Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain. By Sarah Stroumsa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxi + 220. $35, £28.

Glazed Brick Decoration in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of a Workshop at the 11th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Munich) in April 2018. Edited by Anja Fügert and Helen Gries. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020. Pp. iii + 122, illus. £30.

Large sculpted circular door sockets are a characteristic feature of Neo-Assyrian monumental architecture and have been found in palaces, temples, and admin- istrative centers both at core imperial sites such as Khorsabad and Nimrud and at provincial capitals such as Till-Barsib, Arslan-Tash, and Ziyaret Tepe. In the case of Iran, although the Assyrians controlled significant parts of the country, especially in the eighth century Bce, research into their presence in that period has until now been very limited. Even so, there (...) is one such door socket known from Iran, namely from the excavations at Tapeh Giyan, the discovery of which helped confirm the existence of an Assyrian administrative center at the site. This in turn led Julian Reade to suggest that Giyan was the location of the capital of the Assyr- ian province of Kharkhar. We can now add to the debate new discoveries from the site of Quwakh Tapeh in Kuzaran, in the northern Mahidasht plain, where a carved door socket and fragments of other carved stones scattered across the mound attest to the existence of a building of major importance. In this study we present this socket and compare it with other relevant material in order to determine its date, establish its archaeological context, and consider the implications. (shrink)

This article explores how mutakallimūn engaged with competing visions of the cosmos—traditionalist and Aristotelian-Ptolemaic—to the beginning of the sixth/ twelfth century. Drawing on works of kalām, Quran commentary, and items from other genres, I demonstrate that rationalist theologians remained divided on such questions as the shape of the earth to the end of this period. These disagreements, moreover, cannot be explained in terms of school affiliation. Based on a comprehensive examination of published sources, I argue that cosmographical opinion among mutakallimūn (...) was a function of exposure to late ancient learning, intellectual formation, and personal inclination more than doctrinal commitment. (shrink)

Krishna’s Lineage: The Harivamsha of Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata. Translated from the Sanskrit by Simon Brodbeck. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xxxx + 420. $99 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).

The Aramaic of the Bible and Qumran, unlike Imperial Aramaic, possesses a unique prefix conjugation that functions as a narrative tense. Aramaists have appealed to various notions of tense, aspect, text-linguistics, and even Hebrew and Akkadian influence to solve the conundrum of the so-called preterite prefix conjugation. A novel proposal is offered here, based on the semantic category of modality. By beginning with future functions of the prefix conjugation and working backward through the present temporal sphere to occurrences in the (...) past, it is argued that modality accounts for the full range of the prefix conjugation’s syntactic functions, even those in independent narrative clauses. Thus, a unified theory of the form’s semantics emerges. (shrink)

Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine. By Karel van der Toorn. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 270. $65.

The authors of the numerous medieval and early modern Sanskrit-medium commentaries on the various recensions and sub-recensions of the Vālmīkirāmāyaṇa frequently found themselves in a somewhat awkward hermeneutical position. The epic itself, like many Indic texts, is highly revered both as a religious text, one of the earliest and most influential Vaiṣṇava texts, and as a literary work that is not only a great poem but indeed the very first poem and the fons et origo of all subsequent poetry. Moreover, (...) like Vyāsa, the author of the Rāmāyaṇa’s sister epic, the Mahābhārata, Vālmīki was regarded not merely as an inspired poet and sage, but as a ṛṣi, that is to say an inerrant seer whose speech, in his case inspired directly by the creator divinity Brahmā and the god’s gift of a divine vision, must therefore be accepted as absolutely true and authoritative. The problem facing the work’s commentators is that Vālmīki’s text portrays its hero, Rāma, as not only a god in the form of a man, but as one who, ignorant of his own divinity, suffers all of the mental, emotional, and physical pain to which ordinary mortals are prey. In this Rāma differs sharply from the subsequent Vaiṣṇava avatāra and central figure of the Mahābhārata, Kṛṣṇa, who, fully aware of his godhood, rarely suffers in any way mentally or physically. But the Rāmāyaṇa’s commentators are living and writing in a world in which the development of the medieval bhakti movements has led poets and theologians to conceive of and write about Rāma as an omnipotent and omniscient figure very much like Kṛṣṇa. The present essay discusses the lexical, grammatical, and hermaneutical strategies the commentors adopted to negotiate the tension between Vālmīki’s apparent depiction of the suffering of his hero and a proposed deeper meaning in which the avatāra conforms more fully to what became the medieval and modern theology of god on earth. (shrink)

While less common than narratives about their male counterparts, accounts of female avengers are scattered throughout Chinese literature and historiography. Nevertheless, despite being included in a variety of genres and modes of writing, the extant corpus of Tang and pre-Tang female avengers appear to share remarkably similar tropes, tensions, and outcomes. In this article, I will explore how three tensions are apparent across Tang and pre-Tang female avenger accounts through the case study of narratives about Xie Xiao’e 謝小娥, a woman (...) who seeks revenge after her father and husband are killed by bandits. Supernatural elements, cross-dressing, and judicial proceedings all seek to reduce the power and autonomy of the heroine, presenting us with a fascinating and rich example of the limits of revenge. It has been previously assumed that this is the sole example of a female avenger account preserved in two modes of writing, but this is not the case. A detailed comparison of the versions relating to Xie Xiao’e will act as a springboard to recategorize the corpus of female avenger accounts and in turn more amply reveal the variety of methods used to curtail, control, and Confucianize these women. (shrink)

Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800–1937. By Margaret B. Wan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. Pp. xxii + 434. $75.

A Literary History of Medicine: The ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah. Edited and translated by Emilie Savage-Smith, Simon Swain, and Geert Jan van Gelder. Handbuch für Orientalistik, 1: The Near and Middle East, vol. 134. 5 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2020. $865. Open access: https://scholarlyeditions.brill.com/lhom/.

Man’yōshū Book 16: A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary. By Alexander Vovin. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Pp. xviii + 199. $168.

Hittite Local Cults. By Michele Cammarosano. Writings from the Ancient World, vol. 39. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018. Pp. xxv + 510, illus. $69.95 (paper).

A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing. By Rachel Silberstein. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 276. $65.

Different interpretations exist regarding Khubilai’s 1280 edict prohibiting the Muslim method of slaughtering sheep and the practice of circumcision. By analyzing primary sources in the Chinese and Persian languages this article provides a new translation of the original text of the edict, showing that the Yuan established as a guiding principle that each subject group should follow its own customs. This article argues that the Yuan government prohibited the two Muslim practices because Mongol rulers believed that Muslims violated the guiding (...) principle by forcing other peoples to follow the two practices. This article further argues that the Yuan court insisted on each group following its own customs because the power structure and legal system of the Mongol-Yuan Empire largely rested on differences and boundaries. (shrink)

This article investigates the early reception of Yu Xin, one of the most important court writers of the sixth century in China. It traces portrayals and evaluations of Yu Xin and his work from the late years of the Northern Zhou (557–581) to the early Tang (618–907) by focusing on four texts of different nature: a preface to the literary collection of Yu Xin dated to 579, his biography in the Zhoushu, and two discourses in historical records that evaluate his (...) achievement as a writer. While the former two texts supply valuable information about Yu’s family background, official career, and social network, the latter two voice their criticism of the man along with their overall negative attitude toward literature of the Southern Dynasties. The perception of Yu Xin as a frustrated and nostalgic poet as highlighted by his Zhoushu biography has played a major role in the interpretation of his writings in later ages, but an examination of a wider range of sources shows that there was more than one way of evaluating his writings in the sixth and seventh centuries. A study of these multiple voices in interpreting Yu Xin and his works reminds us of the vibrancy and complexity of understanding the identities of poets of the medieval period. (shrink)

Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Edited by Clive Holes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 422. $115, £84.

This article presents a preliminary study of an unusual Nuzi-type text. A transliteration, translation, and commentary are offered. It transpires that the text is an internal bureaucratic memorandum from ancient Kurruḫanni (very likely Tell al-Faḫḫar) dealing with barley belonging(?) / owed(?) to certain men.

Alphabet Scribes in the Land of Cuneiform: Sēpiru Professionals in Mesopotamia in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods. By Yigal Bloch. Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East, vol. 11. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 497. $99.

Georg Bühler’s Contribution to Indology. By Amruta Chintaman Natu. Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, vol. 12. Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 235. $114.95 (cloth and PDF).

Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India. By Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 204.

Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History. By Wendy Doniger. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. 300. $35.

Flüche und unfromme Wünsche in der arabischen Sprache und Literatur. By Manfred Ullmann. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2020. Pp. 245. €58 (paper).

This article studies how the ʿUthmānī position endorsing the first three caliphs, which was embraced by the majority of the ahl al-ḥadīth in the first two centuries of Islam, came to be replaced by the four-caliph thesis. It examines variations in the narrations of different chains of transmission of Ibn ʿUmar’s tradition in relation to the geographical affiliation and movements of the transmitters active in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The analysis suggests that Ibn ʿUmar’s tradition was present (...) in two versions at the turn of the ninth century, circulated in Iraqi cities and non-Iraqi cities respectively. Through its investigation, this study substantiates the current narrative on early ahl al-ḥadīth attitudes toward the first four caliphs and offers more insights that help explain why the ʿUthmānī hadith narrators failed to perpetuate their ideas. (shrink)

Der ägyptische Tempel als ritueller Raum: Akten der internationalen Tagung, Haus der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 9.–12. Juni 2015. Edited by Stefan Baumann and Holger Kockelmann. Studien zur spätägyptischen Religion, vol. 17. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. Pp. xi + 584, 8 pls. €144.

The Astronomical Diaries are a unique corpus of documents from Babylon containing daily observations of celestial and terrestrial phenomena in the last half millennium before the Common Era. They provide direct information on how Babylonian scholars conducted scientific research and viewed political, economic, and religious events of their time—in other words, how they experienced their era. The book under review is a good introduction to this corpus.

The Translator of Desires: Poems by Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi. Translated by Michael Sells. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xxxviii +323. $24.95 (paper).

This article offers a typologically-driven and corpus-based analysis of the historical present (HP) “active participle” qātēl in Biblical Aramaic. The authors argue that qātēl instantiates the HP category quite neatly and provide three main arguments. First, qātēl complies with the definition of a progredient/propulsive HP that emerges from crosslinguistic literature: while, in its prototypical use, qātēl expresses some type(s) of present, it may also be employed in narrative to introduce past perfective events. Second, when used as an HP, qātēl exhibits (...) functions that are consistent with tendencies attested across languages: stylistically, the HP qātēl is often associated with expressivity, mirativity, and dramatism, while discourse-pragmatically, it is predominantly related to the progression (rarely, the climax) and atomization of the plot. Third, most other properties exhibited by the HP qātēl also harmonize with the behavior of HPs observed in linguistic typology; these concern types of clauses in which the HP qātēl appears, and subjects and verbs used. Overall, the HP qātēl can be viewed as a highlighting narrative device—subjective although linguistically constrained. (shrink)

This article presents a translation of and commentary on a previously unknown Persian account of Kafiristan published in Afghanistan’s first newspaper in 1874. The text purports to be the first-hand testimony of Wān, a recent convert to Islam, who describes the sacred sites of his homeland to a literate Muslim resident of Badakhshan. The account comes from the least documented region of former Kafiristan, not only in being on the Afghan rather than the British Indian side of the Durand Line, (...) but also in possibly being from one of the least-known regions of Afghan Kafiristan. Wān’s testimony may not only be an extremely rare “autoethnographic” account of Kafir religious sites, but in being also a work of Afghan “idolography,” the text lends insight into how the religion of the kāfir (infidel) was understood by Afghan state officials in the decades before the conquests and forced conversions of 1895–96. (shrink)

Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan. By Robert Goree. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. Pp. 400. $65.

This article looks at the current state of sacred prostitution studies in both ancient Near Eastern and Classical Studies through the review of two books published in 2019. Both books reveal that the current trend is to dismiss the existence of sacred prostitution in antiquity, one by attempting (not entirely successfully) to agree with that assessment, and one by condemning that dismissal altogether. All things considered, it does now appear that there has been a marked change of opinion in the (...) academy, and that Aphrodite’s and Ištar’s cult brothels are making their way to the dustpan of historiography. (shrink)

Focusing on Correspondence from the Double-Cassia Studio (Shuanggui xuan chidu 雙桂軒尺牘), a collection of letters by a gentlewoman named Ding Shanyi 丁善儀 (1799–after 1861), this paper examines how elite women in mid-nine- teenth-century China applied epistolary conventions in their social life. Com- pared to other literary collections of individual women in late imperial China, Ding’s letter collection is exceptional in recording the life of its author through the epistolary genre and in revealing the sociopolitical dynamics that underlay elite women’s epistolary (...) gentility. Ding’s letters are indicative of the noticeable concerns shared by gentlewomen in mid-nineteenth-century China and provide specific contexts for understanding some of the epistolary techniques used by lit- erary women to facilitate social networking. This paper uncovers Ding’s life and explores three major themes in her epistolary collection: her responses to crises, concerns about health, and cultivation of friendship. Ding’s letters show how elite women evinced sophistication and erudition in their epistolary composition, which was an important way for them to express themselves and demonstrate their mas- tery of language and rhetorical tradition. (shrink)

An Epic of Technical Supremacy: Works and Words of Medieval Chinese Textile Technology. By Dieter Kuhn. Riggisberg (Switzerland): Abegg-Stiftung, 2022. Pp. 488. CHF 120.

Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam. By Sean William Anthony. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 287. $32.95, £26.

Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals. Edited by Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 335. $85, £70 (cloth); $29.95, £25 (paper, ebook).

Since the writings of Shiblī Nuʿmānī and A. J. Wensinck in the early twentieth century, scholarship has often questioned the ascription of the creed al-Fiqh al-akbar II to the well-known theologian and jurist Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767). But there has hitherto been little attempt to determine how and when this text entered the Hanafi theological tradition and who its true author was. In this article I show that until the early eighth/fourteenth century, theological and biographical works referring to al-Fiqh al-akbar (...) consistently mean the text written by Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī (d. 199/814), which was later renamed al-Fiqh al-absaṭ. I then trace the entry of al-Fiqh al-akbar II into the mainstream tradition, showing that the key figure in its popularization was the legal theorist ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bukhārī (d. 730/1329), who extensively quotes from the creed and attributes it to Abū Ḥanīfa. Finally, I propose that clues in the reception history and content of al-Fiqh al-akbar II corroborate the claim recorded in some texts that it was instead likely written by an obscure late fourth/tenth-century Hanafi scholar named Abū Ḥanīfa Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Bukhārī. (shrink)

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons: A Seventeenth-Century Novel. Translated by Kristin Ingrid Fryklund; introduction by Mark Edward Lewis and Brigitte Baptandier. Seattle: University of Washington press, 2021. Pp. xxiv + 280. $35.

For the Sake of the Vedas: The Anglo-German Life of Friedrich Rosen 1805–1837. By Rosane Rocher, with Agnes Stache-Weiske. Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 118. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2020. Pp. xx + 396.

The main ideas and critical theses of Shady Nasser’s substantial recent book are here critically discussed and evaluated. The book offers many contributions to the field, but I note a few debatable instances where the author’s data are open to interpretations other than those he has concluded. An excursus contains a detailed discussion on the reliability of the eponymous quranic reciters, a topic that, I argue, the book does not treat adequately.

This paper discusses a krater recently discovered in a cultic building at Tel Burna in the Shephelah. Of special interest is the krater’s relatively well-preserved decoration containing multiple nature scenes related to the so-called tree of life or sacred tree motif. The krater’s physical description and archaeological context and the decoration’s relationship to relevant comparanda are explored in order to elucidate the significance of its iconography. In light of this discussion, we conclude that the decoration includes an abstract representation of (...) a Canaanite goddess as a “pubis of life” variation of the “tree of life” motif on the krater as a votive vessel in the Late Bronze Age cult. (shrink)

Known as a composer of fu, of treatises on multiple technical subjects, yet hold- ing no high official position until late in his life, Cai Yong stands out as protesting against certain aspects of public life and as urging a return to the principles of earlier times. Arousing the enmity of some in power, he was put to death in 192. His corpus provides a pointed, if veiled critic of certain aspects of Han governance in his own day.

Sylvain Lévi et l’entrée du sanskrit au Collège de France. By Roland Lardinois. École française d’Extrême-Orient, Sequens, no 3. Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2018. Pp. 147.

The *Kāśyapaparivarta, an early Mahāyāna sūtra, has a complex history. Sanskrit and Tibetan versions, and some of its Chinese translations, have been available to scholars for almost a century, thanks to Staël-Holstein’s 1926 editio princeps. Yet no comprehensive survey of available sources, or critical appraisal of their antecedants, has been published, and most importantly, essential Chinese materials have long been overlooked. The present contribution focuses most centrally on the Chinese translations of the scripture. In addition, the relation of the sūtra (...) to the Mahāratnakūṭa collection of forty-nine texts and the possible Indic origins of the latter are explored. (shrink)

The Ethiosemitic verb hlw ‘to be present’ is strange in three regards: it shows an unusual alternation between -o and -awa in Classical Ethiopic; it is formally Perfect, but used in the present tense; and it has no verbal cognates in other branches of Semitic. This is because it is originally not a Perfect, but a presentative particle, to be connected with other Semitic presentatives reflecting *hallaw. Due to the leveling of the second-person object suffixes to the Perfect endings in (...) Ethiosemitic, suffixed presentative forms like hallo-ka could be reanalyzed as consisting of a verbal stem hallo- and a subject ending -ka. Other forms of the paradigm, including the 3M.SG Perfect hallaw-a, were then created by analogy with III-w 02-stem verbs like fannawa ‘to send’. (shrink)

Over a century ago European explorers in Eastern Turkestan (southern Xinjiang) made a remarkable discovery: the Sunni inhabitants of Khotan were engaged in elaborate veneration of the Shiʿi twelve Imams, whom they believed to be buried at various holy sites in the Khotan region. This paper investigates Khotan’s net work of holy sites and the narratives that were attached to them, from the sixteenth century to the present. While the political landscape of the present may sometimes make the Sunni-Shiʿi divide (...) appear natural, the case of Eastern Turkestan, which had its own, idiosyncratic approach to sectarian identity, reminds us that the maintenance of such a Sunni-Shiʿi consensus on sectarian designation was dependent on networks of knowledge reproduction that did not embrace the entirety of the Muslim world. Pre-Islamic sacred geographies, the power of locally networked holy sites, the phenomenon of textual appropriation, and a popular and eclectic manuscript tradition overwhelmed weak sectarian distinctions, bringing Muslim followers of the Hanafi legal tradition to pray at the purported tombs of Twelver Imams. (shrink)

Reviewing a recent book about early medieval Chinese geographical writings, this essay asks what sort of historical contextualization is needed for historical study, and suggests looking at multiple factors, including the material conditions of textual production, that may be responsible for the proliferation of texts. It cautions against embracing a single story to account for a long historical period, especially if that story fits our modern concerns too neatly; even more importantly, we have to allow the primary sources to take (...) the lead, rather than looking for and presenting only evidence that serves a particular agenda. (shrink)

Islam and Rationality: The Impact of al-Ghazālī. Papers Collected on His 900th Anniversary. Edited by Georges Tamer and Frank Griffel. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, vols. 94, 98. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. xxiv + 454, xx + 344. $202, €154 ; $59, €49.

Les scolastiques indiennes: Genèses, développements, interactions. Edited by Émilie Aussant and Gérard Colas. Études thématiques, vol. 32. Paris: École française d’Extrême-orient, 2020. Pp. 322. €40.

The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik. Edited by IlyA Arkhipov, Leonid Kogan, and Natalia Koslova. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 50. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 829, illus. $234.

Uṣūl al-Dīn. By Tibghūrīn b.!īsā al-Malshūṭī. Edited by 'Amr Khalifa Ennami and translated into English by Trevor Le Gassick. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2020. Pp. 115, 102. $82.80, €68.

In 1955, E. A. Speiser argued that nonreflexive, nonmiddle, and nonreciprocal verbs such as התהלך “walk about” are not derived from the hithpael stem but originate in a durative stem comparable to the Akkadian Gtn. This article challenges Speiser’s argument and intends to show that these “atypical” hithpael verbs indeed reflect semantic features of a reflexive stem.

The idea of Greek influences on Hellenistic Judaism appears to be so deeply engrained within modern scholarship that nothing could upset this apple cart, at least as reflected in two recent books on various aspects of magic, astronomy, and medicine in Jewish sources from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The usual frame of reference relies upon paradigms clearly outlined by Saul Lieberman and Martin Hengel, that Greek culture and science had penetrated Jewish thinking to such an extent, that even Hebrew (...) and Aramaic texts from Qumran or the Mishnah were eventually integrated into an undefined Hellenistic-Greek Jewish episteme. The present review article advocates an alternative Near Eastern context for Jew- ish writings in the period, one that did not reflect Hellenism in any form. (shrink)

Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni. By Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii + 312. $99.99, $32.99, $26.

In the first person singular of the athematic middle optative in the R̥ gveda, there is strong metrical evidence that the poets knew and used forms in *-iy-a along- side the morphologically regular forms in -īy-a. I argue that the forms in *-iy-a are older and developed from PIE *-ih1-h2e by regular sound change, whereas the younger ones in -īy-a result from morphological regularization. The phonological development of *-ih1-h2e > *-iy-a provides further evidence for the historical phonology of “laryngeals” and (...) geminate consonants in the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. (shrink)

Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship, 1800–1950. Edited by John E. Cort, Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg, and Leslie C. Orr. Studies in Asian Art and Culture, vol. 6. Berlin: eb verlAg, 2020. Pp. 615, plates. €69.

Eşrefoğlu Rumi was a Sufi master and poet from the time of the Ottoman sul- tan Mehmed II. His principal writings, a small collection of poems and a treatise Müzekki’n-nüfûs, are both still popular today. Numerous manuscripts of both works survive from the late sixteenth century onward. But there is a substantial gap in the transmission his- tory—no manuscript copy of either work survives from the century following his death, which should be considered anomalous in comparison to other writers of (...) his time. A curious sentence found in some old copies of his Müzekki’n-nüfûs offers an unexpected look into the politics of the day—and, quite probably, an explana- tion for that gap. (shrink)

During the excavation of the Tuyoq Grottoes from 2015 to 2016, a new Sogdian frament was unearthed. This paper aims to provide an edition of the Sogdian fragment and to identify it with the Chinese parallels in the Taishō Tripiṭaka.

Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty. By isaac Yue. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 199. $110 ; $40.

The Arabic documentary papyri are precious wit- nesses to the day-to-day written Arabic of their time. These texts exhibit consider- able variation in grammar and orthography. Classical Arabic and the prescriptive attitudes of the Arabic grammarians traditionally provided the lens through which the earliest documents of the Islamic period have been read. Since Classical Ara- bic was only fully canonized in the tenth century, approaching the early Arabic papyri, and the variation attested in them, through this standard is anachronistic. This (...) article seeks to understand the language of these documents on their own terms. It employs a quantitative approach to investigate the nominal case system, focusing on the form of ʾab in construct, producing a fine-grained analysis of how inflection operated in early documentary Arabic, and attempts to account for points of divergence within a historical and sociolinguistic framework. (shrink)

Classical Arabic Begging Poetry and Šakwā, 8th–12th Centuries. By Nefeli Papoutsakis. Arabische Studien, vol. 14. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017. Pp. viii + 254. €58.

The purpose of this paper is to offer evidence for a set of related formulaic expres- sions meaning ‘bond and blow’, ‘of binding and smiting’, and ‘the substitute for binding and smiting’ in Luvian cuneiform texts of the second millennium bCe. The passages where the relevant formulae are attested have resisted a coherent interpretation thus far. Our argumentation is three-pronged. First, we resort to the combinatorial method to show that these formulae occur in the vicinity of other merisms, and therefore (...) are likely to constitute the same figure of speech. Further- more, we endeavor to demonstrate based on context that they denote something related to strong physical impact. The argument involves a great deal of restored text, but although voluminous, the contexts are so repetitive that the restorations appear warranted. Second, we use the etymological method in order to justify the claim that the roots supplying their reflexes to our formulae are Proto-Indo- European *seh2 ‘to bind’ and *wedh ‘to strike, smite’. The derivation of each of the derivatives occurring in the bipartite merisms under discussion is addressed in some detail, and additional evidence from a Luwian hieroglyphic inscription kululu 1 is adduced to flesh out our hypothesis. Third, we provide typological discussion facilitating the interpretation of “binding” and “smiting” in the context of the Hittite-Luvian antiwitchcraft rituals. It turns out that hostile witchcraft has a potential to both “bind” and “smite” the body parts of its victim. As a whole, the paper represents a contribution to the ongoing decipher- ment of the Luvian language. (shrink)

The Babylonian Talmud has reached us in multiple versions in medieval manu- scripts, early printed editions, and in citations in the works of medieval and early modern scholars. The field of Talmud criticism has developed criteria for working with these materials and the scholar E. S. Rosenthal famously theorized about the implications of textual variants for the history of the Talmud’s redaction. Tractate Temurah of the Babylonian Talmud received special attention due to the frequency and, at times, unique usage of (...) the term, lishana ’aḥarina, meaning “alternative textual reading,” found in it. In Temurah the term lishana ’aḥarina does not only signal a difference in formulation, as in other tractates of the Talmud, but some- times also seems to introduce a separately redacted text of the tractate that was integrated into a widespread and known base text. (shrink)

Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan’s Medieval Mirror Genre. By Erin L. Brightwell. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series, vol. 433. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. Pp. xiii + 327. $60.

Mithras—Miθra—Mitra: Der römische Gott Mithras aus der Perspektive der vergleichenden Religionsgeschichte. By Jaan Lahe. Kasion, vol. 3. Münster: Zaphon, 2019. Pp. 271, 30 pls. €88.

Kōūhala’s Līlāvaī, a romance in Prakrit verse from around 800 CE, has two types of constructions that present “syntactical difficulties” : the use of mhi in the meaning of maē, and the use of amhēhi and tumhēhi in the meanings of amhē and tumhē. This article reviews the phenomena and puts them into the context of expressions of agency in related Indic languages, arguing that Prakrit’s split ergativity is implicated in both cases. A further conclusion is that the particle hi (...) is all but absent from Kōūhala’s Prakrit. (shrink)

This article examines a group of Song-dynasty biji 筆記 anecdotes featuring the Northern Song literary giant Su Shi 蘇軾 playfully engaging with Buddhist encounter dialogues. These religious accounts are well known for their riddle-like language and the baffling effect they create among their readers, prompting the question of whether they were read for humor. Previous scholarship on encounter dialogues focuses on the religious perspective, demonstrating that their perplexing language and rheto- ric serve pedagogical and monastic functions. By contrast, this article (...) explores Chan Buddhist humor from the perspective of the literati and vernacular culture by examining how encounter dialogues were incorporated in Song-dynasty vernacu- lar plays and literati storytelling. Focusing on stories that depict Su Shi’s playful engagement with encounter dialogues as a case study, this article reveals that an important part of Su Shi’s humorous image is inspired and shaped by Buddhism. It also shows that humor in these biji stories is contingent on the readers’ knowledge of Chan literature such as “recorded dialogues” and “transmission records”, which were popular among literati during the Song. The anecdotal materials preserved in biji suggests a mutual influence between Chan literature and vernacular entertainment during the Song. I argue that, in addition to religious functions, literary factors of performance and aesthetics played sig- nificant roles in conditioning the entertaining effect of encounter dialogues, par- ticularly when they were received outside of monastic circles. (shrink)

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought. By Luke B. Yarbrough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 361. $120 ; $32.99.

Among the many manuscripts that emerged from the library cave at Mogaoku 莫 高窟 are copies of a medieval vernacular rhapsody entitled “Rhapsody on the Ershi General Spring”. The poem relates a legend about the Han general Li Guangli 李廣利, who is said to have created a spring to provide drinking water for his troops traversing the desert near Dunhuang 敦煌. This article introduces the manuscripts containing “Rhapsody on the Ershi General Spring,” discusses the background and content of the rhapsody, (...) and translates it. (shrink)

This article is a study of the earliest Twelver Shiʿi literature on pilgrimage to the tombs of the Prophet Muḥammad and his revered descendants. Such tombs had been visited since the first centuries of Islam, holding especial importance for Shiʿis, but the associated pilgrimage rites were not discussed in early Islamic legal literature. This had changed by the mid-fourth/tenth century, as Twelver scholars sought to codify ziyāra alongside long-established rites like prayer and ḥajj. As they did so, these scholars had (...) to mediate between the accustomed texts and tools of legal discourse and a world of practice, identity, and devotion that lay beyond the usual purview of the law. Ziyāra might be just another voluntary piety, but it might also be more important than the ḥajj itself. (shrink)

Zhou Zuoren, a pioneer of the New Culture Movement, became a collaborator and classicist poet during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This article attempts to bridge the gap between two periods of Zhou’s life: his later return to Chinese lyric classicism and his earlier career as a pioneer of vernacular poetry, translator of Japanese haiku, and literary critic championing a “Short Verse Movement.” I argue that Zhou’s wartime doggerels consisted of a modernist project in classicist guise, a continuation of his endeavor (...) to lend expression to the immediacy and the transience of the moment through a native linguistic medium. Reflecting the urgency of self-expression under the Japanese occupation, Zhou’s esoteric doggerels represent a lyric subjectivity in crisis vis-à-vis the epic of history. By participating in a global moment of literary modernity, they also represent an “alternative lyric modernity” for China. (shrink)

Repentance and the Return to God: Tawba in Early Sufism. By Atif Khalil. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 260. $95 ; $32.95.

The place of reason in the Islamic tradition has attracted much debate, among both classical scholars and modern researchers. One of the main areas of disagreement is the definition of reason, with scholars from various disciplines oftentimes offering different definitions, which, in turn, undergird their corresponding understanding of rationalism. Starting in the classical period, Muslim scholars have credited al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī with making a particularly powerful contribution to the discussion by defining reason as an “instinct” and elaborating on this definition; many (...) recent scholars concur with this assessment. This article studies al-Muḥāsibī’s theory of reason through his major work on the subject, Māʾiyyat al-ʿaql. More specifically, it examines the concluding, analytical section of this work, titled “Masʾala fī al-ʿaql”, which bears an unusual resemblance to a work by al-Muḥāsibī’s contemporary al-Jāḥiẓ, “Ḥujaj al-nubuwwa”. By analyzing the similarities between these texts through a detailed comparison, the article attempts to verify the authorship of this critical section of al-Muḥāsibī’s work, thereby casting light on other contributions to the study of reason in Islam that were eclipsed by the scholarly concentration on al-Muḥāsibī’s output. For this comparison, the text of “Masʾala fī al-ʿaql” is fully edited and translated. (shrink)

Siedlungskammer Kilikien: Studien zur Kultur- und Landschaftsgeschichte des Ebenen Kilikien. By Susanne Rutishauser. Schriften zur Vorderasiatischen Archäologie, vol. 16. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. Pp. xiii + 212, illus. €88.

The Mandaean Book of John: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary. Edited by Charles G. Häberl and James F. McGrath. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2020. Pp. vii + 467. $218.99.

A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī. By Konrad Hirschler. Edinburgh: EdinBurgh University Press, 2019. Pp. x + 624, illus. $130.

Archaeology and History of Eighth-Century Judah. Edited by Zev I. Farber and Jacob l. Wright. Ancient Near East Monographs, vol. 23. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 593, illus. $79.95.

The Theology of Hathor of Dendera: Aural and Visual Scribal Techniques in the Per-Wer Sanctuary. By Barbara A. Richter. Brown University Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Wilbour Studies, vol. 4. Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2016. Pp. xxix + 543, illus. $145. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, CT].

Focusing on A Sketch of Sites and Objects in the Imperial Capital, this article examines how the primary author, Liu Tong, created and preserved the cultural memory of Beijing through writing the city’s scenic sites in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. Liu Tong, who sojourned in the capital then situated on the state’s frontier, observed Beijing during a period of comprehensive decay. This temporal and spatial framework affected the way he observed Beijing’s northern landscape features and inspired him (...) to both preserve the city’s literary and historical heritage and report on its current dilapidation. This study addresses Liu Tong’s literary strategies to preserve Beijing’s literary legacy and surviving landscapes, with particular attention to his adaptation of earlier travel writings about Beijing, his development of a new lyrical style of prose, and the portrayal of the immediate reality of his lived experience. (shrink)

Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry. A Study of Anzû, Enūma Eliš, and Erra and Išum. By Selena Wisnom. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. viii + 280. $185.

Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography. By Yuri Pines. New York: Columbia UniversitY Press, 2020. Pp. 352. $120 ; $30.

Askese und Devotion: Das rituelle System der Terāpanth Śvetāmbara Jaina. 2 vols. By Peter Flügel. Alt- und Neu-Indische Studien, vol. 56. Dettelbach: J.H. Röll, 2018. Pp. 1227. €229.

The present essay explores the question of continuity and change between Kaneš and Ḫattuša in the cultic sphere, reviewing the cult of Parga, probably a fertility goddess of local Anatolian origin, in the Hittite sources. It reveals that Parga appears in several different cultic contexts but within a relatively invariable sequence of offerings, often appearing with the same, often “exotic” deities, such as Zūluma, Šišumma/i, and Šurra. The probable location for performance of many of these cultic sequences in the lower (...) town of Ḫattuša, one of the most ancient parts of the city, shows a great deal of continuity between the Old Assyrian and the Old Hittite periods, and may further highlight the antiquity of these cults. Since some of the cultic action considered in this essay took place in close proximity to the ašuša-gate, the evidence concerning the location of that gate, probably at the western or northwestern section of the fortification wall and near some of the institutions located in its vicinity, will be examined. (shrink)

Being Human: Baha’i Perspectives on Islam, Modernity, and Peace. By Todd Lawson. Studies in the Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, vol. 25. Los Angeles: Kalimát PreSS, 2019. Pp. xxi + 172. $39.95.

Die mandäische Religion und der aramäische Hintergrund des Manichäismus: Forschungsgeschichte, Textvergleiche, historisch-geographische Verortung. By Ionuţ Danial Băncilă. Mandäistische Forschungen, vol. 6. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018. Pp. x + 301. €74.

Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World. By L. W. C. van Lit. Handbook of Oriental Studies, I, vol. 137. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xi + 333. $150, €125, open access: https://brill.com/view/title/56196.

There are several features of Akkadian that set it apart from other Semitic languages. One such feature is the assumption of seven alefs that descended from Proto-Semitic phonemes, *ʔ, *h, *ʕ, *ɣ, *ħ, and sometimes *w and *j. The standard account is that they merged before being lost in nearly every environment. Additionally, ʔ3-5 interact with the low-back vowel, [a], producing [e]. Two other issues regarding the shift from [a] to [e] is which environments [e] surfaces in to be reanalyzed, (...) and the fact that there are several roots that have [e] and no apparent conditioning environment. In this article I provide a solution to these issues clarifying the conditioning environments obscured by Akkadian orthography and Semitic derivational morphology. I show that voicing assimilation alone is responsible for the different outcomes of *ħ and *ʕ, which have the same distribution. This assimilation has parallels in non-guttural roots such as *√ntn, which becomes √ndn in Akkadian. Whether *ʕ and *ħ surface as or depends less on the underlying form than on assimilation to the voicing value of the adjacent consonant radical. With this analysis, there is no reason left to reject Kowenburg’s theory that gutturals became glides which cause raising to [e], with the slight amendment that it is the voiced variant *ʕ alone which becomes a glide. (shrink)

Collective Liability in Islam: The ʿĀqila and Blood-Money Payments. By Nurit Tsafrir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 167. $99.99.

Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives. By Fozia Bora. The Early and Medieval Islamic World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019. Pp. xviii + 250. $115.

Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans. Translated and edited by Wai-yee Li. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 328. $60, $20.

Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages. By Sam van Schaik. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2020. Pp. xiv + 226. $18.95.

Gu Yanwu, Record of Daily Knowledge and Collected Poems and Essays: Selections. Translated and edited by Ian Johnston. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. xvii + 323. $75.

Towards a History of Egyptology: Proceedings of the Egyptological Section of the 8th ESHS Conference in London, 2018. Edited by Hana Navratilova, Thomas l. Gertzen, Aidan Dodson, and Andrew Bednarski. Investigatio Orientis, vol. 4. Münster: Zaphon, 2019. Pp. 304, illus. €79.

This article treats the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic 3rd person singular pronoun נוולא nawla, attested four times in the vast rabbinic corpus: three times in the Babylonian Talmud and one time in Tractate Sofrim. First, it is shown that the form is epicene, as it can have both masculine and feminine antecedents. Second, the four attestations reveal a specialized meaning for the form, to wit, ‘this-one’ or ‘that-one’ when there are specifically two items under discussion. Which is to say, the form (...) נוולא nawla is not used for simple ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘this’ or ‘that’, for which JBA and other Aramaic dialects have familiar and widely attested forms. Third, the article proposes that the form is borrowed from the Hurro-Urartian family, well known for its epicene pronouns. See, for example, Hurrian anni=lla, ani=lla, etc., Urartian i=ne=lə, ina=ne=lə, etc. Even though these forms are plural forms, while נוולא nawla is a singular form, comparative evidence demonstrates that when pronouns are borrowed from one language to another, they at times may jump person and number. (shrink)

Aus geteilten Zeiten: Studien zur Nanbeichao-Periode. Geburtstagsgabe für Shing Müller 宋馨. Edited by Roderich Ptak. Deutsche Ostasienstudien, vol. 35. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2020. Pp. vi + 216. €29.

This paper sets forth a proposal for deriving the emphatic particle Ved. áha from an obsolete present form of the verb ā́ha ‘says’. The suggested verbal origin accounts for unusual syntactic features of the particle, most notably the synchronically unmotivated accentuation of the verb in a main clause containing áha.

Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China. By Ting Zhang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 252. $95, $30.

Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory: An Outline of Western Studies of Chinese Unearthed Documents. By Edward l. Shaughnessy. Library of Sinology, vol. 4. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019. Pp. xx + 485. $69 ; open access: https://www.degruyter.com/document/ doi/10.1515/9781501516948/html?lang=en.

There is a widespread belief in Hinduism that Vyāsa, the alleged editor of the Vedas and author of the Mahābhārata, is identical with Bādarāyaṇa, the author of the Brahma-sūtra. The identification of these two mythic characters, however, originated between 800–980 CE, after the likes of Śaṅkara, Padmapāda, and Bhāskara, but before Vācaspati Miśra, Prakāśātman, Sarvajñātman, and Yāmuna. The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why such identification took place. The argument developed here is that the Bādarāyaṇa-Vyāsa identity (...) was invented by the author of or community behind the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as part of a complex of self-representation strategies. The Bhāgavata intentionally makes itself a work of Vedānta, indeed the Brahma-sūtra itself, over which it builds a new soteriology that is centered on the idea of bhakti. Two factors in particular stand out in light of the Bhāgavata’s Vedāntic background: Vyāsa’s paradigmatic character as the preserver of old dharma and the innovator, visionary, of new soteriologies; and the image of Vyāsa’s son Śuka as the model ascetic and ideal candidate for the new soteriological vision, through whom the Bhāgavata community chose to represent itself. (shrink)

The Villages of the Fayyum: A Thirteenth-Century Register of Rural, Islamic Egypt. Edited and translated by Yossef Rapoport and Ido Shahar. The Medieval Countryside, vol. 18. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. Pp. viii + 260. €90. Rural Economy and Tribal Society in Islamic Egypt: A Study of al-Nābulsī’s Villages of the Fayyum. By Yossef Rapoport. The Medieval Countryside, vol. 19. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. Pp. xxix + 285. €110.

The writings of al-Ghazālī give the distinct impression that he was highly concerned with the threat the Ismailis and their doctrines posed. By his own admission, he wrote six separate treatises to refute and condemn them, most importantly his Faḍāʾiḥ al-bāṭiniyya, which he composed in the year 488h in the months prior to his renunciation of government service and departure from Baghdad. His attack focused on the doctrine known as taʿlīm, with its insistence on the unrivaled absolute authority of a (...) single infallible Imam. He had in mind the Alamut teaching by Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ of a doctrine then widely advocated in the Abbasid–Seljuk East. Significantly, there is no sign of this term used in this manner in the western Fatimid domains either earlier or later. However, our knowledge of events in the career of Ḥasan and of his teachings come from much later sources and are in part legendary at best. Although the doctrine of taʿlīm was certainly implicit in Ismaili works long before, in this particular work al-Ghazālī directed his attentions squarely against a new teaching he encountered personally in his own time and place. But we know it otherwise primarily from accounts recorded much later, in particular al-Shahrastānī’s al-Milal wa-l-niḥal. (shrink)

The Hermopolis letters showcase the personal concerns of those writing Aramaic letters in the era of Persian Egypt. One individual named Nabuša is particularly interesting because of his familial correspondence and emotional tone. This study will examine what can be known about this writer and his complaints about an unwanted tunic and a snakebite. There have been several notable disagreements about the Aramaic translation of Nabuša’s concerns, whose discussion will help heighten our understanding of his passion.

Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China. By Ying Zhang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 306. $50.

“Qiuchi” 仇池 recurs as an enigmatic proper name in Su Shi’s 蘇 軾 later poetry. While scholars have treated Qiuchi primarily as the poet’s name for strange rocks, I argue that it is in the first place a metaphorical topos for him—it is a heterotopia, a counter-site to reality for this nonconformist. As a poetic image, Su Shi’s Qiuchi is a composite motif that allows for diverse interpretations. It is a hallucinatory dreamscape at the outset; the vision then turns out (...) to be Mount Qiuchi, a historical spot and Daoist “grotto heaven” near Su’s hometown in Sichuan so that Qiuchi becomes a macro-micro-equation of landscape; finally, the poet analogizes his Qiuchi to Tao Qian’s 陶潛 Peach Blossom Spring while denying its transcendency by bringing it down to earth. Qiuchi also inhabits various roles in Su Shi’s different life stages. It appears in matching poems among scholar-officials as the antithesis of bureaucratic service and an expression of longing for seclusion when the poet was in office. During his banishment, the inaccessible Qiuchi is the prototypical home topos and projected on other sites of exile as mirror images, which I call “heterotopia and its paratopia.” In this way, the Qiuchi trope contributes to Su Shi’s self-identity and public image, crystallized in the poet’s posthumous appellation. (shrink)

The Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria : Scribes, Libraries and Market. By Doris Behrens-Abouseif. Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, vol. 162. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xii + 178. $120, €100.

Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Selections from The Comprehensive Exposition of the Interpretation of the Verses of the Qurʾān. Translated by Scott C. Lucas. 2 vols. Cambridge: The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and The Islamic Texts Society, 2017. Pp. xxxiv + 575; xxxii + 550. $32.95 each.

Lexikalische Texte I: ur5-ra = ḫubullu, mur-gud = imrû = ballu, Lú-Listen. By Frauke Weiershäuser and Ivan Hrůša. 2 vols. Keilschrifttexte aus Assur literatischen Inhalts, vol. 8, Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesell- schaft, vol. 153. Wiesbaden: HarrassowitZ Verlag, 2018. Pp. xv + 567, illus. €98.

The Notebook of Djuthmose, P. Vienna ÄS 10321. By Regina Hölzl, Michael Neumann, and Robert J. Demarée. Probleme der Ägyptologie, vol. 37. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. viii + 72, 23 pls. €145.

Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft. Edited by Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xlii + 644. $179, €149.

The ‘History of the Kings of the Persians’ in Three Arabic Chronicles: The Transmission of the Ira- nian Past from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Robert G. Hoyland. Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 69. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 185. $120, £90 ; $34.95, £24.95.

A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century. By Marinos Sariyannis, with a chapter by E. Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas. Handbook of Oriental Studies, sect. 1, vol. 125. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xi + 596. $179. Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought. By Hüseyin Yilmaz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 370. $39.95 ; $27.95.

Le théâtre de l’Inde médiévale entre tradition et innovation: Le Moharājaparājaya de Yaśaḥpāla. By Basile Leclère. Indica et Tibetica, vol. 54. Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 2013. Pp. 614. €84.

A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. By John L. Hays. Aids and Research Tools in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, vol. 5. 3rd ed. Malibu, CA: unDena publications, 2018. Pp. vi + 579. $50.

Corpus of Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian Incantations. By Elyze Zomer. Leipziger Altorientalische Studien, vol. 9. Wiesbaden: HarrassowitZ Verlag, 2018. Pp. xxiv + 463, 3 pls. €84.

Language between God and the Poets: Maʿnā in the Eleventh Century. By Alexander Key. Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 267. $34.95.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers. By Jack Tannous. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 647. $39.95, £34.

The Creation of Philosophical Tradition: Biography and the Reception of Avicenna’s Philosophy from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century A.D. By Ahmed H. al-Rahim. Diskurse der Arabistik, vol. 21. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. Pp. xviii + 218. €42.

The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, Aššur-etel-ilāni, and Sîn-šarra- iškun. Edited by Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, vol. 5/1. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2019. Pp. xxx + 449. $89.95.

Sedfestritual und Königtum: Die Reliefdekoration am Torbau Osorkons II. im Tempel der Bastet von Bubastis. By Eva Lange-Athinodorou. Ägyptologische Abhandlungen, vol. 75. Wiesbaden: Harrassowit Verlag, 2019. Pp. ix + 503, illus. €148.

The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. By Stephen J. Shoemaker. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 260. $59.95, £52.

What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming. By Aurelia Campbell. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 217. $65.

Le personnel cultuel à l’époque néo-sumérienne. By Fabienne Huber Vulliet. Biblioteca del Próximo Oriente Antiguo, vol. 14. Madrid: ConseJo Superior De Investigaciones Científicas, 2019. Pp. 513.

Recipes from the Garden of Contentment. By Yuan Mei, translated and annotated by Sean J. S. Chen. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2019. Pp. xxxiii + 428. $125.

Universal Śaivism: The Appeasement of All Gods and Powers in the Śāntyadhyāya of the Śivadharmaśāśtra. By Peter C. Bisschop. Gonda Indological Studies, vol. 18. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. viii + 221. $75.

No Moonlight in My Cup: Sinitic Poetry from the Japanese Court, Eighth to the Twelfth Centuries. Edited and translated by Judith N. Rabinovitch and Timothy R. BradstocK. East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 10. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxvi + 474. $232.

The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books. By John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa Darnell. Writings from the Ancient World, vol. 39. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018. Pp. xxxvii + 685, illus. $99.95.

A Maritime Lexicon: Arabic Nautical Terminology in the Indian Ocean. By Abdulrahman al Salimi and Eric Staples. Studies on Ibadism and Oman, vol. 11. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2019. Pp. 641, illus. €88.

Child Custody in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice in Egypt since the Sixteenth Century. By Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 266. $99.99, £75.

Diamond Sutra Narratives: Textual Production and Lay Religiosity in Medieval China. By Chiew Hui Ho. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 144. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xiv + 520. $159.

In the fifth–sixth century CE the rulers of the Kadamba dynasty claimed the town of Halsi in modern Karnataka as the northern capital of their expanding polity. Their investments in this locale are recorded in a corpus of copper-plate inscriptions spanning four generation of kings. The plates record the growth of a thriving Jain community at Palāśikā and are revelatory of their relationships with the Kadamba rulers and their agents. This study of the donative and political processes converging in Palāśikā (...) shows that the use of Sanskrit inscriptions as media for royal representation and public self-fashioning was highly developed in the Kadamba polity, where idioms and trends developed independent of the Gupta royal model. Moreover, the evidence from Halsi is indicative of the centrality of Jain religious communities, ideologies, and institutions in the administration of the Kadamba polity and the expression of a lineage identity. (shrink)

Les hymnes au dieu Khnoum de la façade ptolémaїque du temple d’Esna. By Abraham I. Fernández Pichel. Studien zur spätägyptischen Religion, vol. 23. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018. Pp. xiv + 217, 21 pls. €94.

productive Traditions in Ancient Egypt: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Liège, 6th–8th February 2013. Edited by Todd Gillen. Aegyptiaca Leodiensia, vol. 10. Liege: Presses Universiraires de Liège, 2017. Pp. v + 621. €74.

The orthography of the relative pronoun and the near demonstrative pronoun in the Byblian dialect of Phoenician is exactly the same, meaning that the grapheme z in introductions to dedication inscriptions has been left to interpretation. The historically related nature of these pronouns and their linguistic development led to this situation, in which the written expression of both pronouns in Byblian is identical. In this article, I examine this situation from a variety of perspectives, using both inner-Phoenician word order and (...) comparative data from related languages, in order to show that two patterns underlie the pronoun z in the introduction to Byblian dedication inscriptions. First, I present the historical data regarding the development of the near demonstrative and relative pronouns in Phoenician. Next, I provide an analysis of the syntax of Phoenician dedication inscriptions and offer comparative material in mortuary inscriptions in Phoenician as well as evidence from Old Aramaic and Samʾalian. In doing so, I argue that, in light of comparative evidence, there is good reason to posit that two patterns exist underlying Byblian z, one in which the grapheme indicates the relative pronoun and another in which the grapheme indicates the near demonstrative. (shrink)

Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661–1257. By Taef El-Azhari. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. xix + 449. $140, £90.

What kind of impact did social networks of Song literati have on their lives in exile? This paper focuses on Sun Di 孫覿, a prominent literary figure in the Northern to Southern Song transition, and studies his epistolary writings in connection with his banishment to Xiangzhou 象州 in the years 1133 and 1134. Through an in-depth analysis of the contents of his letters, the paper shows how Sun Di established ties with officials in different localities and how he responded to (...) the humiliation of banishment. I argue that Sun Di’s reputation as a literary stylist among his contemporaries helped him to develop a good rapport with local officials, particularly in the Guangnan West circuit, which was essential to creating a relatively comfortable exile journey and a pleasant life during his confinement. This study highlights the value of letters as historical sources pertaining to Song political and literati culture and sheds light on literati responses to life’s many challenges. (shrink)

Inscriptions of Chin and the San-Chin, Chung-Shan, and Yen 晉與三晉金文及相關史事彙考. By Noel Barnard. 3 vols. Taipei: SMC Publishing inc., 2018. Pp. cxlvi + 867, xviii + 997, xiv + 1092. NT 15,000.

Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World. By Christian C. Sahner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xxi + 335, illus. $39.95, £34 ; $27.95, £22.

The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry. A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis. Edited by A. A. Seyed-Ghorab. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2019. Pp. x + 662, illus. $75.

Sufism and Early Islamic Piety: Personal and Communal Dynamics. By Arin Shawkat Salamah-Qudsi. Cambridge: camBridge universiTy Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 315. $99.99, £75 ; $80.

The First Compendium of Ibadi Law: The Mudawwana by Abu Ghanim Bishr b. Ghanim al-Khurasani. By Miklos Muranyi. Studies on Ibadism and Oman, vol. 14. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2018. Pp. 159. €38.

Hasmonean Realities behind Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives. By Israel Finkelstein. Ancient Israel and Its Literature, vol. 34. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 208. $32.95.

Sumerian Model Contracts from the Old Babylonian Period in the Hilprecht Collection Jena. By Gabriella Spada. Texte und Materialien der Hilprecht Collection, vol. 11. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018. Pp. x + 126, 32 pls. €78.

Un principe nel deserto: Leone Caetani nel Sinai e nel Sahara. I diari, le lettere, le fotografie. By Valentina Sagaria Rossi. Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Fondazione Leone Caeta- ni, vol. 28. Rome: Bardi ediZioni, 2018. Pp. 561, illus. €68.

Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies: Life and Collections of Johann Gottfried Wetzstein in Context. Edited by Boris Liebrenz and Christoph Rauch. Islamic Manuscripts and Books, vol. 19. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxiii + 437, illus. $130, €108.

The article presents an analysis of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s treatment of fasting and hunger as it appears in chapters 106 and 107 of al-­Futūḥāt al-­makkiyya. In the process of examining this very short section of the encyclopedic text, the essay both draws out the deeper theological significance of hunger and fasting and highlights the virtues and trappings of the spiritual exercise in the mystic’s thought. An attempt is also made to situate some of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ideas within the broader context of (...) the earlier Sufi tradition to which he was heir. (shrink)

This article discusses one of the main problems of the Zalpa-text, namely that its mythological part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Nēša, but leaves Ḫattuša unmentioned, whereas its historical part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Ḫattuša, but contains no reference to Nēša. Following Martínez’ 2016 suggestion that in the text’s historical part Ḫattuša does not have the function of capital of the kings who feature in this story, but is merely used as a military base for (...) the campaigns against Zalpa, it will be argued that during the historical events described in the Zalpa-text these kings in fact ruled from Nēša. A major consequence of this interpretation is that Nēša was the capital during the reigns of the early Hittite kings Ḫuzzii̯a I and Labarna I and also that Ḫattušili I ascended the throne there before he moved his court to Ḫattuša. (shrink)

Le waqf de la mosquée des Omeyyades de Damas: Le manuscrit ottoman d’un inventaire mamelouk établi en 816/1413. Edited by Mathieu Eychenne, Astrid Meier, and Élodie Vigouroux. Beirut: Presses de l’ifpo, 2018. Pp. 741. €75.

Recent bioarchaeological and phylogenetic studies have identified Central Asia as an early reservoir for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague in humans and animals. Lacking documentary evidence, however, historians have heretofore been unable to find a place for South, East, and Central Asia in the premodern history of the plague. This article uses Tibetan-, Chinese-, and Khotanese-language sources to tell a history of the bubonic plague in Central Asia between the seventh and ninth centuries. From official Tibetan (...) histories, we learn of human and animal plagues at the turn of the eighth century. From the prophetic narratives of Khotan, we learn of an unnamed Chinese princess who died in Tibet with a black pox on her chest. Finally, interpreting Tibetan and Khotanese translations of an Āyurvedic medical text in light of bioarchaeological data, we can begin to retrospectively diagnose the plagues of Central Asia. More than just the documentary history of a specific plague outbreak, these sources demonstrate the variegated responses to centuries of plague in Central Asia, including narrative description, scapegoating, ritual protection, humoral diagnosis, and pharmacological and surgical therapies. The end result is an integrated account of the bubonic plague in Central Asia based on Tibetan and Khotanese explanations of epidemics. (shrink)

Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic. By Ambjörn Sjörs. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 91. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xv + 478. $140.

A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India. By Patton E. Burchett. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 433, 2 plates. $70.

Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, vol. 3: From 1914 to the Twenty-First Century. By Jason Thompson. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 598.

How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? By Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 221. $45.

In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt. By Khaled Fahmy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 377. $39.95.

Arab Christians and the Qurʾan from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period. Edited by Mark Beaumont. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv + 216. $120, €104.

This paper discusses the stem variance of the root ḥ­b­q in the Bible, suggesting that its inconsistent conjugation does not reflect the original Biblical Hebrew, but rather results from an anachronistic pronunciation created by the Masoretes. The paper reviews the research of Masoretic anachronisms and the methodologies developed to identify them, applying these to the case of the root ḥ­b­q. It concludes that ḥ­b­q belongs to a specific type of Masoretic anachronism, in which original Qal forms were misvocalized by the (...) Masoretes as Piel under the influence of Mishnaic Hebrew. After presenting biblical and extra-biblical evidence to support this conclusion, the paper briefly discusses some of its main implications for the diachronic study of ancient Hebrew: the "late spelling paradox," the scope of the phenomenon of substituting Piel for Qal, and the relation between Masoretic anachronisms and the scholarly debate about the linguistic reliability of the Masoretic text. (shrink)

On the Growth and Composition of the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas: Relationship to Kāvya; Social and Economic Context. Proceedings of the Fifth Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas, August 2008. Edited by Ivan Andrijanić and Sven Sellmer. Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016. Pp. xxvi + 536.

Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, vol. 1: Sources from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 403. $150.

The Material and Ideological Base of the Old Babylonian State: History, Economy, and Politics. By Lukáš Pecha. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. xvii + 316. $115.

The Dialectical Forge: Juridical Disputation and the Evolution of Islamic Law. By Walter Edward Young. Logic, Argumentation and Reasoning, vol. 9. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017. Pp. xiv + 643. $149.99, €124.79 ; $109, €101.14.

This article assesses the importance of the biblical book of Daniel in the first four Islamic centuries, focusing in particular on the legendary materials contained in Daniel 1–6. The article is divided into three sections. In the first section the treatments of Daniel 1–6 in Isrāʾīliyyāt works are examined, and it is shown that summaries of Daniel 1–6 in these works display evidence of oral transmission. Additionally, it is shown that some authors’ familiarity with Daniel legends led them to insert (...) this character into “biblical” narratives that do not otherwise relate to him. In the second section it is argued that Daniel’s exploits were so widely known that they served as a sort of yardstick for judging the relative importance of some other “heroic” figures who are described in classical Islamic sources. In the third section it is postulated that the introductory sections of Ibn Hishām’s Sīra consciously relate stories with Danielic associations in order to bring the Sīra into line with the Christian Gospels. (shrink)

Seafaring Expeditions to Punt in the Middle Kingdom: Excavations at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Egypt. By Kathryn A. Bard and Rodolfo Fattovich. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 96. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xvi + 233. $156.

Ḥmēdān al-Shwēʿir. Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18th-Century Najd. Edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. l + 198. $35. ʿAbdallāh Ibn Sbayyil. Arabian Romantic: Poems on Bedouin Life and Love. Edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. li + 311. $35.

“Tu es de mon sang”: Les alliances dans le Proche-Orient ancien. By Dominique Charpin. Paris: collège de France, les Belles leTTres, 2019. Pp. 337, illus. €21.

This study investigates the literary-historical context of the attempts by late Southern Song critics to periodize Tang poetry. It demonstrates that the primary agenda of these critics was to establish High Tang poetry as the sole correct model. The insistence on the supremacy of the High Tang went in tandem with, and formed part of, the rebuke of contemporary poets for choosing Late Tang poetry as the object of emulation. The focal point of contention was whether Late Tang poetry could (...) or should serve as a useful model, at least for some in the initial stage of their poetic training. In this context, periodizations of Tang poetry functioned as an auxiliary to the discourse on choices of models in the late Southern Song. (shrink)

The Unknown Benno Landsberger: A Biographical Sketch of an Assyriological Altmeister’s Develop- ment, Exile, and Personal Life. By Ludĕk Vacín. Leipziger Altorientalische Studien, vol. 10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018. Pp. xvi + 132, illus. €39. And: Bernard V. Bothmer, Egyptologist in the Making, 1912 through July 1946: With Bothmer’s Own Account of His Escape from Central Europe in October 1941. By Marianne Eaton-Krauss. Investgatio Orientis, vol. 3. Münster: Zaphon, 2019. Pp. 174, illus. €59.

I will assess earlier approaches to the morphology of the G-stem imperative in Semitic and mount a reconstruction that supports a specific set of disyllabic patterns for the imperative of the basic stem in Proto-Semitic, i.e., qutul, qitil, and qital. The most common process envisioned for the formation of the imperative is clipping from the prefix conjugation, but the most recent full treatment of the topic is Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal’s revision and expansion of a century-old proposal that qatul, qatil, and (...) qital are the patterns of the imperative in Proto-Semitic. I refute both the clipping approach and Bar-Asher’s patterns in favor of qutul, qitil, and qital, which are the most economical and precise reconstruction in accounting for the realizations of the imperative in the various branches of Semitic. (shrink)

The phonetic change between b and w is analyzed in a new way. The phenomenon can be considered as firmly established in current research and the list of examples is here enriched by further material. The objects of investigation consist of writings of single words, as well as plays on words.

Die Sicht auf die Welt zwischen Ost und West. Edited by Robert Rollinger. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 12. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. Pp. x + 231 + 119, map in pocket. €79.

Lukas Nickel’s article “The First Emperor and Sculpture in China” in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies has drawn significant attention to the issue of Hellenistic influence on the making of the terracotta warriors excavated from the mausoleum of the First Emperor of China. In the perspective of textual evidence, Nickel attaches much importance to the connection between the Chinese report of the twelve da ren 大人 in Lintao 臨洮 in the Hanshu and the account of (...) the construction of “altars” to the twelve Olympian gods by Alexander the Great at the easternmost point of his expedition to India in the Bibliotheca Historica. This coincidence suggests to Nickel that the twelve Big Men are a possible reference to large sculptural figures erected on the western border of the empire. This article aims to question this interpretation of the twelve da ren as sculptures in the Hanshu. A twofold examination of the textual and other historical sources will make clear that the twelve Big Men were mentioned not as huge statues but as exceptionally tall visitors, an exemplary omen related to human illness manifested in physical abnormality. (shrink)

Lives of Sogdians in Medieval China. By Moritz Huber. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. Pp. xvi + 350.

Édition synoptique et traduction des chapitres supplémentaires du Livre des Morts 162 à 167. By Annik Wüthrich. 2 vols. Studien zu Ältägyptischen Totentexten, vol. 19. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015. Pp. xxi + 333, viii + 179, illus. €168.

Anthropomorphism in Islam: The Challenge of Traditionalism. By Llivnat Holtzman. Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 434. $130, £85 ; $44.95, £29.99.

Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought. By Ahmad S. Dallal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 421. $100 ; $34.95 ; $27.99.

Medieval Jerusalem: Forging an Islamic City in Spaces Sacred to Christians and Jews. By Jacob Lassner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. xxv + 242. $75.

The Provincial Capitals of Ērānšahr, a medieval Zoroastrian Middle Persian text, recounts how the daughter of the Jewish exilarch married the Sasanian king Yaz- dgird I and gave birth to Wahrām Gōr, his successor. While the historicity of the text has been largely undermined, scant attention has been given to its authorship and purpose. This article proposes that the story’s creators were members of the exilarch’s household in the tenth through eleventh century who internalized the broader concern with Sasanian pedigree (...) during the period known as the Iranian intermezzo in an effort to appeal to Iranian Jews and other elites alike. Studying this text and its origins provides evidence of contact between Jews and Zoroastrians during this period and offers a new suggestion about the cultural context of the Zoroastrians who produced The Provincial Capitals. (shrink)

This paper investigates the representation of the Shijing 詩經 and its hermeneutic traditions in Cao Zhi’s 曹植 poetic writings with regard to the reception and utilization of the Shijing at different stages, especially the early third century CE. Cao Zhi not merely appropriated poetic utterances and literary patterns from particular odes but also presented a variety of Shijing-related interpretations, which show correspondences with different hermeneutic traditions that transcended the boundaries of the four main Shijing schools. This case represents a syncretic (...) mode of the reception and utilization of the Shijing within larger intellectual and cultural contexts. The Cao regime, as the new ruling authority in Northern China around the early third century CE, engaged in gathering dispersed literary scholars and cultural legacies, in which the Shijing-related materials and sources played significant roles. Taking Cao Zhi’s syncretic representation of the Shijing and its hermeneutic traditions as an instantiation of these factors, this paper also aims to invite methodological reflections on the traditional and modern studies of the reception of the Shijing, considering its status with both literal significance and hermeneutic diversity in early and medieval China. (shrink)

Al-Ghazālī on Condemnation of Pride and Self-Admiration : Book XXIX of the Revival of the Religious Sciences. Translated by Mohammed Rustom. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2018. Pp. xxxvi + 190. £17.99.

Kleine Schriften. By Eva Tichy, edited by Axel Metzger. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2018. Pp. xviii + 698. €98.

Focused on Nandi Timmana’s sixteenth-century Telugu epic poem, Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, this article analyzes citrakāvya, a genre of poetry that includes various kinds of patterned verses, word puzzles, and figural poems. The seventeenth-century Telugu grammarian Appakavi outlines three genres of citrakāvya: 1) citrakavitvamu ; 2) bandhakavitvamu ; and 3) garbhakavitvamu. Timmana employs all three genres of citrakāvya in Theft of a Tree 5.92–99, which are set in the voice of Nārada praising Kṛṣṇa as god. Rather than reading citrakāvya as simply a form (...) of alaṅkāra, I argue that citrakāvya primarily functions as a form of stotra in the context of Timmana’s Theft of a Tree. Shifting the flow of his rather fast-paced narrative, Timmana intentionally uses citrakāvya to praise and even capture god through the complex figuration of syllables and sounds. Timmana’s citras are essential to scripting a new layer of the pārijāta narrative, one that highlights the voice of the poet himself speaking to his god. (shrink)

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. By Zev Handel. Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xiv + 369. $59.

This article examines the lexical emergence of salafiyya in the Algerian press between 1925 and 1927, which currently constitutes the earliest known use of this abstract noun in Arabic. An attentive reading of the sources reveals that, since it was a new category, it had not yet an established meaning. The task of outlining its definition and features fell to the reformers who first used it. One of them, Abū Yaʿlā al-Zawāwī, did so in a way that defies today’s conventional (...) thinking: he laid claim to Salafism while disparaging the Sunna and attempting to reduce the authority of hadith literature. The article shows that the core intellectual features we routinely associate with Salafism were not necessarily embraced by the historical actors who used this term at its inception in the mid-1920s. This has implications for the proper historicization of Salafism as a category. (shrink)

Jamal Mian: The Life of Maulana Jamaluddin Abdul Wahab of Firangi Mahall, 1919–2012. By Francis Robinon. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxv + 429. $29.95, £22.99.

The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 1, Ancient Science. Edited by Alexander Jones and Liba Taub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 642. $160.

Writing Laws in Antiquity. Edited by Dominique Jaillard and Christophe Nihan. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 19. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. Pp. 170. €58.

The Qur’an and Its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion. By Mark Durie. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. lvi + 337. $120.

The Quran makes repentance an important element of piety and exhorts believers to repent of their sins. Numerous hadith also emphasize its importance, along with God’s merciful forgiveness of the repentant sinner. In his K. al-Tawwābīn, the Hanbali scholar Ibn Qudāma al-Maqdisī draws on a wide range of akhbār to present examples of repentance of angels, prophets, Companions of Muḥammad, pious mystics, and others, including non-Muslims. Ibn Qudāma’s treatise stands out for his frequent citation of accounts maligned by other scholars (...) as isrāʾīliyyāt. In addition, his willingness to highlight the sins of prophets and the Prophet’s Companions, while in line with other Hanbalis, challenges common notions of prophetic impeccability and the ethical qualities of the ṣaḥāba. In this article we argue that Ibn Qudāma is willing to challenge these notions because of his vision for the construction of the pious self. He sees human initiative in overcoming the self’s natural inclination to sinfulness as a necessary step toward spiritual excellence. In this regard his spiritual vision is shaped by certain Sufi notions. While divine grace still plays a role in the working of repentance, it does not eliminate the need for human initiative. This led Ibn Qudāma to construct a mythical past in which many of the great spiritual figures were involved with a spiritual struggle with their own immoral or impious instincts. (shrink)

Old Indic diphthongs underwent a chain shift whereby e and o monophthongized and ai and au shortened, filling the gap. While it is clear that these changes were complete by the end of the Vedic period, it has been unclear when during that period they occurred. Based on the avoidance of superheavy syllables in metrical cadences, which is corroborated here, I argue that both shifts took place during the compositional period of the R̥ gveda. That is, they had not yet (...) begun when the oldest material was composed, but were largely complete by later material, including book 10. (shrink)

The Chhoti Sadri inscription of the Mānavāyaṇi king Gauri of Malwa is a most unusual specimen of a Sanskrit verse praśasti. Its remarkably poor Sanskrit has attracted the most attention, but its rhetorical structure is also quite abnormal. It is proposed here that such unusual features as the first person presentation and the fronting of subjects with demonstrative pronouns suggest a setting involving an actual, or perhaps only an imagined, presentation of a royal portrait gallery, such as are attested both (...) in Sanskrit literature and in Indian archaeology. (shrink)

Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries. By Stephen Owen. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 114. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. 420. $49.95.

Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism. By Edward Slingerland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 385. $35.

In formal terms, the Dtr-Stem of Akkadian mirrors and partially overlaps the more familiar Dt-Stem, albeit with an additional medial reduplicated syllable. It is suggested in the following that the Dtr did not arise as a deviant form of the Dt but represents a survival of the Dt’s morphology in early East Semitic. Similarly, the Št2-Stem, which shows a comparable added syllable, offers us evidence of the prehistory of the Št-Stem. The diffuse semantics of both the Dtr and the Št2 (...) testifies to their antiquity; the cohesive passive-voice sense of the Dt and the Št1, by contrast, marks these stems as relatively late analogical creations. (shrink)

Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State: The Shang and Their World. By Roderick Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xxx + 331. $99.

Etrog: How a Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol. By David Z. Moster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xv + 144, illus. $54.99. The Etrog Citron : Tradition and Research. Essays on the Scientific, Halachic and Historical Significance of the Etrog. Edited by eliezer goldSchmidT and moShe bar-JoSeph. Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2018. Pp. 24 + 14 + 480, illus. IS96. [Hebrew with English abstracts].

The Early Bronze Age Tombs of Jebel Hafit. By Bo Madsen. Aarhus: Jutland Archaeological Society and Moesgaard Museum, 2017. Pp. 245, illus. DKK 350. [Distributed by Aarhus University Press].

Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook. Translated by Nawal Nasrallah. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 148. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. xix + 704. $172, €149 ; $155, €135.

Kontaktzone Vorderer Orient und Ägypten: Orte, Situationen und Bedingungen für primäre griechisch-orientalische Kontakte vom 10. bis zum 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr. By Iris von Bredow. Geographica Historica, vol. 38. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017. Pp. 394, maps. €44.

Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community. Edited by Wendy Swartz and Robert Ford Campany. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 140. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. x + 270. €99, $119.

Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture. By Eve Krakowski. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 350. $39.95, £32.95.

The Harivaṃśa has usually been seen as a later addition appended to the Mahābhārata, and so the Mahābhārata has usually been understood without it. This article first introduces an alternative approach, whereby these two texts are viewed as a single whole, and justifies that approach on the basis of the details presented in Mbh 1.2. Then the Harivaṃśa’s narrative mechanics are summarized, to contextualize what follows. The main body of the article offers three kinds of answer to the title question (...) of what difference the Harivaṃśa makes to the Mahābhārata. The first answer is theological: the Harivaṃśa emphasizes the divine level of the Mahābhārata story as the story of the gods descending to help the earth. The second answer is narratological: the Harivaṃśa continues and completes the story of Janamejaya begun in Mbh 1, thus emphasizing his role for the text as a whole. The third answer is structural: if the Mahābhārata includes the Harivaṃśa then the whole text can be studied and analyzed as a macrocompositional unit. The “Mahābhārata as a whole” has been the subject of collaborative study in recent years, and this article continues that study, with regard to a fuller whole. The article, unlike that whole, is short, sketchy, and provisional. It looks forward to further and corrective studies in all the sketched areas, and more. (shrink)

The particle ulašūma in Old Babylonian Akkadian is analyzed from a functional and syntactic point of view. In addition to its known functions as a pro-polar protasis and as a disjunctive particle, it is also concluded to function as a conditional exponent. As such it is shown to belong with other expressions of epistemic modality. Its most plausible diachronic source is determined, based on comparative as well as Akkadian material, to have been a non-verbal circumstantial expression *u lā šū not’) (...) ultimately meaning ‘it not being the case...’. In the second part of the paper, a cognate origin is proposed for the Biblical Hebrew epistemic particle ʔūlay. Two possible paths are discussed—one is internal development and the other a result of language contact. Each path is considered, paying meticulous attention to the respective sets of difficulties. The difference in the synchronic function and meaning between the Akkadian and Hebrew particles is bridged based on the syntactic and functional analysis of the Old Babylonian particle, which shows it to be an epistemic particle. (shrink)

Isriye-Seriana : Heiligtum, Siedlung und Militärstation in Zentralsyrien von der frühen Kaiserzeit bis in die mamlukische Epoche. By Rüdiger Gogräfe. Damaszener Forschungen, vol. 17. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2017. Pp. xiv + 371, 49 pls., map in pocket. €92.50.