The manuscript to which the present note refers was purchased by me at Śrīnagar in October, 1898. It is written in Śāradā characters, and contains the Gada, Sauptika, Strī, and Aśvamedha Parvans of the Mahābhārata. The manuscript acquired by me originally formed only a portion of a codex which must have contained the whole of the great Sanskrit epic. This is made clear by the curious notice I shall proceed to discuss, as well as by the fact that other portions of the codex have been seen by me in Śrīnagar during earlier visits. The whole must have formed two large folio volumes which, judging from the writing and the paper, were probably copied in the sixteenth century, or in the early part of the seventeenth. The manuscript is very carefully written, evidently by the hand of a Paṇḍit, and represents a very good specimen of the text of the Western recension of the Mahābhārata current in Kaśmīr.

To the curious book of which the full title stands at the head of this article, I have already alluded in my communication to the Journal of January, 1899, on The Sources of Dawlatsháh, pp. 51–53. I now propose to give such account of its contents as is possible within the limits here prescribed. For this purpose I have made use of the Cambridge Codex (belonging to the Burckhardt Collection) marked QQ. 225. Though the book is a rare one, at least three other manuscripts are known — two in the British Museum (see the old Arabic Catalogue, pp. 418 and 581) and one (marked A. 1741) at Gotha. The last was used by Professor Nöldeke, in his reference to the Niháyat, at pp. 475–476 of his excellent Geschichte … der Sasaniden. He describes it as “in the main a quite arbitrary recension of Dínawarí, though here [namely, in the Romance of Bahrám Chúbin] it had before it an essentially fuller text than this,” and briefly characterizes it as “das seltsame, ziemlich schwindelhafte Werk.”

In the following pages I have endeavoured to present an account of the contents of a document, which needs some special acquaintance with the details of village history to understand it, but which possesses considerable interest since it is the earliest known account of a local group of Indian villages written by an European observer.

At the end of January of the year 1258 A.D., after a siege of more than a month, the Mongol array stormed and took possession of Baghdad; then, on or about the 18th of February following, the thirty-seventh and last Caliph of the House of Abbas, Al-Musta'ṣim-billah, was by order of Hūlāgū put to death. Concerning the manner of his death the accounts differ; unfortunately there has come down to us no narrative by an eye-witness of these events, for the only really contemporary historian, the author of the Ṭabaḳāt-i-Nāṣirī, was a native of India and wrote at Delhi.

The history of Aḥiḳar and his nephew Nadan forms part of Eastern popular literature. When publishing my history of Roumanian popular literature seventeen years ago (Bucureesti, 1883) I devoted a special chapter to the Roumanian versions of this history (pp. 104–114). I was the first to recognize the connection between the Roumanian and Slavonic versions and those contained in the Arabian Nights. I then drew attention to the intimate relation between this legend and that which has entered the Greek life of Æsop. Since that time scholars have paid much attention to this legend, especially as through Meissner's studies it is being considered as one of the lost Apocrypha mentioned already in the Book of Tobit.

In December last I received from Captain H. H. P. Deasy a small cylindrical box containing a block-print, which, as he wrote to me from Yarkand in April, 1899, he had obtained, apparently, not long previously in Khotan.

My learned colleague and friend, Professor Rhys Davids, in the course of his recent travels in India, found at Junagadh two fragments that had broken away from the Girnar Rock. One was in the museum; the other was lying on the floor by the rock, and has now been removed to the museum. They belong to the Thirteenth Edict of Piyadasi. It will be remembered, in fact, that only a part of this tablet was found in situ. I am all the more obliged to him for the friendly confidence with which he asked me to present them to our colleagues of the Royal Asiatic Society, because, unless I am mistaken, the study of them will enable us to introduce important corrections into the reading or interpretation of several passages.