The large Chinese Bronze (Plate I) which the kindness of its owner, Mr. George Eumorfopoulos, has enabled the members of our Section to inspect and examine at our leisure, is a specimen in more than one respect of exceptional importance. And being a quite recent acquisition, and not derived from any other European, American, or Japanese collection, it has been judged a very appropriate occasion to introduce it to the notice, and, I will add, to the critical scrutiny, of the sinologic world here represented.

The Siamese is the southernmost outlier of the great family of the Chinese dialects. Its kinship with them is shown, first, by its monosyllabic vocabulary; and second, by the peculiar use it makes of tonal inflections of the voice, not as a part of its rhetorical apparatus, but as essential elements of individual words, quite as indispensable for their right enunciation and interpretation as are the consonants and vowels that make up their framework. Their kinship is further shown by a singular feature of the content and use of words in both—a quality which is often called their abstractness. To me, however, that term seems wholly inappropriate, for it apparently denies what is one of the most conspicuous features of both languages, namely, their concreteness. The fact apparently is this: In both languages the words are symbols of concepts per se, being wholly devoid of inflectional apparatus to express and define their relations with other words in the sentence. They are, therefore, free to function in any syntactical relation not incompatible with their essential meaning. The very same thing has to a notable degree become not only possible but even common in modern English, as a result of the disappearance of the inflectional and derivational apparatus that formerly prevented nouns from taking on the functions of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and vice versa.

Although this was one of the first hymns to Ninurta which attracted attention, it seems never to have been published fully. Strassmaier, AV. 7357+8575+6971+7129+8536+7586+8431, provides the text of obv. 1–12; 7303 gives obv. 19. Jensen, from two copies by Bezold, gave in Kosmologie, 470 ff, transcription and translation of obv. 1–13 only (cf. also Jastrow, Religion, i, 149). I have been able to copy the full text through the kindness of Sir Ernest Wallis Budge. I am greatly indebted to Professor Langdon for help of all kinds in editing it. References and other matter in the notes which I owe to him have been marked [L.].

The tablet of which I here give a text and translation was given by Col. Stevenson, of the Ordnance in Mesopotamia; to Professor Langdon, to whom I am indebted for much help in its decipherment. It was found at Wannah wa-Ṣadûm, a group of mounds in S. Babylonia, situated on the Euphrates, to the west of Nippur, and a little to the south-west of Daghara, where other isolated inscriptions of the reigns of Narâm-Sin and Nebuchadrezzar II concerning Marad have already been found.

The recognition of the kinship of many of the languages of Asia and Europe was the starting-point of the science of Indo-European philology; and hardly was the first linguistic family-tree set up before there was inaugurated the search for the original home of the Indo-Europeans, a search which has been going on for nigh to a century, and whose chief accomplishment to date has been a voluminous literature. Needless to say, the site of the first home has not yet been fixed. In the course of time the quest had gradually shifted from Asia, where Bactria served as a convenient centre for the original community, over to Europe, where Germany and Scandinavia were the chief claimants for this honour, when the discovery of Tocharish, a centum-language, once more revived the hypothesis of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Far be it from an Assyriologist to take sides in this matter: but may he be permitted to remind the Indo-European scholars that the chancesof finding older historical information about the Indo-Europeans than that furnished by the inscriptions from the Egypto-Babylonian cultural area are very slight indeed? It is the purpose of this paper to point out the earliest known contacts of the Indo-Europeanswith that cultural area and then to speculate a little as to when and whence these tribes may have come into Asia Minor and on into the Semitic world.

The transcription of the Cuneiform signs presents a problem much more difficult than that of the transcription of the ordinary Semitic alphabetical scripts. The object of transcriptions of Cuneiform signs is not merely that of obtaining phonetic perfection, but it must also distinguish the signsemployed for the same sounds. In the earlier stages of Assyriology Delitzsch and others adopted the system of accentuating the signs, and before a larger number of homophones were discovered this system sufficed, and has beenadopted for the transcription of both Sumerian and Semitic texts. But at present there is complete anarchy among Assyriologists in transcribing Cuneiform texts. A tablet of the Rassam Collection in the British Museum, which the writer recently copied through the kindness of Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, groups together the homophonic signs. On this tablet there are, for example, eight different signs for the phonetic syllable eš. nine for še, eleven for gir, and eighteen for ge! It is not possible to devise eleven and eighteen different accents for thesevalues. The writer, therefore, proposes to introduce the method of numbering the signs with inferior exponents, eš1 eš2 eš3; ge1, ge2, ge3, etc., following a suggestion made by Dr. A. Walther, ZA. xxix, 147. [The idea was taken from Weissbach.]

As explained in the note on p. 74, the reading of this name is uncertain, especially with regard to the second element, due, the other transcriptions being ul-e (the ordinary values of the two characters of which it is composed) and rue. I have chosen the transcription in the title because it seems to be the most probable and because, some sort of transcription was a necessity. Other possible transcriptions, due to what seem to be variants, will be found on the page which I have quoted.

The few remarks which it is my privilege and honour to address to you to-day will be concerned with some of the results of investigations which I have made during the course of my research work in connexion with The History of the Music of the Hebrews and the Synagogue, and the Jewish source of the early music of the Roman Church.

It was before the Eoyal Asiatic Society that seventy years ago (on 8th July, 1854, to be precise) Mr. J. E. Taylor, H.B.M.'s Consul at Basrah in Turkey-in-Asia, read his paper on his excavations for the British Museum at Ur. Nearly a year later, on 5th May, 1855, after a further season's work in the land of the Muntefik, Mr. Taylor read his paper on Eridu and other sites in the neighbourhood. The first paper, “Notes on the Ruins of Mugeyer, by J. E. Taylor, Esq.,” will be found printed on p. 260 ff. of Vol. XV of the Journal, published in 1855; the second paper, “Notes on Abu Shahrein and Tel el Lahm,” on p. 404 ff. of the same volume. Both articles were illustrated by the quaint woodcuts of the time, in which first the draughtsman and then the engraver combined successively to deform the (originally probably rather poor) sketches or notes of the actual observer into something that can have borne but a faint resemblance to the original. One notices this in Taylor's sketch of the ziggurrat of Ur on p. 262, which is of the severely diagrammatic kind, as befits a learned publication. For the florid and romantic style of the period one may turn to the picture of the same ziggurrat opposite p. 129 of Loftus's “Travels and Researches in Chaldeæa and Susiana”, published three years later (reproduced in Plate XII, Fig. 1).

In an article on the representation of tones in Oriental languages (JRAS., 1920, pp. 475 ft), I pointed out that the so-called Vedic accents were the same as the tones found in certain Indo-Chinese languages, the only difference being one of name. In this connexion I stated that the visargacorresponded to the Indo-Chinese glottal check—the “ entering tone ” of Southern Mandarin and other Chinese dialects.

Professor Konow in his work on the Indian Drama (Grundrissder Indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde, ii, 2 D, 1920) gives an account of the Sanskrit bhāna as follows:

“ A popular origin belongs to the bhāna also. The subject matter is due to the author's invention; the vrtti is predominantly the bhāratī, the kaisikī, at any rate, being excluded, and of the ‘junctions ’ (sandhi) only the first (mukha) and the last (nirvahana) appear. The leading interests (rasa) are the heroic (vīra) and the erotic (śrngāra), which are evoked by the description of heroisms and fortune in love. The whole is enacted by a single actor, who appears as a rake (vita), and indeed as the rake-in-chief of the city. He describes partly his own experiences, partly those of others, employing ākāsabhāsitas, voices in the air (ākāse), that is, he pretends to see and hear others act and speak and asks ‘what do you say ?', himself then repeating the imagined answer. He accompanies this with the appropriate gestures. It is clear that the bhāna is a development from the pantomime or mimetic dance, and so it is intelligible that the Iāsyāngais employed.”

In his philosophical speculations regarding the original scheme of the universe, Mānī portrayed with poetic imagination the primordial struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness that formed the dualistic basis of his system of religion. When the primeval attack upon the Realm of Light was made by the King of Darkness, the Sovereign of Light “evoked”, or emanated, three successive evocations in the form of divine personifications, designed to serve first in combating the onslaught of Evil, and then in weakening the pernicious effects of its force.

The labial spirant does not occur at all in Sanskrit, but the words beginning with the letter F constitute an interesting but limited class in the language of the Avesta. They occupy less than 47 out of the 1,879 pages of Bartholomæ's Altiranisches Wörterbuch, and less than 21 out of the 611 pages of Kanga's Avesta Dictionary.

The question of the orientation of the dead has recently engaged the attention of anthropologists, the term in this connexion meaning, not, as the derivation of the word implies, a position in the direction of the west, but in some specified relation to the points of the compass. For example, Mr. W. J. Perry, discarding what he terms the “solar theory” of Sir E. Tylor, reverts to the explanation suggested by Herbert Spencer, that the beliefs concerning the direction of the Other World depend on the migrations of the tribes, the Land of the Dead being identified with the region from which a certain tribe has, or believes it has, come. Mr. Perry's investigation is confined to Indonesia, and Sir J. G. Frazer quotes a case from British New Guinea in which the dead are buried on their sides with their heads pointing in the direction from which the totem clan of the deceased is believed to have come originally.

In the present paper, certain points are submitted for consideration with reference to Indian punch-marked coins. They are the result of an examination of two finds of punchmarked coins found in 1917, the one at Patna and the other at Gorho Ghat, north of the Ganges, in the Bhagalpur District of the Province of Bihar and Orissa. My examination of the Patna coins was published in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 1919, pp. 17–72, and of the Gorho Ghat coins in the same Journal, 1919, pp. 463–94. I have since then examined a number of other punch-marked coins which have agreed with and supported the conclusions that were arrived at from the examination of the above two finds.

Sivājī occupies so prominent a place in the history of the Marathas that many European and Indian writers have made him the subject of their study and works. Among writers in English we are especially indebted to five: Eobert Orme, official historian to the East India Company; James Grant Duff; H. G. Eawlinson; C. A. Kincaid and D. B. Parasnis; Jadunath Sarkar.

The earliest annals of Mysore are of much interest, and round up a critical period of Indian history long wanting in authentic records. The inscriptions discovered at Śravana Bejgola in Mysore have brought to light detailed accounts of events that transpired in connexion with Chandragupta, contemporary with Alexander the Great, and founder of the Maurya dynasty. Moreover, we have in conjunction with him full notices of Bhadrabahu, the greatest leader of the Jains at the time. Opinions have been credulous as to their value, but their validity is coming to be recognized.

The existence of parallelisms between a number of the stories contained in the Jataka portion of the Buddhist literature and those embodied in the epic literature is an admittedly interesting fact, and is by now a commonplace of Post-Vedic studies. The canker of chronological uncertainty, however, that generally runs through the history of Indian literature and antiquities here also unfortunately prevails, and detracts much from the value of what would otherwise have been a highly decisive means for judging of the priority of the one to the other. Indeed, because of this particular disqualification, viz. chronological dubiousness, the issue often tends to appropriate wrong proportions, and generally a satisfactory solution of the diverse aspects of the problem thus presented in a double form becomes increasingly difficult.

Although a great deal has been written concerning St. Thomas's connexion with India, it has so far resulted only in barren controversies and inchoate theories. The finding of the “Gondophares.” coins in the Cabul region raised great hopes of a final settlement of the problem; but apart from the (itself doubtful) identification of a single name in the Ada Thomae, it has shed little light on the mysteries of Christian origins in India. Nay, it has had positively injurious results, inasmuch as it diverted the attention of scholars into fields far remote from the familiar haunts of the Thomistic tradition. South India is the quarter from which we should expect fresh evidence: the north has no known claims to any connexion with the Apostle. In the south live the Christians of St. Thomas—the so-called “Syrians” who for more than a thousand years have upheld their descent from the Apostle's disciples. There also we have what has been believed from immemorial antiquity to be the tomb of St. Thomas, with various lithic remains of pre-Portuguese Christianity around Madras. South India has a remarkably ancient tradition of St. Thomas; and it is a living tradition, not a dead legend. It can be traced back at least to the sixth century a.d., and it still lives in popular memories, not only of Christians, but of others not recognizing the claims of Christianity. The existence of this tradition is known and recognized; but no organized attempt has yet been made to explore it.

The great poet, whose Mathnawí and Díwáni Shamsi Tabríz are well known to students of Persian mysticism, is said to be the author of a prose work entitled Fíhi má fíhi. Riḍá Qulí Khán mentions it in the preface to the Tabríz edition of the Díwán, remarking that it is addressed for the most part to Mu'ínu'ddín, the Parwána (Lord Chamberlain) of Rúm, that it is equivalent to 3,000 verses in extent, and that manuscripts are rare. I have not met with any further account of it. The only copies of which the existence has yet been announced are the two at Constantịnople referred to by M. Louis Massignon in his Bibliography of Ḥalláj, which was published last year. Since then, however, an Indian scholar, Mr. 'Abdu '1-Majíd, of Daryábád, Bara Banki, has brought to my notice three more copies, one in the Hyderabad State Library, one in the Rampur State Library, and one in Nawáb Sálár Jung's Library at Hyderabad, Deccan. Mr. 'Abdu'1-Majíd, who proposes to edit the Persian text, is having these MSS. transcribed for his own use, and a few weeks ago he was so kind as to lend me for a short period his copy of the manuscript belonging to the Hyderabad State Library. I am glad to take the opportunity of thanking him for this and other important services which he has rendered me in connexion with my work on the Mathnawí. So far as I can judge at present, the Fíhi má fíhi throws a good deal of light on the meaning of that immense and difficult poem; but the question is one that it would be premature to discuss now.