What is Amarnaic, the language of the Amarna letters sent to Egypt from Canaan? Once called “Canaano-Akkadian, ” “Amarna-Canaanite” or the like, it was believed by many scholars to be a barbarous Akkadian furnished with Canaanite glosses, but today we know otherwise. Moran in the 1950's, and 1960's, then Rainey in the 1970's revealed its syntax, verbal morphosyntax and verbal morphology to be nothing but Canaanite with obviously Akkadian lexical items.
There are a number of languages in the world that are “mixed” in a very similar way to Amarnaic. They are known as “pidgins” or “creoles.” The aim of the present paper is to prove that Amarnaic is a pidgin at the expanded stage. A vehicle of communication such as this does not emerge suddenly; it presupposes the preceding jargon and stabilizing stages. The present paper argues on circumstantial evidence that Amarnaic emerged as a kind of contact jargon in Canaan in the early years of Egyptian 18th Dynasty, became stabilized prior to the enthronement of Thutmose III, and expanded during his reign as a sort of military pidgin.

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Many biblical scholars regard the canonical Psalter simply as a collection of psalms that were sang in the cult of the Second Temple in Jerusalem or in the service of synagogues in ancient Israel, and they seldom give attention to its arrangement. The discoveries of the manuscripts of Psalms, however, shed a new light on the problem. Known as 11QPs^a, this manuscript shows different arrangement from the canonical Psalter. After examining the opinions of J. Sanders and P. W. Skehan, I assume that the Psalter was fixed in the second half of the first century A. D., when a few groups of redactors worked on the Psalter. This brings the matter to the question whether the canonical Psalter was used in the cult of the Second Temple. I agree with N. Füglister's hypothesis that negates the actual relations between the Psalter and the Second Temple. He insists that the Psalter was a book of prayer and contemplation to be used by the maginal people who kept themselves away from Sadducees. As a result, the arrangement of Psalter shows a clear intention on the part of the redactors. The study of the arrangement will require further attention.

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The 'Abbasid revolution brought about a radical change in every corner of the society. In the literary field, poets tried to adapt themselves to the taste of the new urban society, especially of the newly established caliphal court. Through their efforts a highly rhetorical and ornate style in Arabic poetry was created, and this new style was named badi (literally—the New) by the Caliph poet, Ibn al-Mu'tazz. Badi' continued to exercise considerable influence both in composing and criticizing Arabic poetry.
Bashshar b. Burd (c. 95-167A. H.) was noted for his particular attachment to figures of speech such as pun, metaphor and antithesis. Al-Jahiz regarded him as an originator of this new style. He was ethnically persian, socially mawali, religiously heretic, ideologically shu'ubi, and physically blind.
In this paper the author investigates what Bashshar's stylistic features are, how he originated them, and how deeply the literary event was intertwined with the specific social and intellectual climate of his time.

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Court poetry is one of the greatest traditions in Persian literature. Medieval Persian Court Poetry, written by Prof. Julie Scott Meisami is one of the studies which shows clearly the importance of court poetry in history of Persian literature. Peculiarity of Persian court poetry, with its variety of figure of speech, has been noticed by critics and researchers in the West. Above all, there has been a great achievement in descriptive studies of this phenomenon for Ghaznavids period (977-1186). Some of the typical researches in this field are: Menouchehri: Poète persan du 11^ème siècle de notre ère by A. de Biberstein Kazimirski, La description de la nature dans la poèsie lyrique persan du XI^e siècle by Charles Henri de Fouchècour, and The Divan of Manuchihri Ddmghdni: A Critical Study by Jerome W. Clinton.
In all of these studies, however, little attention is given to the composition of poetry in the context of complex human relations and social life. In their view poetry is made of merely natural materials and is an isolated masterpiece. Therefore, it is necessary to study the figure of speech through the background in which the figure of speech was completed, that is, a mechanism of the appearance of the description of nature.
In the 11th century, 'Unsuri Balkhi (d. 1039), Farrukhi Sistani (d. 1037), and Manuchihri Damghani (d. 1040) appeared as great poets at the courts of Sultan Mahmud and Mas'ud. They are considered as “poets of Khorasani Style (Sabk-e Khorasani)” in the history of Persian literature.
This paper is intended as an investigation of Manuchihri's poetry which have been appraised the best poetic descriptions of nature. It deals with the background of appearance of his way of description in his panegyric qasidas through researches into his social life and human relations.
First, I examined Khorasani Style (Sabk-e Khordsdni), which is the common style among these three poets and show Manuchihri's position in this style.
Next, I treated the biographies (tazkiras) of poets. They are used by many researchers as introductions to their lives and poems. My purpose was to explore into the poet's social life and human relations.
Finally, reading his qasidas including musammats which are his original contribution to Persian poetic forms, I paid attention to the relation between Manuchihri himself and his poetry.
Manuchihri created a descriptive approach intended for describing nature, whereas many other court poets paid their Sultans a high compliment as his subjects. Manuchihri acquires his own way of producing poetry, the main purpose of which was to describe nature as it is. That makes his existence a unique one in Persian literary tradition in the Ghaznavid period, and his name all the more worthy to be praised as the most excellent one.

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The purpose of the present paper is to make a linguistic analysis of Tâleqâni's Osul-e Dastur-e Zabân-e Fârsi which is one of the typical Persian Grammars written on the traditional model. I also intend to criticize some of his grammatical description and his own view of Persian language and grammar in general.
Tâleqâni, together with other traditional grammarians, classifies the parts of speech into nine, i. e. nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, interjections, conjunctions, numerals. In the following discussions I will mainly focus on the noun ('esm) and verb (fe'l) treated in the chapter 2 and 5, which make up most of its volume of the part 1, and comment on his description of them.
His grammar, as is the case with his contemporary ones, has the following characteristic features:
1)His framework of classification o parts of speech is based on the traditional Latin and Islamic grammars, thus causing confusion of classification criteria.
2) No phonological or phonetic descriptions are found. Instead, the rules of orthography in the declentional and conjugational systems are rather minutely stated.
3) No distinction between synchronic and diachronic approaches is made. His main interest is directed to the correctness of writing. Correctness, in this case, means that it is modeled on classic writings, not on contemporary writings. Thus his linguistic materials for description are mostly taken from classical writers, such as Sa'di, Hâfiz, Ansari, etc.

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When he visited Turfan in October 1990, Y. Yoshida, one of the authors of the present article, examined the Iranian manuscripts unearthed at Bäzäklik during the excavation undertaken in 1980-81. Among them he found and transliterated a fragment (80. T. B. I. 644) of a Parthian hymn written in Sogdian script. He showed his transliteration to the other author, W. Sundermann, in April 1991 when the latter was invited to Ryukoku University. On the spot Sundermann noticed that the same hymn is found in two manuscripts, one in Sogdian script (X) and the other Manichaean (M 779), of the German Turfan collection deposited at Turfan Forschung in Berlin. The two then decided to publish this hymn dedicated to the Manichaean Third Messenger as a joint contribution to the project organized by Professor K. Kudara of Ryukoku University and supported by the grant of the Monbusho International Scientific Research Program.
In the meantime Yoshida discovered two small fragments containing the same hymn among the Otani collection (Otani 6229 and 7375) now housed at the Ryukoku University library. They are also edited in the present article.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of this hymn is the occurrence of 'yl (M 'yl), the Aramaic word for god so far unknown in the Manichaean literature. This word appears in combination with 'st'y (M 'st 'yy) “(you) are” and employed in an ecstatic exclamation: 'yl 'yl 'yl 'yl 'st'y 'st'y 'st'y “El, el, el, el. You are, you are, you are!”. It is also to be noticed that 'st'y (M 'st 'yy) is the combination of the inflected forms of a verb 'h- “to be”, i. e. 'st “is” and 'yy “you are”.

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