THE early history of Central Asia, the background of the Turkish expansion in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of the Mongol eruption in the thirteenth, presents a large number of problems which the slowly progressing study of documents made accessible to us in particular by the late M. Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot is bringing nearer to solution. Among these documents those from the kingdoms of Khotan and Krorayina are of outstanding importance for the early period. It seems desirable to treat of some of these problems here.

1. The vocabulary of Khotan and the Iranian words in the Krorayina documents

A large part of the vocabulary of the Khotanese language is now known, much of it already accessible in print, and it is possible to confront it with the Iranian words found in Krorayina. It is at once noticeable that in the two vocabularies, while part is identical, as in lāstana- ‘quarrel’, corresponding to Krorayina lastana, or prahona- ‘garment’ to Krorayina prahuni, yet marked differences appear which are unlikely to be due only to difference of time.

I would notice here the following ten cases.

1. In an article Recent Work in ‘Tokharian’ (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1947, 149–150), I called attention to the difference between Krorayina guśura, Kuchean Sanskrit gauśura, and the Khotan *bisīviraa-, attested in the plural bīsīvīrā of high birth ‘(Suvarnabhāsa-sūtra, Khotanese Texts I p. 248, 73 r 1), and the related bäsīvärāssai, translating Sanskrit kulaputra, a person of good family. The treatment of the initial υ- shows that here two dialects are concerned.

It is one of the most tantalizing features of the ancient history of southern Asia that there is no generally accepted solution to the dating problems of the Kushan dynasty. The wide divergences of opinion still current with regard to this question were well evidenced by the lively discussions which took place at the Conference on the Date of Kanishka, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 20 to 22 April I960. It was rightly appreciated that numerous questions of Oriental history and archaeology depend on the correct solution of this problem.

As one reads through the Rigveda the āyú- stand out challenging attention. They are vīprās (8.12.13) and belong to the antiquity of the poets (9.10.6; 9.23.2 prtnasa āyávaḥ). Their activities are clearly to some extent identical with those of the kārú- officials. They even share one verse with these in RV 9.10.6 āpa dvrā matīnm pratn ṛṇvanti kārávaḥ hárasa āyávaḥ ‘the ancient kārú- officiants (and) the āyú- officiants have opened the gates of the formulae for the heat of the bull (soma)’. Both these types of officials thus assist in the production of mantras.

The frequent Vedic construction exemplified by ṚV 5, 31, 4 indram … arkaír évardhayann éhaye héntav u ‘they strengthened Indra with hymns to slay the serpent’ has since Delbriick's days been the subject of some discussion and difference of opinion. Whitney expressed the view that the frequent use of the dative beside a so-called infinitive dative to denote the subject or the object of the action constitutes a case of attraction: in the above sentence one would, in accordance with the implication of this term, expect the accusative ahint, whereas in ṚV 1, 24, 8 cakira sryāya pánthām ánvetav u ‘he made a track for the sun to follow’, the dative of the noun denoting the being on whose behalf the path is made is understandable at first sight. Hence no doubt the comment made by Whitney before quoting the latter line: the construction is in part a perfectly simple one, but is stretched beyond its natural boundaries by a kind of attraction.

On 29 June 1881 letters were despatched by a Dunqulāwī ascetic and religious teacher to various notables in the Egyptian Sudan. The writer, who had previously been known as Muḥammad Aḥmad b. ‘Abdallāh, announced in these letters what had for some time been an open secret among his followers, namely that he was the Expected Mahdi. Muḥammad Ahmad was by no means an unknown figure. He was at this time approaching 40 years of age. From childhood he had been profoundly devoted to the study of Islam, Ṣufī doctrine, and the ascetic life, although, unlike a number of other Sudanese, he had never proceeded to higher studies at al-Azhar. His experience of the world was limited to the northern and central parts of the Egyptian Sudan.

The subject to which I venture to invite your attention is not altogether new to the members of the Royal Asiatic Society. Three years ago, at a meeting of the Society on 14th March, 1916, with Sir Charles Lyall in the chair, when the Campbell Memorial Gold Medal was awarded to Professor Macdonell, of Oxford, the latter in his reply touched upon the desirability of creating, on behalf of British Sanskrit scholars, some opportunity of study and research in India. “The only remedy,” Professor Macdonell said, “seems to be the establishment of a school of research for Europeans at some centre of Sanskrit learning, preferably Benares, like the School of Classical Archæology at Athens or the French School at Hanoi in Indo-China. It will be a reproach to this country if we cannot establish something of this kind in India, with all our obligations to advance education and learning in connexion with the ancient civilization and literature of the vast Indian Empire.”

Unlike most of the medical works of Maimonides (1135–1204), which enjoyed wide circulation both in their original Arabic form and in Hebrew or Latin translations, his Epitomes of Galen seem never to have become widespread or popular. Whereas his other medical compositions are usually extant in a good number of manuscripts, and in their original language are often available in both Hebrew and Arabic script, the manuscript attestation of Maimonides's Epitomes of Galen is rather meagre. Steinschneider, whose splendid works remain the basic tools of reference for all research in this field, devotes to the Arabic Epitomes a mere three lines and lists only three manuscripts containing them (in fact, containing only a small part of them); Hebrew translations are not known to have been made, and not one of the Epitomes appears to have found its way into Latin. In 1966 two further manuscripts, both of them fragments from the Taylor-Schechter collection in the hand of Maimonides himself, became available when S. M. Stern published his ‘Ten autographs by Maimonides—fragments of medical works, responsa, letters and prescriptions’ in Maimonidis Commentarius in Mischnam … Vol. III, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, ed. R. Edelmann, Pars I (Hafniae, 1966),11–29. The first two of these ten autographs are fragments of the Epitomes of Galen, to the publication of which Stern prefixed a fine discussion of the contents of these Maimonidean Epitomes and a summary of what is known about them.

In recent studies of the Tibetan epic, much effort has been spent on analysing the origins and types of material that make up the epic literature, but no study presents an overall view of Ling (Gling) society. In the paper I gave at the second Symposium on the Epic of King Gesar at Lhasa in 1991, I therefore discussed the theoretical basis upon which the whole of Tibetan epic literature is built. I demonstrated that the Tibetan epic reveals a basic principle as well as a ‘chronological order’ in its development. Without this theoretical basis, Tibetan epic literature appears as a tangled web of material which is moreover still growing in complexity.

One of the fundamental innovations of the early Church was the abolition of an ancient, venerable institution—divorce, the practice of which was as widespread as marriage itself. The explicit ban on divorce found in the Gospels ran counter to legal systems of the known world, with one notable exception: among the sectarian group whose rules are enshrined in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a stance against divorce can be verified, implying that a legal innovation of early Christianity can be tracked back to its origins in Sectarian Judaism.

By the time Christianity was emerging, marriage and divorce had already co-existed for a long time; in Mesopotamia marriage contracts had for two millennia been anticipating the possibility of divorce, with litigation governing the dissolution of marriage and division of properties. The best evidence, however, for the precursors to late Hellenistic (i.e. pagan, Jewish, and Christian) legal practice derives from a group of Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts dating from the seventh to third centuries B.C.

Several biographical notices on the seventeenth-century Egyptian chronicler Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Abi ‘l-Surūr b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī al-Miṣrī al-Shāfi’ī al-Wārthī al-Ash’arī sibṭ Abi ‘l-Ḥasan, better known as Ibn Abi ‘l-Surūr, have been written in more than one language, but most of them contain misleading, and sometimes erroneous, statements about his birth and death dates and works. The new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, for instance, in its brief notice ‘al-Bakrī, b. Abi ‘l-Surūr’, states that this is the ‘name of two Arab historians of the notable family of Egyptian shaykhs of the Bakriyya ṭarīḳa’, viz. (1) Muḥammad b. Abi ‘l-Surūr b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Ṣiddīḳī al-Miṣrī, d. 1028/1619; (2) Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Abi ‘l-Surūr Shams al-Dīn Abū ‘Abdallāh, son of the above, b. c. 1005/1596, d. c. 1060/1650. While the entry ‘ al-Bakrī b. Abi ‘l-Surūr’ really refers to the first, it does not, as such, apply to the alleged second historian whose identity, supposed works, and relationship to the first have to be established. The notice, moreover, gives wrong dates and erroneously ascribes some of the works of Ibn Abi ‘l-Surūr to his supposed son.

Throughout most of pre-Han literature we find a particle hu which appears to occupy the same syntactic position as the directive preposition yü. Indeed, one particle often substitutes for the other in parallel passages.

‘The old and the weak are rolled into the gutters’ (of the dead in time of famine; the parallel in Me. 2B/4 has yü for hu).

PROFESSOR J. BLOCH in L'Indo-aryen du Veda aux temps modernes, p. 271 f., has discussed the passage of the passive construction of the past tense of transitive verbs (based on the past participle of Sanskrit) into an active construction in which the verb agrees in number and gender with the logical subject. It is obvious that during the course of this evolution there were periods of fluctuation. An astonishing fluctuation is found in the Rājasthānī MS. Nala kī bāta (R.A.S. Todd Coll. No. 81), written at some date prior to A.D. 1806.

The change of p, initial and intervocalic, to h in Kanarese was noticed by Western scholars early. Caldwell says “the initial p of nearly all the words-whether they are pure Dravidian or Sanskrit derivatives-changes to h”. A more careful study of this change of p to h was made by Kittel in his Grammar. He points out that initial p was changed to h in Kēśirāja's time (1260) optionally. But he has not given evidence from the inscriptions to show when p changed to h.

Ilya eu un verbe indo-iranien pour désigner le labour: RV. imp. ; il s'y rattache des substantifs désignant le sillon: av. karša-, karši- f.; RV. sans doute ŚBr.

Par contre les noms Sanskrits de la charrue n'ont pas de correspondants connus dans l'lran.

L'un de ces noms, qui vit encore aujourd'hui, skr. hala-, n'est pas attesté avant Pānini. Est-il cependant plus ancien que le Sanskrit? On en a proposé plusieurs étymologies indo-européennes, dont malheureusement aucune ne s'impose (v. Walde-Pokorny, Vergl. Wb. der. Indog. Spr., i, p. 629; Scheftelowitz, ZII., ii, p. 278). Le Rgveda offre deux autres noms encore:

Svetadvipa, “The White Island,” is the name of an island, situated in the far North, inhabited by Nārāyana and by pious White Men, who worship him. The description of their worship, which can be read in that part of the Śāntiparvan, the twelfth of the Mahābhārata books, devoted to Nārāyana is distinguishable to an obvious degree from the stories of other cults found in the Brahminical literature, and has led researchers of both earlier and more recent date to try certain more or less successful interpretations. The attempt at solving the problem of Śvetadvīpa, which has, during more recent times, attracted the greatest attention, is that of Garbe.