In his admirable Catalogue of the Coins of Ancient India, pp. 282–4 and Introduction, pp. clvii ., Mr. J. Allan describes what he calls “a puzzling group” of coins in the British Museum, of which he has deciphered the legends ; but he is unable to throw any light upon them beyond the fact that they were obtained by the late Mr. Rodgers at Barwala (in Hissar District, Panjab). I am able to locate them with certainty, and propose to add some relevant observations.

In Professor Geiger's new Grammar of the Sinhalese Language there is so much that is admirable and instructive that one is loth to dissent from any of his statements. When, therefore, I find myself unable iurare in verba magistri in respect of a few of his etymologies, I do so with regret, and hope for pardon.

It is well known that in a great number of words e and o in Kanarese, Tuḷu, and Telugu correspond to i and u in Tamil and Malayalam, With reference to this interchange K. V. Subbayya in his “Primer of Dravidian Phonology ”, published in the Indian Antiquary, lays down the following rule: “ i before cerebrals and liquids and followed by a becomes e in Classical Canarese, Tuḷu and Telugu and also in New Tamil and New Malayalam.” Likewise with respect to u and o he says: “Pr. Drav. initial u becomes o when followed by a and before cerebrals and liquids. This change is found in classical Can., Tel. and Tuḷu, and also in New Tamil and Malayalam.” This formulation is faulty in as much as there is no restriction on the consonants intervening between the i or u and the following a-vowel.

The importance and function of the Secret Committee as an essential part of the East India Company's home government have in general been misrepresented or ignored. From the beginning the Company's executive body in London consisted of the rather large number of twenty-four and, since the Company was wholly dependent upon trade, the formation of a smaller, trustworthy committee, which in emergency could safeguard the Company's voyages, especially against the threat of war or piracy, by giving secret instructions to the ships' captains, was sooner or later inevitable. Likewise, as the Company became increasingly entangled in Indian politics, it realized the necessity of issuing secret political orders from London, and since the Company's unwieldy executive body was obviously ill-fitted for this task a Secret Political Committee soon evolved. That the duty of ensuring the safety of the Company's ships and of issuing secret political orders should have been entrusted to one and the same Committee was convenient and natural. Historians have not only underestimated the significance of this Committee's activities down to its statutory establishment in 1784, but have also tended to disregard the part it thenceforth played, describing it at best as a mere ministerial instrument or as a channel, conveying to India the Ministry's instructions “which it could neither discuss nor disclose”. The truth is much less one-sided than this, and in fact long before 1784 the Secret Committee had emerged as the cabinet council of the Company, the most powerful Committee at the India House, a status which it maintained until the Company's extinction in 1858.

During the whole of the tenth century from about 910 onwards, Tunhuang under the name of Kuei-i Chün was governed by members of the Ts‘ao family, who were more or less independent of the fugitive dynasties that rose and fell at Lo-yang and Pien-liang. The connection with China was practically limited to the bestowal of the title of chieh-tu-shih on the man in power if he cared to apply for it. The system seems to have worked well enough: with the Tibetan menace removed, the people enjoyed a fair measure of peace and prosperity, though the standard of living and culture in general never rose again to what it had been under the T‘angs before An Lu-shan's rebellion. The deterioration of arts and crafts dating from that disastrous upheaval is plainly observable in the manuscript rolls of this period: the highly finished paper of the seventh and eighth centuries with its beautifully glazed and stained surface has entirely disappeared, and what we find in its place is with rare exceptions thick, coarse, and drab-coloured. The handwriting, too, though sometimes vigorous, lacks the elegance and grace of former times.

THE island of the Northern New Hebrides which the French explorer Bougainville named Isle of Lepers is uow usually known as Oba (Omba), and to this the locative preposition a is prefixed, Aoba. One is inclined, however, to question the accuracy of the name Oba as applied to Lepers’ Island, since on Raga, the nearest island eastward, the name given to the island is Bai, A Bai. Also on Atchin and its neighbouring islets to the westward, off the coast of Malekula, places that had a considerable connection with Lepers’ Island for ceremonial as well as for trading purposes, Ba and Bai are the names by which it is known. Bishop Patteson, of the MM., who frequently visited the island, always wrote of it as Lepers’ Island. The later name of Opa given to it by members of the MM. would seem to be due to mission scholars from the island of Mota further north, where p replaces b, and the article o precedes the names of islands. This would point to Ba (Mba) being the name of the island.

Dr. R. H. Codrington published a grammar of the Oba language, using the dialect of that portion of the north coast of the island which is known as Walurigi. This grammar was founded principally on information derived from scholars from that part of the island in the MM. school at Norfolk Island.

Present difficulties have induced me to publish in the form of an article the text of the Khotanese Rāma poem. It is of interest to both Indian and Iranian scholars, not least perhaps to our confrères with whom we are not at present in contact. It is hoped to publish a commentary and translation in a subsequent paper.

A description, with short summary, of the contents of the poem was given in a lecture to the American Oriental Society in Baltimore, April, 1939, and will be shortly published in the Journal of that Society. Reference for the present may be made to that account.

The text is contained in three MS. rolls numbered 2801, 2781, 2783, written on Chinese paper, in cursive Khotanese script, and now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I first read them in December, 1937, and subsequently obtained photostatic copies. I wish once again to thank Professor Paul Pelliot for his permission to use them.

Of all our Iranian sources for that form of Zoroastrianism which recognized Zurvān as the prime principle of the cosmos, the Selections of Zātspram are undoubtedly the most important. We have seen (BSOS., IX, p. 573) that in his first chapter Zātspram assigns to Zurvān a decisive rôle in the creative process not found elsewhere; for it was he who handed to Ahriman that “black and ashen garment”, “that weapon, like unto fire … that containeth the very essence of Āz”. In so doing he was making no idle gesture; he was presenting Ahriman with one who was to be at once his most powerful ally and his eventual destroyer. The results of this action are related in the thirty-fourth chapter, an edition of which is offered here. Though our text is at some points exasperatingly corrupt, our chapter does seem to throw additional light on the mysterious figure of Jēh, the Primal Whore, and to support the theory advanced by Professor Benveniste that woman belonged, in the Zervanite system, to the evil creation. We hope in the near future to be able to offer an interpretation of this fascinating chapter: in this article we have confined ourselves to the text and, in the next number of this Bulletin, we will add a first translation which we hope will be of use to such students of religion as are unfamiliar with Pahlavi.

A Passage in the Sogdian edition of the Manichæan Book of the Giants relates what punishment the angels meted out to the γίγανтες (Sogd. kwyšt, cf. βγyšt, etc.). They apply” ṯr nfṯṯ'ṯ[yy l–2]wqṯṯ “fire, naphtha, and?” It is a priori obvious that the third, damaged word is “sulphur”, and further confirmation (although not necessary) can be found in a similar sentence of the Middle Persian Kawān where we read: pd 'dwr npt' wd gwgyrd “with fire, naphtha, and sulphur” (both fragments are unpublished).

The first thing which strikes the student of the Arabic literature of this period is the remarkable number of works attributed to Rifā،ah, but, in reality, there is nothing new or startling about the quantity, for the eighteenth century provides us with the names of many Egyptian scholars who produced long lists of works on all the subjects in which the learned were interested and for which there was a constant demand in scholastic circles. Rifā،ah had a gift for writing which was encouraged by the exceptional circumstances in which he found himself once he had become absorbed into the military system created by Muḥammad ،Alī. What is so pleasing about Rifā،ah is the variety of his literary interests, and he must be credited with having been the principal actor in laying the foundations of the “new” literature. His verses, too, were admired by his contemporaries; as a student in the mosque of al-Azhar, he wrote an urjūzdh on tauḥīd which attracted the attention of one of his teachers, Shaikh al-Faḍḍālī, but it was never published.

In the cold December of 1906 I was returning from Borūjerd to Tehran. At every village on the road I inquired whether there existed any local curiosities. At Kondūrūd I was told that the inhabitants belonged to the Turkish Khalaj tribe and spoke Khalajī. I had only a couple of hours to jot down a few sentences in the dialect which struck me by its unusual features. It was too late to call back my men who, by that time, had gone ahead, and I had to content myself with the hope that some Khalaj might turn up in the capital. Indeed I had an inhabitant of “Khalajestān” brought to me from the bazaar only to discover that he spoke an Iranian dialect. I revisited Solṭanābād in 1917 in circumstances of war. At my request, the governor's men got hold of two Khalaj villagers, but the latter were so frightened that the official summons might mean some trouble in store for them that they hardly answered my questions and most pathetically asked me to let them go in peace.

The medieval phase of the language now spoken between Korosko and Ḥannak on the Upper Nile is known to us since 1906, when first documents were brought to Berlin and deciphered by Professor H. Schäfer. In 1913 a full inventory of the then available material was published by the late Professor F. Ll. Griffith, in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy. It was completed by a subsequent article in 1928.

I am here presenting a series of notes on Griffith's texts, obtained mainly by a careful comparison of the medieval with the modern language. May they serve to smooth the path of some future student.

[On going through the papers of Dr. Alice Werner, I found many valuable and interesting documents. Miss Mary Werner very generously presented these papers to the School, and it is the aim of the African Department to edit and publish them from time to time in the Bulletin. It is hoped that the following short article will be the forerunner of an extensive series. A. N. T.]

The language on which this short study is based is Lingala, the very interesting lingua franca spoken along the vast stretch of the central part of the main Congo River. The language is spoken almost entirely by Bantu tribes, all of whom have also their own tribal languages. Naturally there is considerable affinity between these languages, and in some senses Lingala may be said to represent the Highest Common Factor of them. Phonetically they are almost identical, and so Lingala has preserved a clearly marked phonetic system, a brief account of which should not be out of place here.