Major M. D. Van Lessen, M.C. (Royal Hampshire Regt.), has made available to me, in photographs and hand-made copies, about 30 inscriptions and graffiti which he had either acquired or come across on rocks and buildings during his tour of duty with the Aden Protectorate Levies. These inscriptions, most of which proved to be hitherto unknown or unpublished, will be numbered in a series under the name-of Van Lessen.

Inscription on a limestone slab, 27 ½ in. 7 ½in.; obtained from a man who has done extensive digging in Haid Ibn ‘Aqil, the necropolis of Timna’, and now in Major, M. D. Van Lessen's possession. Plate I.

THE origin of the term miḥrāb is somewhat obscure. In Islām it is usually particularly applied to the prayer-niche, and the article in the Encyclopaedia of Islām2 treats of it only as such, yet this technical usage of the word seems to be derived from a more primitive and general meaning, and on the balance of the evidence its emergence as a name for a part of the sanctuary appears to be Islāmic only. Miḥrāb has been discussed by Nöldeke,3 by Horovitz,4 and by Landberg.5 It has been discussed in connexion with architectural studies by Creswell,6 and by Sauvaget.7 These studies cite a number of references and sources which I have re-examined, but do not propose to repeat in toto. Each of these authorities shows conclusively that the employment in the technical sense of prayer-niche is not early.

The inscriptions published here for the first time were discovered in the course of a visit to Edessa, the modern Urfa, during the summer of 1956. My journey was made possible by generous subventions from the Central Research Funds of the University of London and the Pilgrim Trust Fund administered by the British Academy. It is a pleasure to express here my gratitude not only to those bodies, but also to the officials of the Turkish Department of Antiquities and to the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, whose ready co-operation greatly facilitated our work in the field; and my sincere thanks are due no less to the energy and perseverance of Dr. D. S. Rice and his assistants Dr. Donald Strong and Mr. Michael Ballance, my companions in the rigours of an Anatolian heat-wave.

The subject of this paper is a small work entitled Qahr al-wujūh al-‘ābisa bi-dhikr nasab umarā’ al-Jarākisa wa-ttisālihi bi-Quraysh,2 which might be rendered, ‘A cogent demonstration of the lineage of the amīrs of the Circassians and its connexion with Quraysh’. Manuscripts exist in the John Rylands Library in Manchester and in the British Museum. The Rylands copy, com-pleted on 21 Rajab 1092/6 August 1681, states that the original work was finished on 1 Rajab 1041/23 January 1632. The British Museum copy is dated in the colophon 21 Hijja 1258/23 January 1843.3 The work is anonymous but the style and language suggest that its author was an 'ālim who enjoyed the patronage of a Mamluk amīr, Ridwān Bey.

In al-Wāqidī's Kitdb al-maghāzī and in that part of Ibn Ishāq's Sīra which deals with Muhammad's life in Medina and is contained in Ibn Hishrm's version of al-Bakkā'Ī's recension, there are similar and sometimes identical passages. Since Ibn Ishāq is the earlier of the two authorities, it has been assumed on a plausibly a priori basis that al-Wāqidī modelled himself on his predecessor in the arrangement of his material, and drew from him much of the basic warp of his narrative to which he then added his own weft.

Vasumitra in his famous work‘Origin and doctrines of early Indián Buddhist schools’ (Samaya-bhedoparacanacakra)1 enumerates the following four doctrines as characteristic of the Sautrāntika school: '(i) The skandhas transmigrate from one world to the other: hence the name Saṃkrānti-vāda; (ii) There are mulāntika-skandhas and eka-rasa-skandhas; (iii) An average person (prthagjana) also possesses the potentiality of becoming a Buddha (lit. in the statě of average man there are also divine things, drya-dharmas); (iv) There are paramārtha-pudgalas '.2

The object of this paper is to give preliminary information about Shāhrudi, one of the Iranian dialects spoken in Khalkhāl, the south-eastern province of Āzarbāijān lying between the Caspian province of Tālesh to the east, Ardabil to the north, Zanjān to the south, and Miyāna(j) to the west.

Our information about the Iranian dialects of Āzarbāijān, where a form of Turkish is the common language, has until recently been very defective. The scanty material available was summed up by Professor W. B. Henning in a recent article. Since then, however, several studies of the current dialects of Āzarbāijān have been published.

Those who wish to ascertain ‘le dernier état de ces questions’ will be grateful to Professor G. Dumézil who has now summed up for us in brief compass his immense labours of nearly a quarter of a century in the study of Indo-European religion. Although the book does not cover the whole wide range of his researches, it does deal comprehensively (and with full bibliographical notes) with the central dogma:

'La comparaison des plus vieilles traditions des divers peuples parlant des langues indo-europeennes a révélé un fond considérable d'éléments communs, et d'éléments non pas isolés, mais organises en structures complexes, dont les autres peuples de l'ancien monde n'offrent pas l'équivalent. L'xposé qu'on va lire est consacré à la plus importante de ces structures'(introduction, p. 5).

The following description of Nambudiri Ṛgvedic recitation was made possible by Mr. J. F. Staal who very kindly lent the recordings he had taken in Kerala in 1957. Mr. Staal has already written on the Nambudiris in general as well as on their chanting in a publication1 to which the reader is referred for a very full account beyond the scope of the present pages. Apart from treating the saṃhitā; recitation in somewhat greater detail, an attempt will be made below to amplify some of the conclusions hinted at in a previous article with regard to the nature of the Vedic accent.2

Since Karlgren's ‘Word families’ first drew attention to the existence of large groups of cognate words in classical Chinese, efforts have been made to define more closely the principal phonetic contrasts involved, and to find semantic relationships that would correspond regularly to the phonetic contrasts. Karlgren himself came to the conclusion that in general it was impossible to find any regular semantic or grammatical correlations with the phonetic correspondence, and that Archaic Chinese showed only the last vestiges of a former inflectional system.

Until quite recently, Western students of Veda have found it difficult to obtain reliable information on the manner of chanting practised by Rgvedic Brahmans maintaining their sacred tradition. Some studies on Vedic recitation have appeared in the past, 1 but none has given any information on the oldest of the Vedic schools, the Rgveda. During the year 1952–3, some progress was made in this respect, and recordings were taken in Rājasthān2 and in Bombay.3 At the time, the manner in which these two reciters chanted appeared to run so far counter to the generally accepted notions in the West concerning the nature of the Vedic accentual pattern that their evidence was simply‘filed ’. More recently still, in 1957 and 1958, a further opportunity presented itself of recording chants by a Rgvedic Brahman, this time from Mahārāstra.4 Nothing fully authentic is yet available from the eastern side of India, 5 but the fact that the above three Brahmans agree so closely that any divergences are scarcely worth noting makes useful.

One of the most important factors which distinguish the VaibhĀsikaṣika Abhidharma from the TheravĀda Abhidharma is a category called the viprayukta-saṃskĀras. The disputes on the reality of the dharmas included under this category dominate some of the major works on Abhidharma, especially the Abhidharma-kośa-bhĀṣsya of Vasubandhu and the ShpuṭĀarthĀ of Yaśomitra. An analysis of these dharmas is found in a few pioneering works like those of McGovern, Stcherbatsky, and others, but very little is kown about their origin.

Yang Ju is one of the Chinese philosophers of whom we know least. In the fourth century B. C. his doctrines and those of Mohtzyy were the two most successful rivals of Confucianism.1 In the literature of the next century his school is rarely mentioned, perhaps because it had been absorbed into Taoism.2 The most familiar summary of his teaching is that of Mencius:

IT is more than 20 years since Durga Prasad published his ‘ Observations on different types of silver punch marked coins, their periods and locale ’1. In this lengthy paper one section was devoted to demonstrating that certain signs can be regarded as Mauryan royal marks (pp. N 61-7). This conclusion and the many probabilities it raises have long been widely accepted in India, but in Europe acceptance has been more reserved. We are not here concerned with Prasad' main argument but with the section indicated above, our purpose being to restate that part of the evidence and consider its probable meaning. From some points of view Prasad's advocacy was imperfect, for in presenting his case he made certain assumptions which we are unable to accept, and thus weakened the force of his argument.

The first publication of an inscription in the alphabet by a European scholar was made about 120 years ago by H. C. von der Gabelentz in the Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (Halle), n, 1, 1839. Books and articles relating to the subject have been appearing intermittently ever since, but finality has not yet been reached on the exact shape and phonetic value of some letters in the alphabet.