According to the Breslau edition of the Nights (vol. ii, p. 11), Nûr ad-Dîn ‘Alî, after his quarrel with his brother Shams ad-Dîn Muḥammad, leaves Cairo in the morning, and arrives at Bilbais at mid-day, then at in the evening. For Macnaghten (vol. i, p. 151) reads ; but there can be no doubt that the original reading was , as will be shown. According to Breslau, Nûr ad-Dîn at sleeps in the , “ post-horse station.” Historically, a place called appears in the Mamlûk postal service as the next station north of Bilbais on the route out of Cairo, and corresponding exactly to the of the tale (e.g. Qalqashandî, ed. 1919, vol. xiv, p. 376); it was at as-Sa‘îdîya that two roads branched respectively to Damietta and Gazza.

Again the rich collection of Sumerian literary tablets, discovered at Nippur, has contributed splendid religious texts. Professor Chiera's Sumerian Religious Texts contains seventy-two plates of elegantly copied Sumerian religious and mythological documents preserved in the Nippur Collection of the Museum of Stambul, where I copied fifty-four similar tablets and a large number of incantation texts in 1913. Dr. Chiera has found in Constantinople a surprisingly large number of well-preserved tablets of most valuable contents. I confine myself here to the well-preserved six-column tablet, Ni. 2487, identical in size and material arrangement to the large epical tablet, Ni. 4561, in Philadelphia, published by the writer in Publications of the Babylonian Section, University Museum, Philadelphia, vol. x, No. 1, and re-edited in a French edition, Le Poème Sumérien du Paradis, Paris, 1919. The Nippur Collection has already contributed a large number of these fine six-column zagsal or epical texts, copied by Poebel (PBS. v) and by the writer (PBS. x, Nos. 1–3).

The nature of Akbar's arrangements for the assessment of the land revenue in the newly acquired province of Bengal is a matter of some historical importance. It concerns the eighteenth century as well as the sixteenth, for the controversies which marked the early years of British rule found common ground in the revenue roll attributed to the year 1582; and, now that the famous Fifth Report of the Select Committee of 1812 is being studied so widely in India, it is desirable to know just what Todar Mal did, and just where Grant and Shore took erroneous views regarding the nature of his action.

El Kawâkib as Saiyâra, by Ibn Ez Zaiyât, was written in 804 a.h. = a.d. 1410, and published by the Egyptian Government Press in 1907. It is a guide in Arabic to the Qarâfa—the whole of the cemetery region situated south of the citadel of Cairo and between Fusṭâṭ and El Muqaṭṭam. Nothing appears to be recorded of the author beyond his name, but his book shows that he was well acquainted with the place himself and had studied the earlier works on the subject. Of these he names (p. 4) some thirty, of which not one appears to have survived. Several of them appear to be known only by his mention, while others are alluded to or cited by other extant authors.

Popular and (as attested by theory) undoubtedly old as the bhāṇa must have been, the specimens of this form of composition which have been hitherto known to exist belong to comparatively recent times. Considerable importance, therefore, attaches to the discovery and publication (1922) of four bhāṇas. under the title Caturbhāṇī, by M. Ramakrishna Kavi and S. K. Ramanatha Sastri from Śivapurī, for which great antiquity is claimed by the editors and which, whatever might be their date, are certainly older than any of the late existing specimens. The Caturbhāṇī consists of Ubhayâbhisārikā (Ubh), Padma-prābhṛtaka (Pp), Dhūrtaviṭa-saṃvāda (Dvs) and Pāda-tāḍitaka (Pt), ascribed respectively, on the authority chiefly of a traditional verse, to Vararuci. Śūdraka, Īśvaradatta and Śyāmilaka. Professor Keith, in his recently published Sanskrit Drama (p. 185, fn. 3), throws doubt on the first two ascriptions, and declares rather dogmatically that “ none of these plays need be older than a.d. 1000”.