The Funj were a people of uncertain origin who, in the early sixteenth century, established themselves in the valley of the Blue Nile with their capital at Sennar (Sinnār), and acquired the hegemony over the Muslim Arab tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. The present investigation attempts an analysis of the documentary information on the inception of the Funj hegemony. It develops certain criticisms made by Dr. A. J. Arkell in his article, ‘Fung origins’ (Sudan Notes and Records, XV, 2, 1932, especially pp. 209–13), in connexion with an hypothesis, which he has since abandoned, that the Funj were Shilluk. It does not deal with the controversial general problem of Funj origins.

For many years it was vaguely known that the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai possessed a large collection of documents concerning its own affairs and written in Arabic and Turkish, and more especially that this collection also included a number of decrees issued by various Fāṭimid caliphs; but it was only recently that detailed information became available. It will be convenient to preface the edition of one of these Fāṭimid documents by a review of what has been written about the Sinai documents up to now.

In glaring contrast to the period of the Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517), which abounds in rich, most detailed and accurate source material, hardly surpassed either in quality or quantity by the source material pertaining to any other region of Islam, the period of Ottoman rule in Egypt (1517–1811, approximately) is conspicuous for the dearth of its historical sources written by contemporary inhabitants of the country. This state of affairs, gloomy enough in itself, becomes even more gloomy in the light of the fact that the first 70 years or so of Ottoman rule are almost totally obscure. The very concise chronicles of Ibn Abī al-Surūr al-Bakrī and al-Isḥqī, which contain no more than the barest outline of the events, give only a faint glimpse of what happened in Egypt in the above-mentioned period. Thus the process of Egypt's transition from its Mamluk into its Ottoman shape is practically unknown except for the first few years (922–8/1517–22) of Ottoman rule described by Ibn lyās. It is only after that transition had reached a very advanced stage that a somewhat clear picture of Egyptian history and society can be drawn from historical works compiled by contemporary Egyptian authors; and it should be stressed in this connexion that however important other kinds of sources may be—such as the Ottoman archives, and to a much lesser extent, the itineraries of European travells—they are certainly no substitute for the works of the local historians.

Autobiography is a genre not frequently encountered in Ottoman literature. In recent years two works have been published which fall into this category—the autobiography of ‘Omān Āghā who was a prisoner of war in Austria towards the close of the seventeenth century, and the memoirs of Ma'jūnjuzāde Muṣṭafa Efendi describing his experiences after his capture by the Knights of Malta in 1597.

Only comparatively recently was it recognized that the few MSS of portions of Kemālpaazāde's ‘History of the Ottoman Dynasty’ which exist in the libraries of Western Europe represent less than a half of the complete work and that there survives in Istanbul the great bulk of the ten books of which it originally consisted.

A Buddhist practice existed whereby a dānapati, patron, had a manuscript of a Buddhist religious text copied, into which at the appropriate place his personal name was inserted with Sanskrit inflexion. In the Buddhist Sanskrit Sitātapatra-sūtra, the ‘Book of the white umbrella’, Stein manuscript S 2529, two personal names are inserted. In lines 45–6 occurs aṣṭānā mahāgrrahāṇā vaidhvasanakara hu ttrū 〈rakṣa rakṣa〉 mama vaṣayānasya ‘O destroyer of the eight great ravishers, hūṃ trūṃ. Protect, protect me Yaṣayāna’. In lines 48, 70, 88, 117 the name is Sīdyākaraca. Here we read:

48 auma svasta〈ka〉ra bavattū mama sīdyākaracasya

70 rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

88 ye ke cai salvā mama sīdyākaracasya ∥

117: rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

Instead of a name in line 122 occurs the word īthanāmasya ‘of so-and-so’.

The first traveller who brought copies of Pahlavi inscriptions to Europe was Garsten Niebuhr. On 2 March 1765, he arrived at Shīrāz, and on 13 March he went to Persepolis. In its surroundings he sojourned till 7 April, almost every day visiting its ruins and the monuments of Naqš-i Raj ab and Naqš-i Rustam, all of which he describes very minutely (Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, 11, Copenhagen, 1778, 121–63). In the ruins of Persepolis he found and copied the Old Persian inscriptions on which Grotefend, in 1802, based the first decipherment of the Persian cuneiform script. At Naqš-i Rajab he copied three short inscriptions, each in two Pahlavi versions and a Greek translation, of the Sasanian kings Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Hornmd; and at Naqš-i Rustam the left corner, the tails of 23 very long lines, of a Pahlavi inscription which he could not identify at all. The short inscriptions, together with two kindred inscriptions of Shapur II and Shapur III at Tāq-i Bostān, were deciphered by Silvestre de Sacy (Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse, Paris, 1793), who thus initiated the Pahlavi palaeography. Carsten Niebuhr and Silvestre de Sacy have a claim to be called the fathers of this branch of Oriental research.

1. The importance of the Avesta for the study of the history of Iranian languages and religions is matched by the interest it holds for the Vedologist. Whoever attempts to fathom the prehistoric origins of Rigvedic poetry and ideas will have to turn to the sacred book of the Parsis, which on innumerable occasions will help him to check his reconstructions: it is one of the most serious defects of Bergaigne's treatment of the Ādityas in his Religion védique (III pp. 98 ff.) that he omitted to avail himself of this rich source of information. The Avestic evidence offers, in fact, often more than a check. There are instances where it can bring us nearer to Proto-Aryan origins than the Rigveda itself. This point was most impressively vindicated by Benveniste and Renou in their monograph Vṛtra et Vṛθragna (1934). Nowhere, however, does it become clear more immediately than in the case of God Mitra/Mithra. It was the Avestic evidence that enabled Meillet (J As., juillet-août 1907, 143 ff.) to establish his original nature as the personified Contract/Treaty.

The two principal obstacles to the study of the older forms of Marathi language and literature are the shortage of definitive texts of early works and the dearth of critical bibliographies from which one might discover what texts are available and in what form they exist. Date's Marāṭhī-grantha-sūc¯ is of course invaluable for anything published before 1937, but even this work is not exhaustive and the idiosyncrasies of its arrangement according to subject-matter make it sometimes difficult to discover how many of the works of any particular early writer exist in printed form. For an unpublished work, unless one is fortunate enough to find it in the British Museum or India Office Library catalogues of Marathi MSS, one can only consult the index of a general history of Marathi literature such as V. L. Bhave's Mahārāṣṭstra-sārasvata. There one may well find numerous references to and quotations from the work in question, but only exceptionally will there be any indication of the source of these quotations. One is left to conjecture whether they are from a MS belonging to the author or from some early printed pothī that has escaped the attention of Date. On occasions the same quotation is repeated in a different part of the book with substantial variations in its text, and when a work is described but not quoted one can never be sure whether it is in fact extant or whether description and perhaps even short quotations are not taken from some intermediate secondary source or commentary.

Kajali is a Tāti dialect spoken in at least two, and possibly more, villages in Khalkhāl, the south-eastern province of Persian Āzarbāijān. Kajal, the main village where this dialect is spoken, lies in Kāghaz-konān, the southwestern district of Khalkhāl, and has a population of over 400 persons, who live mainly by cultivating cereals (particularly wheat and barley), growing fruit, and keeping a small number of farm animals. Most of the Kajali men go to Tālesh, the Caspian province east of Khalkhāl, during the winter to work, and return for the summer.

The long-awaited Greek-letter inscription discovered, on 6 May 1957, by the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan in the course of their excavations at ‘Surkh-Kotal’, the ancient Bagolango, has now been made public by M. André Maricq under the title of ‘La grande inscription de Kaniṣka et l'étéo-tokharien, l'ancienne langue de la Bactriane’, JA, CCXLVI, 4, 1958, 345–440. It is wonderfully well-preserved and, once one gets accustomed to the somewhat barbaric forms of certain letters, offers not the slightest difficulty to the reading. The difficulties lie elsewhere: this is the first substantial, and at the same time readable, document of the Iranian language once spoken in Bactria and, appropriately to a text in an unknown language, is slow in yielding its meaning to the scholar, who inevitably has to be guided partly by often contradictory internal evidence, partly by uncertain comparisons with related languages. All those devoted to Central Asian history and languages will be grateful to M. Maricq for his painstaking work and for his unselfishness in publishing this superb monument before being able to submit more than a partial interpretation.

The study of fortification in the Indian subcontinent is a discipline not only of intrinsic merit but also of considerable extrinsic value, for the material it may be expected to yield is of relevance to the archæologist, antiquarian, and historian, taking these terms in the broadest sense; indeed, it is these, in somewhat narrower terms perhaps, who have helped to amass the not inconsiderable body of material which is at present available on the fortified sites in the subcontinent, most of which have long been known to archæologists and art-historians. The old series of Archæological Survey of India Reports (1862–84), largely reports of tours by Cunningham and his associates, contain much material on the major fortified sites of the subcontinent, although some of this is merely incidental to the main purposes of the reports; the New Imperial Series of the Archæological Survey, including the regional surveys, presents more precise and detailed description of individual sites, and this is supplemented by the Archæological Survey of India Annual Reports, from 1902 onwards, and the reports of various states with autonomous departments of archæology, most notably the Nizām's Dominions whose sometime Director, Dr. Ghulam Yazdani, has in addition to considerable work on the Deccan sites published in those reports produced two valuable monographs. These works have supplemented the evidence of the sites themselves with the available historical material, documentary and epigraphic, and further epigraphic material is available in the volumes of Epigraphia indica and Epigraphia indo-moslemica, as well as in some of the Memoirs of the A.S.I. Less reliable technically, but always useful and often suggestive, is the information available in the gazetteers of the various provincial governments and states. The journals of learned societies with an Indian interest add more to this material, as do the catalogues and journals of Indian museums.

I have in the following notes expressed occasional disagreement with Pelliot, Haenisch, Mostaert, and Cleaves. This does not mean that in general I underrate their immense services to Mongol studies.

In a book to be entitled Early Ismā'īlism I shall argue in some detail that the Ismā'īlī movement began about the middle of the third/ninth century. It was at that date that the missionaries sent out by the leaders of the movement appeared in various parts of the Islamic world; soon afterwards their successful preaching, the increasing number of their followers, and various armed conflicts with the authorities, brought the movement to the knowledge of the outside world and secured for it the first entries in the pages of the chroniclers.

The Boxer Movement is traditionally treated by Chinese and foreigners alike as a political or military phenomenon. In this study, however, it features as an episode in social history. Moreover, our interest lies in a static picture rather than in the dynamic development of the movement. Questions of political wisdom or foolhardiness are not our main concern. This, of course, does not mean that we shall not take political factors into consideration, but that we shall regard them only as data in the mathematical sense. To us, the movement is neither sublime nor ridiculous. It is a religious uprising—the most important religious uprising in the world as a whole to take place in the present century. Neither Mafia in Europe nor the Tong Hak in Korea, for instance, can be compared with it in either scale or influence.

The study of the language and civilization of the Mongols was for long a preserve of Russian scholars and of foreigners working in Russia. The publications of Schmidt, Kowalewski, Pozdneev and others, who built in the nineteenth century to some extent on the pioneer work of P. S. Pallas and his interpreter Jaehrig in the eighteenth, remain in full use even to-day. Only at the turn of the present century, with Ramstedt's studies of the Khalkha dialect, did isolated schools of Mongol scholarship begin to grow up elsewhere in Europe, notably in Helsinki and in Warsaw. In Germany and France, under such scholars as Professor Haenisch and the late Professor Pelliot, the study of Mongol remained a subordinate field of another discipline, sinology, while in England, apart from some interest at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Mongol remained an almost unknown subject until the arrival in Cambridge in 1948 of Mr. Denis Sinor. Nowadays studies continue in the U.S.S.R.—notably in Leningrad under Pučkovskii, and in Moscow under Sanjeev and Dylykov. But the post-war years have seen a general growth of interest in Mongol studies elsewhere as an independent discipline. Thus in Budapest, a group of young scholars, pupils of Professor Ligeti, have recently been publishing the results of field-work carried out in Mongolia itself. In Western Europe the material foundation for the extension of Mongol studies was undoubtedly laid by the late Professor Kaare Granbech, who assembled in Copenhagen a large and comprehensive collection of Mongol manuscripts. His work has been enthusiastically continued by Professor Heissig of Bonn, whose researches, based on the Copenhagen material and the collections in German libraries and in his own possession, have shown the great possibilities for literary and historical research in this field. Not the least of Heissig's services has been the founding and almost single-handed nursing of the series ‘Göttinger Asiatische Forschungen’ (now ‘Asiatische Forschungen’) which, though not restricted to Mongol studies, contains several text editions and studies in this field. In the United States of America, apart from the philological work being directed by Professor Poppe in Seattle, the enterprise of the Reverend Antoine Mostaert and Professor F. W. Cleaves, combined with the generosity of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, has resulted in the publication of three beautiful sets of volumes of texts in facsimile reproduction in the series ‘Scripta Mongolica’. The present article will deal with the latest volumes of the Bonn and Harvard series.

Lǔ xùn's first story Kúangrén rìjì ‘Diary of a madman’ was published in the review Xīn Qīngnián (La Jeunesse) in May 1918. This was during the New Culture Movement when the editors of the review were engaged in their onslaught on Confucian morality, the literary language, and other aspects of the Chinese tradition. Lǔ Xùn's story was intended as a contribution to this movement and was written, according to the author's own account, at the request of one of his friends and fellowprovincials on the editorial board, Qián Xuán-tóng .

Isma'īl's defeat by the Ottomans at Chāldirān—his first defeat—destroyed the legend of his invincibility. This legend was based on his pretensions to a quasi-divine status, and, after Chāldirān, the qizilbāsh, although they continued to pay lip-service to this idea, showed clearly by their actions that they no longer accorded any special reverence to the person of their ruler. They had lost their faith in Isma'īl's supernatural powers, and this impaired their fundamental relationship with him. Although in theory Isma'īl was still the murshid-i kāmil, and the qizilbāsh were his murīas, the qizilbāsh were no longer prepared to follow him with the fanatical devotion and indifference to personal danger which had been noted by a Venetian merchant in 1518, only two years before Chāldirān. Once the religious bond between Isma'īl and the qizilbāsh had been broken, and their relationship reduced in practice (though not in theory) to a secular plane, it was but a short step to disobedience to his commands and an open flouting of his authority, especially as this authority was further reduced by his virtual withdrawal from the conduct of state affairs and by the fact that after Chāldirān he ceased personally to lead his troops into battle. The oppressive rule of Amīr Khan Turkmān in Khurāsān during 922–8/1516–22, and his arrogant disregard of Isma'īl's express commands, constituted a challenge to Isma'īl's authority which he seemed reluctant or unable to meet.

The Palaungs, called by themselves Ta-ang, are an ethnic group speaking a language of Northern Mon-Khmer type, distributed widely in the Shan State of Burma and the adjacent border regions of Yunnan, and having its greatest concentration in the former state of Tawngpeng in the northwestern part of the Shan State, where Palaungs are a majority in the population. Occupied chiefly in growing and trading in tea, they are at the same time the most prosperous of the minor hill races of Burma and the only one to have adopted Buddhism. Their language, which is not written—Shan being used as a written language by educated Palaungs—shows the influence of both Shan and Burmese; Shan loans are particularly frequent in the formal language of songs. A grammar and dictionary were published by Mrs. Leslie Milne in 1921 and 1931 respectively.

There is no doubt of the ancientness of Skt. śváśura- and śvaśr- (= Lat. socer and socrus) and their general survival in Modern Indo-Aryan languages: see, e.g., Nepali Dictionary s.w. sasuro and sās. Concerning the earlier existence, however, of its vddhi-derivative, śvāśura-, as a substantive equivalent to OHG suagur, etc. (and so to be accented *śvāśurá-) strong doubt was expressed in Wackernagel-Debrunner, Altind. Gram., II, 2, § 34c.