The indifference of the ancient Indian to the maintenance of definite chronicles even when a voluminous literature of a philosophical and religious kind existed, has left the historian, apart from meagre foreign accounts, with little written evidence of the course of Indian events other than fanciful epics and legends. Under such circumstances, he has had to utilize to the utmost such deductions as can be drawn from material sources, and among these one of the most important has been the ancient coinage. The aftermath of Alexander's invasion left various Græco-Bactrian kingdoms and principalities extending through Afghanistan and the Punjab as far as Muttra, of which many coins have been found, and these have often proved useful for dating purposes. In this paper, however, investigation is confined to the much more obscure early indigenous coins of the years previous or not long subsequent to the Christian era, with a view to discovering what weight standards are present, and what they imply.

The Chinese numeral 4 is a syllable pronounced ssŭ, and was originally written by four horizontal lines, , but by the time of the Han Dynasty (and perhaps before, for the formoccurs on the Stone Drums), and ever since, the scription as above was substituted. And the question with which this note is concerned is: What was the origin of this substituted form ? The author of the Shuo Wen makes the Lesser Seal Version , his 503rd Radical, and describes it thus, hsiang ssŭ fên chih hsing, depicts division into quarters. This is a poor explanation. If a quadrilateral was chosen as an adequate symbol of the numeral 4, that was surely enough, and the two interior strokes are supernous, irrelevant, and misleading.

One of the fundamental tasks of archæological research in regard to thedating of archaic Chinese bronzes is to determine which bronzes date in the Chou period and which are pre-Chou, i.e. of the Yin (Shang) period. In my work “Yin and Chou in Chinese Bronzes” (in Yin and Chou Researches, 1935, also in Bull. Mus. Far East Ant., 1936), I have tried to establish a real dating in regard to a great number of inscribed bronzes by aid of their inscriptions. I found three types of inscriptions which I concluded to be of pre-Chou time: those containing the so-called ya hing, those which had the three symbols traditionally (but very tentatively) interpreted as si tsï sun, and those which had the symbol traditionally transcribed as kü. In this way I obtained a considerable number of illustrated bronzes which I used as research material for determining the types of bronzes existing prior to the Chou era.

In the summer of 1933, within the short space of two months, Egypt, and with her the whole Islamic world, was twice plunged into deep mourning, by the deaths of two men who, widely divergent in circumstances and character though they were, were in their generation the greatest and the most universally esteemed of Arabic poets. In their own country they had won titles which well indicate the appreciation, even the affection which they enjoyed: Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm was called the “Poet of the Nile”, but Shauqī was called the “Prince of Poets”.

The following is an attempt at a rendering of the Minæan inscription found on the side of a sarcophagus now in the Cairo Museum, which is dealt with in the Répertoire d'Epigraphie Sémitique, tome vi, 3427, based on the assumption that K. Conti-Kossini in his Chrestomathia is correct in identifying the first word of the inscription with the Ethiopic , “loculus sepulchralis.”

Under this heading Mr. A. C. Banerji discusses in pages 655–666 of the JRAS. for 1935 the northern invasion of Rājēndra, the Gangaikoṇḍa-Chola, on which subject I made a contribution long ago to the late Sir Asutosh Mukerjee Commemoration Volumes, which article appeared in a slightly revised form in the Journal of Indian History, volume ii, pp. 317–369, more than a decade since. There are some points in the discussion which seem to admit of a few remarks in criticism—perhaps even correction—pending publication of a typical historical document of the great Chola, and attaining to a correct version of the details of the invasion.

Landsberger, ZA., 42,147 and 155, deduced the reading zamin for i.e. zag-mim > zamin, loan-word sammû, from the gloss [za]-me-in on gišar-ri “instrument of praise” = sammû. But the reading zagšal > zašal is proved by the dialectic ša-za-al in Genouillac, Textes Cunéiformes, xvi, pl. 144, AO., 7687, 28; a ùr-a al-a ša-za-al ga-na-ab-du “How long, O city, to the tambourine and lyre? I will say”. Cf. á-lá zag-sal-zu = ina alê ta[nitta-ka], K. 3228, Rev. 8, OECT., vi, pl. 16. zag-sal ba-an-du, Zimmern, Kultlieder, 207, i, 9. For a ùr-a, dialectic for a uru, see my Babylonian Liturgies, 189, 12, a urú-mu im-me “How long, O my city, she cries”. a urú, PBS., x, 4, pl. 94, 52. a é-mu im-me = aḫulap bîti-mi igabbi, SBH., 93, 1. For du = ḳabû, cf. be-dúg (= iḳbi) with var. be-du, RA., 9, 115, 31 = 10, 100, 10; ga-an-na-ab-du, JRAS., 1932, 929, iii, 1 = ga-na-ab-dúg, 946, 28.

The feudal system of the Mamlūks is of great interest not only because it existed for 267 years in the leading state of the Arab world and left some permanent marks on the subsequent social and economical development of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, but also from the sociological point of view, being the result of an intermixture of three various feudal systems which corresponded to peculiar cultural worlds: the Mongol, the Islamic, and the West European. The fundamental principles were borrowed from the Mongol Empire and consequently all the lawsuits relating to the fiefs were settled not by the qāḍīs and according to the Islamic Law, but by the military judges (ḥujjāb) and according to the laws based upon the rules of Chingiz Khān. The technical terms used in the official Arabic-written documents and in the Arabic literary sources were partly borrowed from the terminology of the Islamic Law, but their sense was considerably removed from their ancient meanings—which may signify that they were now used only as more or less faithful translations of the terms employed in the Turkish dialect of the Mamlūks. The Western feudalism, brought to Syria by the Crusaders, influenced the Mamluk system chiefly through the medium of the native tribal chieftains, who after having been vassals of the kingdom of Jerusalem were gradually becoming feudatories of the Sultan of Cairo, and sometimes received the feudal charters from both powers at the same time. In the charters granted by the Latin rulers of Sidon (in 1256) and Beirut (in 1280) to two chieftains of the Buḥturide family the term “fief” is translated by the word shahāra, which means “a land given in reward for a service”, but the word mulk is also used, as well as the verbs a'ṭā and wahaba which usually refer to the unconditional transfers of the right of possession.