These notes are the result of a personal examination of Brāhmī-Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions on coins published by Sir A. Cunningham in his Coins of Ancient India (London, 1891 = C. CAI. in the following pages), and now in the British Museum. I have selected here only those coins on which we find a Brāhmī inscription word by word confirmed by a Kharoṣṭhī inscription. The best known of these biliteral coins are those of the Kuṇindas, to which I have devoted another monograph which I hope to publish shortly. In this monograph I enter more fully into the discussion of certain questions of phonetics, which equally affect the inscriptions dealt with in the present article. By examining and comparing the readings thus given in both alphabets, we may hope to obtain some definite results as to the decipherment of the various forms of each. In the first place, an account is given of these forms as they occur in each inscription, so that they may be compared with those already known from other sources, and their readings determined in accordance with results already obtained. As a rule, these inscriptions exactly correspond, syllable for syllable, to each other. Such differences as do occur—e.g., in case-forms, in vowels, in varied representations of the same sound—are of great interest from the point of view of phonetics.

Thanks to the investigations of Professor O. Franke and of Mr. A. Viktor Bergny the readings of practically all the known biliteral coin-legends in Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī characters may now be regarded as finally settled. In this field of Indian numismatics, as in so many others, General Sir A. Cunningham was a pioneer, and it is, therefore, in no way surprising that many of his readings of these inscriptions as given in his Coins of Ancient India require correction. It is only within the last few years that the progress of the study of Indian epigraphy has made a scholarly treatment of this subject possible.

In January last, having heard that important ruins at a place called Sohnāg, in the eastern part of the Gorakhpur District, where I was then stationed as Commissioner, were being excavated for bricks by a railway contractor, I caused the work to be suspended until inquiries should be made, and on the 14th January visited the ruins. The buildingdisclosed by the excavations is of such a remarkable character, unique indeed in its massive dimensions, so far as my knowledge extends, that it is desirable to place on record an accurate description of it.

The information contained in the following notes on the MSS. of the Turkī text of Bābar's autobiography I have not seen put together elsewhere. It is offered as an ad interimcontribution towards a better knowledge of the Turkī text.

The work of filling in the interstices left by Mr. Thomas in his Catalogue of Pathan Coins has of late made such steady progress, that the time would seem to have come to collect the scattered notices of new coins brought to light during the past twenty years, and to prepare a comprehensive catalogue of the coins of this period. Under present conditions the private collector, who desires to know how far his own coins add to the general knowledge, has to devote to his object an amount of research for which he is often little able to spare time, through journals and proceedings to which he possibly may not have easy access.

Between the north-west frontier of our Indian Empire and the Pamirs there is a tract of mountainous country inhabited by many different nationalities, speaking many different tongues. The Pāmirs themselvesare a polyglot region. Taking Zēbāk, for instance, the district round it is the home of no less than four distinct speeches— one West-Iranian, Persian, and three East-Iranian, Wakhī, Shi ghī, and Ishkāshamīī. These last belong to the same Aryan group as Paksbtō. To the south-east of the Pāmirs we come to the Burushaskī spoken in Hunza and Nagar, a language of Scythian stock, whose immediate affinities have not yet been identified. South-east, again, of the Burushaskī area we come to Bāltistān, where another Scythian language, the Tibeto-Burman Bāltī, is the vernacular. In the valley of Kāshmīr;, there is Kāshmirī, and in the lower reaches of the Jhelum and in the Murree Hills, Chhibhālī, both of which are Indo - Aryan, and can be traced up to ancient Sanskrit. West of the Chhibhālī tract lies the British district of Hazara, of which the principal language is a form of Western Panjābī. Crossing the Indus we come to the Northern Pakhtō dialect of Pakshtō spoken in Peshawar, Ṣwāt, and Bajaur. West of Bajaur, beyond the Kunar River, we come to Laghmān. North of Laghmān lies Kāfiristān, through which we again reach the Pāmirs.

As this edition of a short section of the Pahlavi translation of the Yasna is intended to be followed by similar publications ultimately embracing the entire Pahlavi texts of the Yasna with the exception of those which have been already treated in my Five Zarathushtrian Gāthas, I make here full allusions to the MSS. which have been consulted in producing it.

The identification of the kingdom of Kulūta, which Hiouen Thsang visited, with the present valley of Kullu seems to be quite beyond dispute; and the lapse of more than twelve centuries and a half has effected so little change in the conditions, that Hiouen Thsang's description and the acount in Hunter's Gazetteer are curiously similar. Like its neighbour the kingdom of Chamba (Skt. Caṇpakā), it belongs to the eastern or Jālandhar group of Hill States in the Panjab. At present this group consists of twelve states, but, according to Cunningham, there were formerly only four—Jālandhar, Chamba, Kullu, and Mandi. Of the first and third we have a detailed description by Hiouen Thsang, and, as will be seen (inf., p. 541), it is possible that he mentions the second under another name. In our attempts to unravel the tangle of ancient Indian geography, the untying of one knot fortunately often leads to the untying of others. The identification of the Kulūtas may enable us to identify, with a greater or less amount of certainty, other peoples who occur with them in the geographical lists. It may, therefore, serve a useful purpose, if we examine in detail all the known occurrences of the Kulūtas in literature and on inscriptions and coins.