The dialect here under consideration was first given attention by Hodgson, and was later briefly described from Hodgson's materials by Professor Sten Konow in the Linguistic Survey of India. No connected specimen in the language has so far been made available.

The following story and notes, therefore, gathered in the Darjeeling District in 1931 will perhaps serve as a supplement to our knowledge of this imperfectly known form of speech.

If the traditional opinion were correct which ascribes the Tso-chuan to Tso Ch'iu-ming, a contemporary of Confucius, his work would be of the utmost importance as a source of historical information, though even in that case we might well doubt whether all the incidents which it relates are genuinely historical and might wonder how many of the speeches in which it abounds were the composition of Tso Ch'iu-ming himself. If, on the other hand, those scholars are right who assign it to the Han dynasty, while of less importance as a record of fact, the Tso-chuan is still one of the most valuable of the works which have come down to us from Chinese antiquity, part of its significance on that supposition being that it illustrates what were believed at the time of its composition early in the Christian era to have been the ethical ideals which were acknowledged in the period to which Confucius himself belonged.

The original tablet contained about 527 lines; of these only 367 remain, excluding unintelligible fragments. Large gaps, involving fifteen lines and more, occur in Cols. I, II, III, and VIII; Cols. IV, V, VI, and VII (in the centre of the tablet) are less damaged, though everywhere minor breaks affect the text. In view of this it is very difficult to recover the sequence, and the following summary must be regarded as partially conjectural, though in the main reasonably certain.

The reader of the Tso-chuan cannot but be impressed by the number of suicides it records. Two instances at least are given of suicide because of the loss of wealth, both by men who had no claim to be considered virtuous—Fu-ch'ai, King of Wu (xn, xxii, 2), and King Ling of Oh'u (x, xiii, 2). I Chiang, marchioness of Wei, preferred death to the disgrace of being superseded in her husband's house (II, xvi, 5). Tsang Chien died on a point of honour. Taken prisoner to Ch'i, the marquis of which State sent a eunuch to condole with him and promise protection, he bowed in acknowledgement, but said: “I thank your master's condescension; the favour, however, is not complete, for why has he sent a castrated servant on a visit of courtesy to an officer ?” Then he drove a stake into his wound and died (IX, xvii, 4). When Wu made its great invasion of Ch'u, the plan of defence drawn up by Marshal Hsü was wrecked through the self-seeking of the Chancellor, and all the marshal's efforts could not retrieve the disaster. After repeated battles he fell wounded, but not mortally. “In each of these three battles,” he said, “I have been wounded, and now I am of no more use. Which of you officers will carry off my head ?” One of low rank at length offered his service, and the marshal, referring to the courage which would face the obloquy of having killed his superior, said: “It is my fault that I did not recognize your worth earlier” (XI, iv, 15).

According to a tradition it was believed that a Greek, Christodulos by name, was the builder of the old Fatih mosque at Constantinople. Dr. Mehmet Aga-Oglu has explained in his two articles that the ancient belief was without foundation. In the first one he stated that a Turk, Sinan al-'Atīq by name, was the architect of the old mosque; in the second article, he said that the shape of the first, earliest construction of this mosque was in the purely Turkish style, like some of the old buildings of the Seljuq and Ottoman period in Asia Minor, and that it showed no Byzantine influence. The author's knowledge of the special literature on this subject is deep and complete. Nevertheless, our solution of the problem will be dissimilar to that of Dr. Aga-Oglu.

The new Has Shamra text published by Virolleaud is, despite better preservation, considerably more difficult to interpret than its two immediate predecessors, and in this regard resembles rather the fragments of 1929.

The latter part of the tenth century of the Christian era gradually ushered in a new epoch in the history of India. In northern India the old kingdoms, which had dominated the political arena so long, made their exit, and new powers rose to take their place. The struggle between the Gurjaras and the Rāshṭrakuṭas ended fatally for both the contending parties. The great empire of Bhoja and Mahendrapāla had shrunk into the little principality of Kanauj. Its place was taken by the Chāndellas, the Haihayas, and the Chāhamānas, etc. The Pāla empire, too, in eastern India, had fallen on evil days. The land south of the Vindhyas was no exception from this. The Cholas of Tanjore who were to reach the height of their glory in the succeeding century, were gradually consolidating their position in the extreme south. While a new Chālukya dynasty claiming relationship with the older one eclipsed the supremacy of the Rāshṭrakuṭas in the Deccan. The history of the tenth and eleventh century a.d. is full of internecine warfare, which paved the way for Muslim conquest of India.

The present text is a duplicate of Ki. 1904–10–9, 87 (for a copy of which see AJSL., vol. xxxv, p. 138, and for transcription and translation Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, vol. vi, p. 32), as indeed has been already noted by Güterbock (ZA., xlii, p. 9). But the fragment previously published was so small as to be scarcely intelligible, and the present fragment (K. 5119) throws a great deal more light upon the real nature of this text. It is probably, as will be shown, a text concerning Etana, thirteenth king of the first dynasty of Kish and subject of the famous myth in which he ascends to heaven on the back of an eagle in search of the plant of birth; but it is a type of text not hitherto associated with that hero.

Mr. RameŚa Basu has published a reading of this grant in the Journal of the Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣat, 1337 B.S., No. 4. From Mr. Basu's account, it appears that the plate was discovered at the village of Śaktipur in the Sadar subdivision of Murśidābād district. Mr. Basu has, unfortunately, failed to read correctly some vital geographical details regarding the land granted away by the plate, and thus could discover no clue as to its geographical situation. The genealogical portion of this new plate contains no new information whatever, as it is an exact replica of some other plates of the same king previously found. The real importance of the new plate lies in the supply of new geographical information.

Two years ago an attempt was made in these pages to give a general survey of archæological events since 1899 at An-yang, in the north of Ho-nan province. Though excavation was still in progress, and investigation of results far from ended, the great interest taken by Western students called for an interim statement. This was specially needed because most of the literature of the subject is written in Chinese. Besides the clandestine activities of treasureseekers and the earlier, less organized digging by the peasants, scientific exploration had been carried out since 1928 by the National Research Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, which had published three parts of Preliminary Reports of Excavations at Anyang under the editorship of Dr. Li Chi . The main purpose of the present article is to take account of part iv, which appeared in 1933 after my former article was written, and includes the results of excavation during 1931 and 1932.

The language of the Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan by Sir Aurel Stein is in the main Prakrit, but contains a considerable amount of non-Indian material. Of this there are a number of Iranian words (under a score). The rest consists of about 1,000 proper names and about 150 words. The latter consist of titles, names of agricultural products, articles of dress, etc., for which no doubt there was no Indian term that exactly corresponded. We may take this as representing the native language of the Shan-Shan kingdom, as opposed to the Indian Prakrit which was used as the official language. Most of the documents come from the Niya site, which was an outpost of the kingdom bordering on Khotan. For the rest there are a few from Endere (= Sāca) and about forty from the Lou Lan area (666–707). Since the names in these latter are of the same type and often the same names, we may conclude that the population and their language was uniform throughout the whole kingdom.

Two years ago my translation of the second part of The History of Buddhism (Chos-ḥbyuṅ), the work of the celebrated Tibetan scholar Bu-ston Rin-chen-ḍub (grub), i.e. of the historical part proper, appeared in the press, published by the Heidelberg Society for the Investigation of Buddhist Lore. In the introduction to this translation I have indicated all the principal works of Buddhist scripture and exegesis (sūtra and śāstra) which have been referred to by Bu-ston and which represent the main sources from which he has compiled his work. I have, furthermore, drawn the attention of the reader to the fact that among the said sources an exclusive importance is given to the Mañjuśrī-mūla-tantra (or Kalpa; Tib. Ḥjam-dpal-rtsa-rgyud, Kangyur, RGYUD. xi, Narthaṅ edition, or xii, Derge edition). A great part of chapter 51 of this work, the “Prophecy concerning the Kings” (Rāja-vyākarana-parivarta), has been incorporated by Bu-ston in his work, mostly in the form of direct quotations, and partly condensed in prose. It is to be noted here that Bu-ston is not the only Tibetan author who has made copious references to the Mañjuśrī-mūla-tantra. The latter appears likewise as one of the principal sources in the well-known historical work of Tārānātha. The prophecies as such are not to be found here, but it is easy to trace considerable parts of Taranatha's text to the Mañjuśrī-mūla-tantra, the passages of which are stripped of their prophetical garb and appear in the form of ordinary historical data.

“Punch-marked coins are the earliest Indian archæo-logical ‘document’ that exists,” wrote Mr. E. H. C. Walsh in 1923 in a thorough study of these interesting remains of Indian proto-historic times. At the time when he wrote his article, very little, if anything, was known of the freshly discovered prehistoric civilization in the Indus Valley, at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Even in a more recent publication, in Professor Chakrabortty's numismatic handbook,2 no attempt is made to explain the symbols punched upon these primitive coins, and it still holds good what Mr. Walsh said in 1923: “Until our present sources of information are added to, the significance of the marks on punch-marked coins must remain the subject of speculation and surmise.” The late Mr. W. Theobald's study is an excellent collection of materials, but his explanations might fitly be called “archaic”. Mr. D. R. Bhandarkar has given some very ingenious interpretations of a number of these rūpas. But these interpretations concern only a very few of the large number of symbols.

The downfall of the Umaiyad and the rise of the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate, the central protagonist in which was the formidable Abū Muslim, is one of the most fascinating periods in Islamic History. Numismatic research is gradually revealing more and more vestiges of these troublous times. Recently in the JRAS. (July, 1932) Mr. Rhuvon Guest published a copper coin of Abū Muslim, now in the ‘Irāḳ Museum, which had been unearthed during irrigation work on the lesser Zāb, and which provided interesting corroborative evidence of the statements of the early Arab chroniclers. In a similar way I propose to draw attention to two copper coins in the British Museum, until now unpublished, which not only throw some light on the family relationship of Abū Muslim and his provincial politics, but moreover preserve for us a variety of coin legend which has hitherto been unrecorded and is perhaps unique in Muslim numismatics (Plate I).

Venkayya and I are of opinion that the Koḍumbāḷūr inscription of Bhūti Vikramakēsari must be dated in the tenth century a.d.; Father Heras proposes a date three centuries earlier. The arguments originally put forward by Venkayya, together with others drawn from Cōḷa inscriptions, have been summarized by me in my paper on the Koḍumbāḷūr inscription to which Fr. Heras has referred in his paper published in a recent issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (January, 1934, pp. 33 ff.). I propose here to examine the steps by which Fr. Heras reaches his conclusion.

Nāropā, with Padmasambhava, Mi, la ras pa, and Tsoṅ k'a pa, is one of the most famous Buddhist teachers in Tibet. He may certainly be considered as one of the most conspicuous factors of Tibetan Buddhism, since he was the spiritual father of Marpa, who is acknowledged as the guru of Milaraspa and the founder of the bKa’ rgyud pa sect. This school later split up into several sub-sects, widely spread even now in Tibet, and through Karma Bakshi allied itself with the rÑiṅ ma pas; but its first teacher or ādiguru is said to have been rDo rje ạc'aṅ, or Vajradhara, whose doctrines were secreṭly transmitted to Tilopā, and by this siddha to Nāropā, who was to exercise through his pupil a great spiritual influence all over Tibet.

Ms. Alliance Israélite Universelle, unnumbered; paper 8 × 5½ in.; Arabic in Hebrew characters, of a Syrian square type. Provisionally numbered viii–B–26. The script is fairly legible, though in places the page has faded and a guess has to be made at the right reading. As is usual in such MSS. the headings are in red, as, for instance, in MS. Arabe 2965 in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Minhāj al-Dukkān of Abu al-Muna ibn Abi Naṣr ibn Ḥaffāṭh, called al-Kōhēn ibn al-Attār al-Israīlī al-Hārūnī of Cairo, ca. 1260 (see Brockelmann, i, p. 492, No. 34), or an earlier author Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Bahrām al-Ḳalānisī (ibid., p. 489, No. 23), which I have consulted in MS. 2946 of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In the Genizah collection of the late Mr. Jack Mosseri (Med. No. 14) there is a fragment of a similar work, the original of which, unfortunately, I have been unable to see, but only a photograph.

The latest scientific opinions concerning the origin of the Magyars may be summed up as follows. The primary home of the Magyars as an Ugro-Finnish tribe was probably in Eastern Europe between the Volga and the Ural Mountains. Here they may have lived with kindred Ugro-Finnish peoples, the ancestors of their near relatives, the Ostyaks and Voguls, and of their more distant relatives, the Finns, Lapps, Mordwins, Zyryäns, and Tsheremis, about 2500–2000 b.c. From there they drifted eastward. In the fifth century a.d. they moved south-westward in close connection with several peoples of the Turkish race, chiefly with the Bolgars, Sabeers, “Blue” Turks, and Khazars, absorbing a considerable Turkish stratum, to become organized into a nation, or rather an alliance of several tribes, on the territory of South-Eastern Europe of to-day. About the year 800 they were in the region of the Caucasus, then on the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the last years of the ninth century the Magyars, under the pressure of kindred tribes, proceeded westward and occupied their present home in the basin of the Carpathians.

PRAVARTATE svargaloke grāmo 'sau na mahītale. That scale exists in heaven, not on earth.

It was this sentence in the Sañgītadarpaṇa (i, 72) that determined me thirty years ago to visit India. Not that I hoped exactly to solve the problem, but the music must be interesting, I thought, which had learnt so much that it had quite forgotten.

Dozy's Dictionnaire des Noms des Vêtements long ago settled the meanings of the great majority of the terms used for clothes and clothing in Arabic. Texts not available at the time of its compilation have come to hand in the meanwhile, and, further, something still remains to be said on the social and historical aspects of the subject.