In his Spreading of Cāṇakya's aphorisms over ‘Greater India’ this author drew the attention to the similarity between the Pāli Lokanīti and the Burmese Nīti kyan. The present study contains a detailed analysis of these two sources and is not limited to their comparison with Cāṇakya's sayings.

‘Shaman, Saiva and Sufi’ in 1925 urged R. 0. Winstedt, M.A., D.Litt. (Oxon.), Malayan Civil Service, to write ‘a study of the evolution of Malay magic’. Hoping that Sir Richard Winstedt, K.B.E., C.M.G., M.A., D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A., might be interested in the non-brahmin bhujangga of Bali, these exorcist priests of the sĕngguhu cast

The Yüeh-fu hung-shan is a Ming dynasty work which is generally thought to have been lost. What little is known of it is entirely dependent on one man's description. On the strength of this, however, the work has come to occupy a fairly important position in histories of Chinese oral literature. The purpose of this article is to call attention to a surviving copy of the Yüeh-fu hung-shan, and to show that the nature of its contents has been completely misunderstood.

Berber in the Sahara and southern Morocco, and several West African languages including Soninké, Mandinka and Songhay, all refer to the five Islamic daily prayers using terms not derived from their usual Arabic names, and showing striking mutual similarities. The motivation behind these names has not hitherto been explained. An examination of Islamic sources reveals that many correspond to terms attested within Arabic from an early period but which have passed out of use elsewhere. Others, with a more limited distribution, reflect transfer from a time-keeping system widely attested among Berber-speaking oases of the northern Sahara. These results demonstrate that the variant prayer terminologies attested in the ḥadith reflect popular usages that were still commonplace at the time when North Africa was conquered, and underscore the conservatism of non-Arabic Islamic religious terminology in and around the Sahara.

The middle of the 14th century offers a convenient dividing-line in the study of Islamic metal work. Few distinguished works were produced after that date and practically no new motifs were added to the artists' repertoire. In a passage of his Topography of Cairo, Maqrizi exposes the decadence of inlaid metal work in the latter half of the 14th century and explains some of the reasons which led to it. In view of the importance of this contemporary account, I am translating it in full in an appendix to this paper (pp. 228–31).

Though not invariably susceptible of demonstration, the influence of Classical Arabic upon the popular literature of Arabic-speaking Muslims in North Africa may safely be assumed. ‘Popular’, indeed, the early Islamic verse forms (ši'r mawzūn) and the later stanzaic compositions (klam or ālat al-andalus) have remained, and in these, even when modified by local tradition, the source of inspiration is easily recognized. Less clear is the transfer pattern of classical elements in the strictly vernacular poetry (klam melḥūn) of the same people. It is this category of composition with which the following observations are concerned, and wḥich suggested selection of the term ‘vernacular’ rather than ‘popular’. A further factor contributory to isolation of this topic is the existence of a vernacular literature amongst non-Muslim Arabic speakers in North Africa: the Jewish communities. There, owing both to Judaeo-Arabic orthography and to confessional motives in the selection of theme, the tyranny of Classical Arabic is considerably weakened, to some extent a consequence of social (educational) lines of demarcation. Important, however, are the affinities between the vernacular compositions of both groups, especially in matters relating to rhetorical convention and prosodic structure.

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.

The Library of the Wellcome Institute is devoted to the history of medicine and related sciences. Apart from some 250,000 printed books, it contains about 10,000 manuscripts, half of which are in Oriental languages.

In 1970 I was entrusted with describing the Ethiopian manuscripts belonging to this library. There were 34 of them: 17 mostly of religious content and completely unrelated to the interests of the Institute, 16 magical scrolls, and one manuscript mainly of divinatory content. Without constituting medical manuscripts in the strict sense of the term, the scrolls are designed to combat demons and diseases and to keep people in good health. They can be called magico-medical scrolls and belong to the field of ethnomedicine. The scrolls are written in Gə'az with strong Amharic influence. At the suggestion of Dr. F. N. L. Poynter, Director of the Wellcome Institute, the Wellcome Trust decided to donate the first group of manuscripts to the British Museum, to whom 14 were presented in June 1970 and 3 others in June 1971. All these manuscripts have been described by the present writer in the Catalogue of the Ethiopian manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since 1877 (in preparation). The present catalogue notes contain only the description of the 16 scrolls and the divinatory manuscript.

Burrow and Emeneau (1961, p. xiii, n. 3) have observed that ‘Ta. and Ma. seem to have evidence for two phonemes [/n/, the dental and /ṉ/, the alveolar]a in PDr., but the matter is not yet clear’. This is mainly due to the non-availability of data about the distribution of these phonemes in those two languages and the allophonic distribution, if any, in other languages. With the help of increased material available now, an attempt is made in this paper to find out the history of the development of the two nasal phonemes in Ta. and Ma. and to establish their allophonic nature in PDr. Since definite information about the phonetic nature of the phoneme /n/ is not available for languages such as Kui, Parji, Nk. [Ch.] etc., this study is incomplete to some extent.

For typographical reasons the Jahai words and phrases in the following grammatical sketch have been transcribed from the Anthropos alphabet into the script of the International Phonetic Association. The two alphabets do not strictly correspond, and it seems desirable to add a few explanations of some of the symbols used.