In his fundamental study of the Dome of the Rock Professor K. A. C. Creswell discusses the date of the ceilings, and in connection with this he draws attention to some interesting facts discovered in 1873 by Dr. Thomas Chaplin: “There is a very old carved wooden cornice still running round the building in the space between the ceiling and roof of the outer corridor on the inner wall of the latter, just above the ceiling.” And further: the roof of this outer ambulatory was found to have Kufic inscriptions on one beam and on “6 or 8 more rafters” in the name of the ‘Abbāsid Khalif al-Muqtadir bi'llāh (295–320 H./908–32 a.d.).

The sixth inscription, which is described in the MSS. as being “on the stone pillar at the bridge-head at 'Phyong-rgyas”, relates to the reign of Khri Srong Lde Brtsan (755–797) and is hitherto unknown.

The Gurjara-Pratihāras were the last Hindu power of early Indian history who strove to unify the whole of Āryāvarta under one parasol, and the dynasty produced a brilliant galaxy of monarchs such as Nāgabhaṭa, Mihira-Bhoja, Mahendrapāla and Mahipāla who, apart from their military genius, were great patrons of learning and art. The archaeological remains of this dynasty have been brought to light from Pihova (Pṛthūdaka) in the north to Deogarh and Gwalior in the south, and from Kathiawar in the west to Bihar and Bengal in the east. Rājaśēkhara, the great Sanskrit poet-dramatist, was the spiritual preceptor (upādhyaya) of Mahendrapāla alias Nirbhayanarendra. He continued to grace the Pratihāra court till the reign of Mahipāla, the son and successor of Mahendrapāla, in whose presence the play Bālabhārata was staged. Besides the Bālabhārata, three other dramas, Bālarāmāyaṇa, Karpūramañjarī and Viddhaśālabhañjikā, and Kāvyamīmāṃsā, an elaborate work on poetics, were written by the same author. Being closely associated with the political life of the court, Rājaśēkhara's dramas, although based on conventional themes of love, give us glimpses of the political condition of northern India at that time.

Dr. Kalika Ranjan Qanungo's short work “Studies in Rajput History” consists of six lectures on the history of Rajasthan. The first is entitled “A Critical Analysis of the Padminī Legend”, and we disagree with Dr. Qanungo in many vital points, the most important of which is his theory on the main cause of the sack of Chitor by ‘Alā-ud-Dīn Khaljī. His error is linked up with his confusion about the various chiefs named Ratnasiṁha mentioned by different sources.

I. The Gandhāra and Mathurā Schools of Art made a revolutionary contribution to the traditions and history of Buddhist art. Early Buddhist art was aniconic. At Bhārhut, Sānchi and Amaravātī before the 1st century a.d., the Buddha was represented only in symbols; a riderless horse, the tree or wheel, stūpa, and the rest indicated the great renunciation, enlightenment, preaching of the doctrine and the nirvāṇa. In Gandhāra and Mathurā art, however, the Buddha was represented in human form, and many sculptures representing bodhisattvas have been found in Gandhāra.

In the pre-islamic inscriptions from South Arabia there has survived a small number of words which on contextual grounds may be seen to have reference to a monetary system, either as designating actual coins or as indicating characteristics of these coins. Likewise several different coin types are represented in the collections of Europe and there is evidence, amongst the silver, at least, for a series of denominations based on fractions of a half, a quarter, and occasionally an eighth. Since many of these types and denominations exhibit numbers of sub-classes and die varieties, there is some justification for the assumption that coined money probably played an important part in the local economy, though equally there is nothing to suggest that it was fundamental to it. By making comparisons with the styles and standards of other ancient monetary systems it has been possible to assign tentative dates to the extant South Arabian coinages, which may thus be reckoned to cover the period from approximately 250 b.c. till around a.d. 300. Unfortunately the chronological and, above all, geographical distribution of these coins is very uneven and it is no easy task to reconcile their evidence with the results of present-day studies of South Arabian history and chronology carried out on the basis of the inscriptions, so that in virtually no case is one justified in making a positive identification of a given term in any text with a particular coin.

James Mill in his efforts to belittle the achievements of the Hindus took Jones as his chief antagonist; he tried to show how the Orientalist suffered from illusions about the Hindus and tended to magnify their importance without having any idea of what the term civilization meant. He said that Jones's description of the life of the Arabs and Hindus far surpassed the “rhapsodies of Rousseau on the happiness and virtue of savage life”. To Mill, Jones was a misguided man who failed to grasp the problems of India; his reason gave way to the romantic fascination of the East and so in his judgment on India he was uncritical. Ever since the first publication of Mill's work in 1817 the history of the British policy in India had been presented as if it were a struggle between Jones and Mill, the romantic versus the rationalist. This theme was developed in a recent conference on Indian historiography. Elsewhere Jones is described as a medievalist. In fact most of these writers presented Jones as James Mill had depicted him, even though their sympathies may have been with him.