Dans la tradition religieuse de l'Iran mazdéen, la région dénommée airyanәm υaēǰõ en avestique, Ērān-υēž en pehlevi, jouit, au long des siècles, d'une notoriété consacrée par de nombreuses légendes. C'est la première des régions qu'Ahuxa Mazda a créées et destinées à l'établissement des Iraniens (Vd. i, 2); le dieu suprême y fait apparaître le premier couple animal (Bd. xiv, 3; Zāt-spr. ix, 8), et Yama y a établison paradis (Vd. ii, 21 sq.), après qu'Ahura Mazda lui a dicté les mesures qui assureront la subsistance des êtres devenus trop nombreux sur une terre trop étroite. Zarathuštra y est né (Bd. xx, 32); c'est de là qu'est parti son message (Bd. xxxii, 3); c'est là qu'il sacrifie aux dieux (Yt v, 104; ix, 14, 25; xvii, 45), et que la tentation l'a assailli (Vd. xix, 4, 11).

“It is so published that injury that comes upon the fruits lies upon the holder of the pledge, that which comes upon the stock, lies upon the farmer.”

For the interpretation of graβakāndār, bar and bun, one may refer to Bartholomae, MM., 1, 14.

The main object of this article is to explain the circumstances which induced James I to write to Sultan Ahmad the letter which is here reproduced. These circumstances cannot fail to be of interest to students of Oriental history, constituting as they do a kind of footnote to the relations existing between England and Turkey at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I cannot here recount in detail the many adventures of Sir Thomas Sherley, for they would occupy far too much space in the Bulletin; but I shall confine myself to an outline of the events which culminated in his falling into the hands of the Turks, who held him prisoner for a period of nearly three years (January, 1602, to December, 1605), and the correspondence that passed between Constantinople and London regarding his captivity.

In the archives of the Da'wat of the Yemen and India a collection of royal letters and decrees (sijillāt) issued by the Fātimid Khalīfa al-Mustanṣir bi'llāh (denoted in the following pages by the letter M.) (died A.H. 487 = A.D. 1094) to the Sulaihids of the Yemen has been preserved, and a manuscript containing this collection of documents has now been acquired by the Library of the School of Oriental Studies, London. The MS. is a modern copy, which belonged to an Ismā'īlī priest in India. I have searched in vain for other copies, but it is quite likely that we might find others in the collections of the Ismā'īlī in the Yemen and India. I give in the following pages a synopsis of the historical matter contained in these documents. Apart from their interesting literary style the letters furnish us with some useful historical data and contemporary evidence for the period covered by them, viz. the forty-four years from A.H. 445 = A.D. 1053 to A.H. 489 = A.D. 1095.

It has often been said that the Persian language written and spoken in India does not possess that flavour which is generally found in the writings of the Iranian authors. There is an element of truth in the foregoing charge so far as the literature produced in India during the later period of Muslim rule is concerned. But the Persian literature produced in India from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century may be favourably compared with the writings of many an indigenous Iranian scholar. The works of Amīr Khusrau and Hasan of Dihli and Badr-i-Chāch, who flourished during this period, are highly esteemed by Iranian scholars and are placed next to Sa'dī and Jalāl ul-Dīn Rūmī. The early immigrants who made India their permanent home retained the purity of their tongue in a much larger measure than their successors. But with the growing influence of the Hindu scholars who began to study Persian to qualify themselves for the service of the State, the difference in the style of India and Persia proper became more marked.

There is a saying in India that language changes every twelve kos. This saying will still hold good if we say language changes every kos, although the amount of change in the latter case will be almost impossible to detect. In spite of this saying, which is correct at bottom, we are apt to believe that our next-door neighbours (if they are not recent strangers) speak exactly the same language as we do. Similarly we also believe that we speak exactly the same language as our parents spoke or our children will speak. But this our belief is not true, for, as a matter of fact, language changes gradually and almost imperceptibly both in time and space. The language of one's neighbours is slightly different from one's own, but when the distance grows and two persons separated by twenty or thirty miles talk together, they are certain to pick up some peculiarities in each other's speech. In the like manner the speech of the children differs from that of the parents, and in the course of a few generations this difference becomes appreciable.

1. , kürzere Fassung in 2 Kapiteln (). Im Shangliaier Tripitaka (Ausgabe des -Klosters in Shanghai, vollendet 1913. Abkürzung: S.T.) und im Tōkyō'er Tripitaka (vollendet 1885. Abkürzung: Tōk.T.) findet sich das Sūtra in Abteilung 24 (), Heft 8, fol. 43 recto-52 verso. Im von Takakusu und Watanabe herausgegebenen japanischen Tripitaka (Taishō- Ausgabe, 1924 ff. Abkürzung: T.T.) unter No. 1670 A im 32. Band, Seite 694a-703c. Kyōto'er Tripitaka, xxvi, 9, 769 recto-777 recto.

Vaturanga itself is the name given to a small district at the extreme north-west end of the island of Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands; but, according to Bishop J. M. Steward, who worked as a missionary on that end of the island, the language spoken along a very considerable portion of the north-west coast, as well as of the north-east coast, of the island is very closely allied to the language of Vaturanga. In addition, through the work of the Melanesian Mission, the language of Vaturanga has become the “ecclesiastical” language in the schools and churches of the mission throughout the portion of the island indicated.

These words were collected at Bagamoyo and Tanga and on trips between Zanzibar and the mainland. Most of them do not occur in any of the standard dictionaries, that is, in Krapf, Steere. and Madan. In cases where a word has a specialized meaning or a different meaning from that given by the authority, the fact has been noted.