differing from that of the Russian original. The first volume contains the languages and their written sources, a methodological introduction, phonology...

Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt.
October 1, 1997... Those interested in the folk literature of the Arab world find themselves confronted with an enormous body of publications in Arabic, and a considerable amount in other languages. Some genres are more accessible than others: it is easier, for...

Baburnama: Chaghatay Turkish Text with Abdul-Rahim Khankhanan's Persian Translation.
October 1, 1997... "The Babur-nama is lengthy, ponderous to poise and grasp, and work on it is still tentative, even with the literary gains since the Seventies."(l) So wrote Annette Beveridge in 1922, alluding to Paver de Courteille's French translation of 1871,...

Babur-nama (Vaqayi), by Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 2 vols.
October 1, 1997... "The Babur-nama is lengthy, ponderous to poise and grasp, and work on it is still tentative, even with the literary gains since the Seventies."(l) So wrote Annette Beveridge in 1922, alluding to Paver de Courteille's French translation of 1871,...

Az arabok es az iszlam: Valogatott tanulmanyok (The Arabs and Islam: Selected Studies), 2 vols.
October 1, 1997... Goldziher meant to be understood by the scholarly community and wrote his masterworks in German, but he meant also, all his life, despite decades of neglect on the part of the university establishment, to participate in Hungarian cultural life....

The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources: Arabic Text Edited with Introduction and Notes, vol. 3, Introduction and Indexes.
October 1, 1997... The first two volumes of Muhsin Mahdi's great work on the Nights (Leiden, 1984) contained his critical edition of the Galland manuscript, and his arguments for a radically new view of the relations among manuscripts. The third and final volume...

Arabic Grammar and Qur'anic Exegesis in Early Islam.
October 1, 1997... All students of Arabic and Islam are taught sooner or later that the first attempt at a systematic description of the Arabic language was the Kitab of Sibawayhi (died 180/796). While previous grammarians were primarily concerned with explicating...

Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry.
October 1, 1997... The aims of this work are two-fold; it presents the range of bibliographical materials available to the scholar and student of medieval Islamic history, and it then confronts wider problems of methodology. Its frame is the period A.D. 600-1500....

Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict.
October 1, 1997... Two extremes attract those who write about minorities, and particularly about Jews, in any of the reigns which now constitute Spain. On the one hand there is the lachrymose view, first voiced in the historical writings of refugees from the...

Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
October 1, 1997... Two extremes attract those who write about minorities, and particularly about Jews, in any of the reigns which now constitute Spain. On the one hand there is the lachrymose view, first voiced in the historical writings of refugees from the...

The Legacy of Muslim Spain.
October 1, 1997... Salma Jayyusi's volume includes forty-nine articles in areas as diverse as history, poetry, technology, and architecture. Trying even to touch upon the work as a whole, the reviewer would by necessity be confined to a discussion of the framework...

Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry.
October 1, 1997... Members of the A.O.S. or M.E.S.A. who attend the annual meetings will be familiar with the panels of the self-styled "Chicago school," panels consisting of Suzanne and Jaroslav Stetkevych (hereafter SPS and JS) and usually their current and...

Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo.
October 1, 1997... Shoshan's book is brief (seventy-eight pages of text) but ambitious, crowding together a variety of intriguing sources ranging from sermons and hagiography to accounts of public processions and economic and political history. What emerges is an...

The Theology of Meaning: Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani's Theory of Discourse.
October 1, 1997... The vast contribution of Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 471 or 474/1078 or 1081) to Arabic literary theory has come to the fore during the last few decades. A great deal of scholarly interest has rightly been given to his sophisticated theory of...

Aspects of Ottoman History: Papers from CIEPO IX, Jerusalem.
October 1, 1997... Ottoman history is generally written as if part of a yet to be completed total history with a telos toward which political, social, and economic movements are pointing; the more pieces of the puzzle analyzed and accurately studied and the more we...

The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims. A Textual Analysis.
October 1, 1997... Separating biography from hagiography - history from fiction, in the words of Rubin - has been the major historiographical challenge faced by those writing about the life of Muhammad, according to their own explanations. In his standard treatment...

The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East: States, Resources and Armies.
October 1, 1997... This book is a collection of twelve papers presented at the third workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam on the theme, "States, Resources and Armies." The main aim of the papers is to explore the systems involved as well as the structure and...

Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, vol. 1.
October 1, 1997... Publication of these two volumes brings Irfan Shahid back to the period and subjects with which he began his scholarly career more than forty years ago. This is the material that he knows the very best. Although he reviews topics and...