In the first part of this article we have discussed seven different -*- eras or (to be strictly correct) different kinds of time-reckoning with or without a common era. We are now going to deal with the fourteen remaining sections of our list. But before proceeding to the discussion of the next number, I want to insert here a small note relating to No. 3, i.e. the Kharājī era in Egypt, as a complement to what has already been said in the preceding number of this Bulletin (BSOS., pp. 914–15).

Professor A. S. Tritton called my attention to a few Kharājī dates occurring in an Arabic manuscript in the British Museum (Or. 1338). On examining these dates, which belong to the fifth and early sixth centuries A.H., I find some interesting points which supplement our knowledge about that era as used in that country in the time of the Fāṭimid caliphs. This anonymous book is a history of the Monophysite patriarchs of Alexandria, from St. Mark to Matthew the 87th patriarch who died 31st December, 1408, and it must have been composed by an unknown author soon after the latter date.Some of the Kh. dates in this book are given with their corresponding dates of the Diocletian era (era of the Martyrs). These are as follows:—

Moreover, the date of the death of the Fāṭimid Caliph al-Musta‘lī, which happened in the month of Ṣafar, A.H. 495 (Hilālī) = December, A.D. 1101, is given as 491 Kh. (fol. 284b).

Ever since the West began to take an interest in the music of India, the great affinity of the Indian system with that of Greece has been one of the first characteristics to attract notice. As early as 1782 Sir William Jones remarked on it at length in what is perhaps the first detailed article on the subject written in any European language, entitled ‘On the musical modes of the Hindus’. Originally this was published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, but subsequently it was incorporated in a delightful collection published by Sourendro Mohun Tagore called Hindu music from various authors.

The study of quantifiers is an important area of language description. This is in part because their description has proved relevant to an issue of great theoretical interest, the relation between syntax and semantics. One question of interest is how far the unity of their semantic function is reflected in their syntactic behaviour. This raises questions like, is there a syntactic category ‘quantifier’ or ‘quantifier phrase (QP)’?

The languages of India Proper belong to two great families— in the North, the Indo-Aryan; and in the South, the Dravidian. The map here displayed shows the localities in which the former are spoken. These Indo-Aryan tongues again lull into two main groups, viz., those of the Midland—indicated on the map by red — and a number of Outer Languages, indicated by blue. These two groups differ from each other in an important characteristic, which has affected their respective literatures to no inconsiderable extent. In the Midland the languages are all analytical. Their grammars are very simple, they are cumbered by few grammatical forms, and they indicate the various relations of time and space by the aid of auxiliary words, just as we do in English. The Outer Languages, on the contrary, are synthetic. Their idioms depend chiefly on grammatical form, and, as in Latin or German, each has a more or less complicated system of declension and conjugation.

Although your scholarly fame, Sir Ralph, rests principally on your achievements as a comparative linguist, your work on certain Asoka inscriptions has shown that you are no less at home in the field of epigraphy. I gratefully recall how generously you helped me when, some years ago, I struggled with a particularly difficult inscription (also attributable to Asoka) from the Indo-Iranian borderland. This interest in matters of epigraphy encourages me to hope that you will not disdain, as a modest tribute, the following notes on some new inscriptions, discovered at a place not far beyond the confines of ancient India.

Among the many contributions by which Ignaz Goldziher. deepened and enriched western understanding of Arabic culture, one of the most familiar to all students is his study of the conflict of ancient and modern in Arabic poetry.1 Devoted in the main to an analysis of the attitude taken up by literary critics towards modern, i.e. post–Islamic and later poets, the study traces the gradual shift in the criteria of judgment from the older philologists view of the unapproachable superiority of the pre–Islamic poets to the later aesthetic appreciation of modern and contemporary poetry. At the same time, it is pointed out that the older view not only continued to find support amongst the reactionaries, but remained the generally accepted view of the whole learned society of the Muslim, and particularly of the Arab, East.

Among the manuscripts in the National Library in Bangkok are a number of sმmut dam ‘blank books’ written in yellow orpiment on blackened paper. Many of these are in Thai, but a few, catalogued under the number XVII 37 are in two scripts that show very close affinities with South Indian Grantha.