This painting, “Ladies Preparing Silk,” by the Emperor Hui Tsung, illustrates very clearly certain fundamental qualities of pure art. Whether in sculpture or in painting, the genuine artist seeks the balance and poise which give a static quality even to the most dynamic composition. In this picture one feels the strong persevering movement their work demands of these women. The artist caught one of the moments in this work, and interpreted the exquisite rhythm of the process. Each of the women is graceful, quiet, and dignified, and the movement of each is downwards. Nevertheless, one feels the strain involved in lifting up and down the heavy sticks with which they are pounding the silk.

This is a remarkable composition. The big elephant stands out distinctly, but not too definitely, against a subdued tropical background of interlaced branches and tangled vegetation, a monumental and majestic figure that dominates the scene.

This is a preliminary account of some finds of archæological interest which have recently come to my notice in the tracts comprised within the Gilgit Agency south of the Hindukush. Separated by high ranges from the northern extremity of the Indian North-West Frontier, these tracts are too remote for their population of Dardic speech to have directly shared in the development of Indo-Aryan civilization in the great plains along the Indus and Ganges. Nor have they been immediately exposed to the invasions and cultural influences from the west which have affected that civilization within historical times. Apart from reliable but very scant notices in the Chinese Annals, such written records of the past of these tracts as exist do not reach back much further than the advent of Islām. Hence any relics attesting the conditions prevailing there in earlier periods may claim special interest.

To judge by the number of works published during the last ten years the study of Ibn Quzman should have made appreciable progress. It has marked time. If the opposite seems to have happened it is because students of the Romance languages have taken up the study which students of Arabic had dropped because of the many pit-falls in the way.

All the epigraphic material dealt with in this note was recorded in and about the oasis of Najran, situated in the Wadi of the same name at the point where it begins to leave the mountains and to splay out into the great south desert of Arabia. The oasis lies at an altitude of 4,500 feet above sea-level between rugged granite and basalt walls surmounted by a frieze of reddish, rather friable, sandstone averaging 300 feet in thickness with peaks rising out of it to a further height of about 200 feet. The highest points are about 2,000 feet above the valley or 6,500 feet above sea-level. This layer of sandstone overlies the igneous rock of the foundations over a considerable area—westward to near the summit of the main mountain range, northwards right up into Najd, and southwards far into the Yaman. It has obviously played an important part in human history by providing relatively easy trade and invasion routes through an otherwise forbidding tract of granite mountains.

The Academy of Sciences of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic published in 1941 through the Institute of History, Tiflis, a report in Russian (231 pp. + 132 illustrations and 126 plates, of which 19 are coloured) by Mr. B. A. Kuftin on some remarkable archæological discoveries in Trialeti. The report contains a 16 page summary of its contents in English and an up-to-date bibliography of more than 500 references. The appearance in the middle of the war of a volume devoted to Russian research is in itself an event. It is evidence of the vitality of Russian archæology and of the confidence of the author and editor in ultimate victory at the very moment when the invader was carrying fire and sword to the foot of the Caucasus.

There are many isolated data in the Malay Archipelago that still await scientific explanation. Dr. G. de Hevesy claimed to have discovered a kinship between the script of Easter Island and that of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro (Bulletin de la Socéité préhistorique Française, 1933, Nos. 7–8; The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, E. R. Hunter, London, 1934); Sir Elliot Smith detected Egyptian influence in the banners of Alur Islands (Human History, 1930, p. 339); Dr. Paul Rivet discovered a Sumerian element in Oceanian languages (Proceedings of the Fourth Pacific Science Congress, Batavia, 1930, vol. iii, pp. 519–527). And to these unsolved problems may be added the art motif of a bird perched on an animal.

The Canaanite poem of Aliyan Ba'al and Mot, discovered at Ras Shamra (Ugarit), is now familiar to most students of ancient Semitic literature. As I have repeatedly pointed out, it is the libretto of a seasonal pantomime representing the victory of Rain over Drought. By comparison with the Arabic terms ba'l and mawulh, the names of the two antagonists may be rendered “Sir Rain” and “Sir Drought”.

Western science began to penetrate to the Far East at the end of the sixteenth century, along with the Christian faith spread by Portuguese Jesuits.

Astrology was important in both China and Japan. It included not only a limited knowledge of astronomy, but some philosophy and logic. The advent of astronomical knowledge as understood in Europe was the beginning of a new kind of science, which did not affect the East's traditional view of the universe; although at first information from Europe about medicine, physics, and astronomy reached the Far East along with the doctrines of Christianity, as a means of attracting converts to what the Chinese termed a new philosophy of life. An early propagator of Western civilization in China was the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1553–1610), who taught medicine and astrology together with the principles of Catholicism. Another Jesuit, Francis Xavier, advised his superiors to send a mission consisting not only of the devout but also of the cultured.

When the Persians, led by Darius, had slain Gaumāta the Magian and a great number of his colleagues (. . . ἔκτεινον κου τιν μάγον εὕρισκον), they instituted an annual feast to remind the Magians of their humiliation: it was called τά μαγοϕόνια (Herodotus, iii, 79), or μαϒοϕονία (Ctesias, epit. Photii 15, § 46 ed. Gilmore). Gilmore (p. 149 n.) wisely remarked that “the agreement of Herodotus and Ctesias makes it impossible to doubt the existence of this strange custom”. Ctesias. after having stayed at the Persian court for seventeen years, could not help knowing whether or not such a feast existed, and he would never have foregone the opportunity of correcting his predecessor.

Among the sharpest contrasts between East and West has been their different approach to the problems of physical science. The West, aiming low, concentrated on the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, conceivably attainable ends, and arrived at modern science. The East aimed higher at the grand source of power, from which all the rest would follow, and it arrived practically nowhere. This power was sought in knowledge of the Seal of the Great Name, the seal containing the Ineffable Name of God, which was believed to have given Solomon his power over the Djinn, the birds and the winds.

There are several recensions of the Hikayat Seri Rama or Malay Ramayana. There are three folk-versions: Seri Rama of Sumatran origin, edited with an outline in English by W. E. Maxwell (JRAS. Straits Branch, 17, 1886); Hikayat Maharaja Ravana, by H. Overbeck (JRAS. Malayan Branch, xi, pt. ii, 1933); and a Patani version, of which an outline was given by me in the Royal Batavian Society's Feestbundel, Batavia, 1929. Of literary recensions the best known are Archbishop Laud's text in the Bodleian, ed. W. G. Shellabear (JRAS. Straits Branch, 71, 1915, with outline, ibid., 70, 1917) = Sh. in this article, and that printed by Roorda van Eysinga (Amsterdam, 1843) = Ro. in this article. The last two have been compared by A. Zeiseniss in his Die Rāma-Sage bei den Malaien (Hamburg, 1928), which has a fairly complete bibliography except for the folk-tale versions. But beyond a few lines in van der Tuuk's catalogue (reprinted in Essays on Indochina, 2nd series, vol. ii) nothing has been written of Raffles Malay MS. 22 in the Library of this Society, which for various reasons is of unique interest. Throughout my description I retain the Malay forms for Sanskrit words.

Some three years ago chance brought to light in the India Office Library a little book with an English title on the cover: First catechism of Sourashtra grammar. By T. M. Rama Rou. Madras, 1905. It challenged inquiry because the script was quite unfamiliar. With it was another little book in the same script and by the same author—Saurāṣṭra-bōdhini (1906)—which fortunately gave the alphabet, in the usual order, and lists of the complex combinations of all the vowels with all the consonants, so that the script could be read. The language is listed as Paṭṅūlī, but is not described, in the Linguistic Survey of India. The author of the two books had, however, provided the necessary clue to understanding in his grammar, the opening sections of which happen to be bilingual, quoting and translating the rules of Sanskrit grammarians. For the rest, since it was usually possible to anticipate what the writer must say, for example in denning grammatical terms, and since after all the book itself gave an account of the inflectional system of the language, it remained only to arrive at the meaning of words, so far as it was not obvious from analogues in other modern Indo-Aryan languages; and (a more difficult task) to grasp the part played in the language by certain striking forms of expression which have no Indo-Aryan parallels.—To learn a modern language by methods appropriate to the interpretation of lost languages of the past is of course a procedure difficult to defend, when it would be so simple, and so much better, to learn it from the lips of the speakers in India. But the better course was not open to me, and I was not willing to postpone indefinitely an investigation which promised to be interesting from other points besides the linguistic.

In October, 1933, I contributed a lengthy article to this Journal entitled “Maimonides on Listening to Music” in which I gave a translation of the Responsum 129 from his Pe'er ha-dor (Lemberg, 1849), in so far as it touched upon listening to music. The latter portion of this responsum dealt with another point, a custom, the “Blessing of Virginity”, which took place at the house of a bridegroom. It might have been intended as a religious ceremony (so far as the Seven Benedictions are concerned, although they should have waited until after the actual wedding), but I have been unable to trace the provenance of the custom. Here is the request together with the response of Maimonides:—

Request: “Please instruct us about the so-called ‘Blessing of Virginity’ which runs ‘[Blessed art thou] who in Eden didst plant the Nut-tree’. For [there is a custom for] a company consisting of the wedding party of the bride and bridegroom and their friends to assemble in the bridegroom's house, [when] a celebrant takes a wine-cup, pronounces the customary Benediction over wine, and the Benediction over spices, and then he pronounces this so-called, i.e. new-fangled Benediction— ‘Blessed art thou.…’ And note that this new-fangled Benediction fixed by our Rabbis in the Talmud also contains the Divine Name, i.e. ‘Blessed art Thou, 0 Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who…Blessed art Thou 0 Lord…’. Please tell us whether the recital of the Benediction is merely a custom or actually orthodox and obligatory.

It is a truism that incomplete or incorrect solutions of problems may serve a useful purpose in drawing attention to unsuspected difficulties, illuminate them, and even lead the same or subsequent workers to success; and thus I often regard my own suggestions as well as those of colleagues as mere gropings towards the light, though with no derogatory intention towards them. I was therefore very glad of Dr. Guillaume's article on “Magical Terms in the Old Testament” (JRAS., 1942, pp. 111–131), as it drew my attention to the unsatisfactory nature of the current interpretation of and some other Hebrew words; as, however, his reply shows that he has not appreciated certain of my remarks, I begin this article with a brief answer to his observations. Thereafter I similarly attempt to advance beyond or, it may be, to improve on several suggestions which Dr. Eitan makes in his “Contributions to Biblical Lexicography” (Columbia, New York, 1924) by way of illustrating my point.

The chivalrous spirit that has moved Mr. Kincaid to make his defence of the Rani of Jhansi (Journal, 1943, p. 100) will be appreciated. Chivalry, however, is not sufficient reason for the reversal of an opinion generally recorded by historians. Mr. Kincaid seeks to show that the Rani was not a rebel and had nothing to do with the massacre of the English at Jhansi in the Mutiny of 1857. In arriving at this conclusion he relies on a letter written in 1889 by a Mr. Martin to the adopted son of the Rani, which states that he was saved from the massacre by the Rani, and asserts that she had nothing to do with it and actually supplied food to the garrison before their surrender. Mr. Kincaid accepts this statement as reliable and dismisses as based on hearsay the evidence of the official narrative compiled by Captain Pinkney in November, 1858. Mr. Martin's name does not occur in any of the reports to which we have access, and before accepting his assertion about the Rani's actions it would be desirable to know more about him. It is curious that he was not with his compatriots in the fort. As his letter states that he took messages from the Rani to officials he was perhaps in her service. On one point he is not borne out by the official narrative. Mr. Martin says that the Rani also saved another Englishman and a lady. The official narrative states that Mrs. Mutlow concealed herself in the town disguised as an Indian, and that a Mr. Crawford left the fort on the night of 7th June and made his way to Samthar. In neither case does the Rani appear to have given any help.

The musical interlude which adorns so many a story in The Thousand Nights and One Night is one of the most interesting features of that “wondrous treasury of Muslim folk-lore”, as Burton dubbed the Alf laila wa laila. Yet, strange to say, our translators and commentators have taken little cognizance of this fact. Indeed, beyond the brief and inadequate notices contributed by Lane to his translation of the Nights, it can safely be averred that no serious attention has been devoted to the subject. It was on this account that the present study was made.

Dr. barnett recently sent me an old Siamese document in the Library of the School of Oriental Studies. It is written on a sheet of paper 11¾ in. by 13 in., and its accession-number is 12889. It forms part of the Marsden Collection.

It might be thought that geography would have opened the Malay archipelago predominantly to the influence of China, but oddly enough the impact of her great civilization on the Malay world has been slight. As early as the seventh century a.d. Chinese monks sailed down to Sumatra to study the Buddhist canon, and eight centuries later the Sultans of Malacca and other Malay princes were still sending envoys to China as Malay rulers had done for hundreds of years. But China's difficult language and intricate ideographs, and her want of missionary zeal and of continuous overseas imperialism were barriers to other than trade relations. To the western half of the Malay archipelago India was nearer, and India got first into the field. With little exaggeration it has been said of Europe that it owes its theology, its literature, its science, and its art to Greece: with no greater exaggeration it may be said of the Malayan races that till the nineteenth century they owed everything to India: religions, a political system, medieval astrology and medicine, literature, arts and crafts.