The original home of the founders of the royal dynasties of the Hittites was the country of Kussar. It was of Kussar and Kussar only that Khattusilis, the ancestor of Subbi-luliuwas, the founder of the second dynasty, was king (KB. iii, p. 30); so, too, was “the lord” Labarnas or Tabarnas, the founder of the first dynasty (c. 1900 b.c.). From his death-bed in the city of Kussar Khattusilis I issued his last testament to his son and successor Mursilis I, and the only territorial title of the unnamed “great king” in whom Dr. Forrer is probably right in seeing Mursilis I is “king of Kussari”. The state records carefully preserved the annals of a still earlier monarch, Anittas “king of Kussara”, who describes in them his conquest of the Hittite-land.

MR. GUY LE STRANGE, in his Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphs—which is likely to remain for long the standard work on Baghdad's topography—in discussing the site of the Niẓámíya madrasa, puts it in the southern part of the city, between the Bábu 'l-Azaj quarter and the Bábu 'l-Baṣalíya, now known as the Bábu 'l-Sharqí. The argument for this site rests chiefly—though there are other references which seem to support it—on an ambiguous passage in Yáqút's Mu‘jamu ’l Buldán, dealing with the Tutushí foundations built by Khamartagín, a slave of the Sultan Alp Arslán's younger son Táju'l-Dawla Tutush. These foundations are “a bazaar near the Niẓámíya madrasa, called the ‘Tutushí estate’, a madrasa called ‘Tutushiya’ near it, for members of Hanafite sect, and a hospital, also known as the ‘Tutushí’ in the Bábu 'l Azaj (quarter)”. Equally vague and obscure is another passage in which Yáqút refers to the Niẓámíya madrasa. It comes during his description of the locality of the Qurayya quarter on the west bank of the Tigris, “opposite,” he says, “to the lane leading down to the river from the Niẓámíya madrasa bazaar.”

There is yet another man, whose original message to his fellow-men has been woven into the earliest teachings we call Buddhism, but whose name his age and after-ages have let die. Not in the first utterances ascribed to the Sakyan founder of the movement, nor in the last things which he is represented as emphasizing and enjoining as teachings do we find this original message. We do not know when, in the forty and odd years of the founder's mission, this lost voice began to make itself heard in the same area of missionary work. We do not know when, not the teacher but his teaching was taken over as part of the stock of Sāsana logia. What we do find is a fourfold exercise, moulded into a formula of distinctive character, and emerging here and there in discourses. We also find passing allusions in the scriptures to the four heads of the formula, and we find two at least of the four expanded separately and in a different connexion.

IN the latest addition to the series of the Kurdisch-Persische Forschungen, Dr. Karl Hadank, of Berlin, has presented Iranian philologists and students of Persian dialects with a work of great interest and importance.

The series was initiated by the late Oskar Mann (ob. 1917) and the present volume, Abt. III, Band I, 1926, as well as its predecessors is based chiefly on the material collected by him. Its main contents are described in the title: Die Mundarten von Khunsâr, Mahallât, Natänz, Nâyin, Sämnân, Sîvänd und Sô-Kohrûd.

Among the unfinished papers left by the late Dr. Johns, Mrs. Johns has found one which he was preparing on the dated tablets of the reign of Kandalānu, last Assyrian viceroy of Babylonia, who succeeded Šamaš-šum-ukšn, brother of Ašurbanipal of Assyria. It is certain from a group of tablets from Dilbat, now in the Ašshmolean Museum (Weld Collection), that Kandalānu (Κινηλαδνου) and Ašurbanipal were the same persons; for this group of tablets from the same collection has the following dates: 1924, 487, Belibni, year 2, month Šabat, day 29; 1924, 489, Ašur-nādin-šumi, year 4, month Adar, day 2; 1924, 491, Ašur-aḫi-iddin, year 6, month Tebit, day 27; one in possession of Major A. H. Burn, C.I.E., Delhi, India, Ašur-aḫi-iddin, year 8, month Ab, day 8; 1924, 490, Kan-da-la-nu, year 15, month Kislev, day 9; 1924, 485, Kan-da-la-nu, year 19, month Nisan, day 14; one in possession of R. S. Cooke, Esq., Ministry of Awqaf, Baghdad, Kan-da-la-nu, year 17, month Šabat, day 3; 1924, 482, Kan-da-la-nu, year 15, month Kislev, day 9; 1924, 484, Ašur-bāni-apli, year 23, month Nisan, day 29; 1928,1, excavated at Ḫursagkalamma in 1927 by M. Watelin, but dated at Erech, Ašur-bāni-apli, year 18, month Ululu, day 21.

All things must come to an end, and this series of papers, now running for ten years, is herewith concluded. This final instalment consists of an index, enabling a reader to find at once any character discussed in the series, with the year of the Journal and the page in the latter where the character appears. Naturally the years cannot pass without disclosing much that could be added or improved or qualified. But remembering that he who begins by revising may end by rewriting, I have left these studies as they were published in the Journal.

The late Professor Buehler, in his admirable work on Indian palæography, points to the name of an old species of writing, otherwise unknown, called the puṣkarasārī or pukkharasāriyā, and mentioned by Buddhist and Jain authors. He quite correctly connects this name with that of Puṣkara° or Pauṣkarasādi, an old authority mentioned by some grammarians, Āpastamba, etc. But as far as I am aware, neither Buehler nor any other scholar has gone further into the possible problems connected with this name. Becoming slightly interested in this question, I tried to make a collection of the few passages mentioning Pauṣkarasādi, which are, unfortunately, not very illuminating. Still it may not be wholly out of the way to present here the meagre outcome of my investigations.

The late Monsieur Henri Cordier's parting gift to students of the East was his edition of the Mirabilia of the Dominican Brother Jordan of Sévérac. This was nothing less than a complete facsimile of the unique manuscript of the Mirabilia which is now in the British Museum. The facsimile is accompanied with an Introduction, a French translation and notes, and a transcript of the Latin text. The transcript is little more than a copy of that of 1839, and students will be wise to read the Latin text from the facsimile. But it is not my purpose here to review or criticize the book. Cordier, like Yule before him, thought it worth while to print in addition to the Mirabilia such other fragments of Jordan's writing as survive. Yule published versions of two letters by Jordan in Cathay and the Way Thither, 1866, and Cordier prints the Latin text of these same letters (one of them twice over) in his Notes Préliminaires and adds to them two texts of another letter which is attributed first to Bartholomew, Custos of Tauris, and secondly to Francis of Pisa. All these texts are taken at second-hand from the Biblioteca Bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa by G. Golubovich, O.S.F. These four letters, which may in fact be reduced to two and part of a third, are concerned with the martyrdom of four Franciscan Brothers at Tana near Bombay in April, 1321. This martyrdom seems to have roused extraordinary interest at the time.