Folia Orientalia

The material presented in these two volumes may be divided into two main sections. The first section covers biblical texts and texts which fall between the categories biblical and non-biblical. It also includes articles on topics relating to the history of the Qumran community and to the study of the New Testament in the light of the Qumran discoveries. The second section covers non-biblical texts, such as the Temple Scroll. The two sections are synthesized in the article by Frank M. Cross, in which he reviews the advances made and the challenges for the future in the field of Qumran studies. Several topics recur constantly in many of the articles, such as the origins of the history of the Qumran community, the problem of the distinction between what is biblical and non-biblical in the Qumran manuscripts, and the question of the authority of the texts in the Qumran community.

Coping with Obscurity publishes the papers discussed at the Brown University Workshop on Earlier Egyptian grammar in March, 2013. The workshop united ten scholars of differing viewpoints dealing with the central question of how to judge and interpret the grammatical value of the written evidence preserved in texts of the Old and Middle Kingdoms (ca. 2350-1650 BC). The nine papers in the volume present orthographic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic approaches to the data and represent a significant step toward a new, pluralistic understanding of Earlier Egyptian grammar.

(Peeters 1995)

Mahdis and Millenarians is a discussion of Shiite groups in eighth- and ninth-century Iraq and Iran, whose ideas reflected a mixture of indigenous non-Muslim religious teachings and practices in Iraq in the early centuries of Islamic rule and demonstrates the fluidity of religious boundaries of this period. Particular attention is given to the millenarian expectations and the revolutionary political activities of these sects. Specifically, the author's intention is to define the term 'millenarian', to explain how these groups reflect that definition, and to show how they consequently need to be seen in a much larger context than Shiite or even simply Muslim history. The author concentrates, therefore, on the historical-sociological role of these movements. The central thesis of the study is that they were the first revolutionary chiliastic groups in Islamic history and, combined with the later influence of some of their doctrines, contributed to the tactics and teachings of a number of subsequent Shiite or quasi-Shiite sectarian groups.

This is the third and final volume of the Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian. It comprises the Egyptian words with initial m-. The amount of material offered, the extensive treatment of scholarly discussions on each item, and the insights into the connections of Egyptian and the related Afro-Asiatic (Semito-Hamitic) languages, including many new lexical parallels, will make it an indispensable tool for comparative purposes and an unchallenged starting point for every linguist in the field.The reader will find the etymological entries even more detailed than those of the introductory volume, due to the full retrospective presentation of all etymologies proposed since A. Erman's time, and thanks to an extremely detailed discussion of all possible relevant data even on the less known Afro-Asiatic cognates to the Egyptian roots.