A major gap in present research into the past of eastern Africa has been the lack of a corpus—or at least the beginning of a collection—of the Islamic epigraphy of the coast. What has been set out here is intended only as a beginning: all of us hope that readers of this article will publish themselves, or forward to any of us, information which they may have for future publication. In this way we may some day hope to possess a corpus of inscriptions for this region as complete as the Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum begun by Max van Berchem, or the Répertoire chronologique d'épigraphie arabe of Combe, Sauvaget, and Wiet.

It is now generally agreed by most authorities on the subject that the Aryan linguistic vestiges in the Near East are to be connected specifically with Indo-Aryan, and not with Iranian, and also that they do not represent a third, independent Aryan group, and are not to be ascribed to the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Aryan. This conclusion is incorporated in the title of M. Mayrhofer's bibliography of the subject, Die Indo-Arier im alten Vorderasien (Wiesbaden, 1966), and it can now be taken as the commonly accepted view. It is based on the fact that where there is divergence between Iranian and Indo-Aryan, and where such elements appear in the Near Eastern record, the latter always agrees with Indo-Aryan. Such items are aika “one” and šuriyaš “sun”, and the colour names parita-nnu and pinkara-nnu which correspond to Sanskrit palita- “grey” and piṅgala- “reddish”. The evidence of vocabulary is supported by that of the four names of gods appearing in the Hittite-Mitanni treaty, where the Vedic gods Mitra and Varuṇa, Indra, and the Nāsatyas can be clearly recognized. This combined evidence is sufficient to establish the conclusions of Mayrhofer and others beyond reasonable doubt, and the arguments of A. Kammenhuber, who later attempted to resuscitate the theory that the Aryans of the Near East were Proto-Aryans, cannot be said to have been successful.

Over a number of years inscriptions on Sasanian silver plates have been published by various scholars, but in spite of progress several problems have remained, especially one connected with the weight system of pre-Islamic Iran. The interpretation of one series of signs had baffled me, as it had other investigators in the field, and I had proposed at first tentatively to read the signs as MP salāk “ingot”, but with a technical meaning of a weight equal to about 215 grams.

Copies of early inscriptions from the collection of the Lama Rig-'dzin Tshe-dbang Nor-bu (RT) have been the basis of articles in JRAS, 1969 and 1972. Another of his texts, described as “from the rdo-rings at sKar-cung rgyal-sde itself”, is the inscription on a stone pillar at Ra-ma-sgang near Lhasa which I edited with some remarks on its site and history in JRASB, 1949. It was included also by Professor G. Tucci in Tombs of the Tibetan kings, Rome, 1950 (TTK), where it was brought more fully into relation with a connected edict (bka'-tshigs) of Khri lDe-srong-brtsan recorded in vol. ja of the Chos-'byung of dPa'-bo gTsug-lag Phreng-ba (PT).

In the eastern provinces of Bali the road from the capital Denpasar to Karangasem passes a small exquisite lake surrounded by palm trees. Behind the lake rise a number of dramatic steep hills framing it towards the north, while beyond it the Indian Ocean sweeps to the horizon. In the distance through the blue haze lie the “islands of exile”, the biggest of which is called Nusa Penida, while closer inshore a group of small rocks juts vertically out of the sea. It is one of the most evocative tropical scenes I know. The lake, as befits such a setting, is sacred. Purple lotuses cover its surface, and the two temples to Shiva and Hariti look down from the hill. It is the holy precinct of Tjandidasa.

Jayavarman II is the famous Khmer ruler who, in the first half of the 9th century and after a hundred years when Khmer overlordship had been in abeyance, was consecrated on Mount Mahendra “to ensure that the country of the Kambujas would no longer be dependent on Java and that there would be no more than one sovereign who was cakravartin”. His inscriptions have never been recovered, but Khmers in later times remembered his reign as the time when their ancestors, his supporters, were rewarded with estates. Historians are today tending to regard the reign as a somewhat less significant period in Khmer history than earlier generations of historians had supposed. Its conventionally accepted length (802–850) is no longer taken for granted. The king's cult, inaugurated on Mount Mahendra, may not have been as innovative as was originally believed. Even the extent of the king's temporal power has been revised. In 1952 Dupont, clarifying the king's chronology, came to the conclusion that his territorial authority had been exaggerated and that his bid for overlordship had failed.

In this article I intend to show that the overriding aim of Frederic North, Governor of the Maritime Provinces of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805, was to contract a subsidiary alliance with the independent Kingdom of Kandy modelled on those being established at the same time in India by the Governor-General, the Marquess of Wellesley. The role of the latter in this episode will also be assessed. Moreover I attempt to furnish evidence challenging the prevailing view that Pilima Talavuva, adigar of the Kingdom of Kandy, or for that matter any other of its officials, committed treachery against the King of Kandy.

The activities of the K‘eng ze čin wang, the seventeenth son of the K‘ang-hsi emperor of the Ch‘ing dynasty, as a promoter of translations of Lamaistic texts into the Mongol language, have been fairly well documented. In 1957 the present author published a brief description of a number of manuscripts associated with the name of this prince, which were then, and still are, in the possession of the University Library, Cambridge. For the sake of bibliographical completeness there follows a concise account of a small collection of manuscripts, some complete and some fragmentary, also associated with him, which have come to light in the past few months. These manuscripts belong to the University Library, Aberdeen, and were shown to me by Mr. Howard Nelson of the British Museum, to whom they had been submitted for identification.

I have two reasons for writing this paper. The first is that, while I have occasionally heard the word Nostratic, I have never had a clear idea what it meant, and I suspect that most readers of this Journal are in a similar position. The second is that I have recently received from a colleague in Moscow a book just published there entitled “An attempt to compare the Nostratic languages” (Opyt sravneniya nostraticheskikh yazykov) which defines the term, gives a history of the origin and development of the Nostratic theory, and marshals a great deal of evidence in support of it. The author, V. M. Illich-Svitych, died in 1964, and the first part of his book, which was perhaps never finished, has now been published, with an introduction, notes, and some supplementary matter, by his friend and colleague, V. A. Dybo. This was Illich-Svitych's only major work, but the bibliography (p. 74; this and similar references are to pages in the book) lists also six articles by him in various learned journals. The first feeling of any reader of the book must be utter astonishment at the amount of sheer hard detailed work which he packed into a short life of no more than 32 years.