Within the last quarter of a century two serious attempts have been made to explain the fact that the Avesta uses one set of words for beings belonging to the creation of Ahura Mazda and another for those formed by Aura Mainyu. The former of these theories was advanced by Leo Frachtenberg (“Etymological Studies in Ormazdian and Ahrimanian Words in Avestan,” in Spiegel Memorial Volume, Bombay, 1908, pp. 269–89), and the latter by Hermann Güntert (“Ueber die ahurischen und daēvischen Ausdrücke im Avesta, eine semasiologische Studie,” in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philbsophisch-historische Klasse, 1914, Abhandlung 13).

It has been my good fortune to secure the manuscript of a history of Persia, from the year 1212 (A.D. 1805) to 1286 (a.d. 1869), written in the Shikasta hand and consisting of 135 closely written foolscap pages, each page containing thirty-two lines. Most of the pages are annotated with copious notes. The author of this interesting volume is Aḥmad ibn Abul Ḥasan Sharif of Shīrāz; and his style is terse and easy. It appears that he had secured the manuscript of a history ending at the reign of Fatḥ 'Ali Shāh and decided to complete that volume and bring it up to his own time. As to the identity of the author, I was informed by a friend, who was himself an inhabitant of Shīrāz, that the author was Mīrzā Aḥmad Khān Vaqāyi' Nigār. On referring to the Fārs Nāma of Ḥājjī Mīrzā, Ḥasan Tabīb of Shīrāz, I find, however, that the Vaqāyi' Nigār was the second son of Ḥājjī Mīrzā Asad Allāh. He is not, therefore, the writer of the manuscript in my possession, who seems to have closely studied the conditions existing in Persia at the time he wrote, and expresses frank opinions about the evils which attracted his notice. His criticisms, though moderate in tone, must have been too bold for those times. With regard to this book, he states:— “In those times, I formed a resolution, despite my want of knowledge and information, and because of the mere fact that I can distinguish between black and white, to compose a history, to obtain matter as far as possible from different histories, and to correct and reduce to writing such important subjects as involve less controversy, from the time of His Holiness the Prophet's Flight to the present, in a manner which may give rise to no objection.

Peterson, in his edition of the Subhāṣitâvali, wrote in 1886: “Of the compiler [of the anthology] all we can say is that he cannot have flourished before Jainollābhadīna [i.e. Zain ul-'Ābidīn], whose date is given by Cunningham as a.d. 1417–67.” Aufrecht places Vallabhadeva, the compiler of this important Sanskrit anthology, in the sixteenth century a.d., on the ground that Vallabhadeva has laid the Sārngadhara-paddhati under contribution in compiling his anthology. With this view Winternitz seems to agree.

In Muslim countries adherents of the protected religions had to put up with certain restrictions on their public life. It was held that this was sanctioned by the Ḳur'ān, “Until they pay tribute out of hand, and they be humbled.” This humiliation is often mentioned in the early treaties.

With the exception of a very brief notice in Albírúní (Sachau's transl., vol. ii, p. 13) and a few references in the Táríkh-i-Yamíní of al-'Utbí, and the Rajataranginí of Kalhana, there is scarcely any mention of the Hindu Sháhiya dynasty of Ohind (Udabhanda of Rajataranginí and Waihand of Muslim histories), the successors of the Turki Sháhiya dynasty of Kushan. Cunningham (Coins of Mediæval India, pp. 55 et seq.) advances the conjecture that after a period of usurpation by Kallar (the Brahman wazir of the last of the Turki Sháhiya dynasty) and his descendants, the Turki Sháhiya dynasty was revived by the enthronement of Jaipál, the contemporary of Sulṭán Maḥmúd and the ruler of Ohind and the northern Punjab; i.e., Jaipál and his successors, according to Cunningham, were not the descendants of the Brahman Kallar, but of Kánishka and therefore Turks or Rajputs. This view is contradicted by V. A. Smith, and by the passage quoted below, in which Jaipál is definitely called a Brahman.

In the Egyptian medical papyri, as well as in certain other texts, there occurs a substance called didi which for many years was understood to mean the fruits of the mandragora or mandrake. This equation didi = mandrake arose out of the opinion stated in his dictionary by Brugsch that the word didi was akin to the Hebrew doudaim “mandrake”. Brugsch, some years after the publication of the supplement to his dictionary (vol. vii, 1882), reaffirmed his opinion in a special article with the title “Die Alraune als altägyptishe Zauberpflanze”, which appeared in 1891. From that time the identification was accepted without question until in 1904 M. Henri Gauthier published an important article in which he showed quite conclusively that didi was not the mandrake, nor even a plant at all, but a mineral. It does not in the least detract from the importance and value of M. Gauthier's paper that it is now necessary to go over the ground once again, because further evidence has become available since its publication. We will first, therefore, enumerate the texts in which the word didi occurs.

It is, I believe, familiar knowledge that the work on Rhetoric called Kāvya-prakāśa was composed by two authors, Mammaṭa and Alaka or Alaṭa. The traditional verse quoted by Rājānaka Ānanda, in his commentary entitled Kāvya-prakāśa-nidarśanā—

informs us that Mammaṭa wrote the work as far as Parikara, and the rest was completed by Alaka. Sanskrit scholars therefore inferred that “about a third of the last chapter on Figures of Speech, or roughly speaking a tenth of the whole work, was written by Alaka, i.e. from the second half of the 118th, verse onwards”. But the reference to the joint authorship of the seventh Ullāsa by Arjunavarmadeva has given rise to the question whether “Alaka had a hand not only in the tenth, but also in the seventh chapter”. An attempt is made in the present article to examine the question and to arrive, if possible, at some definite conclusion in the matter.

A. Linin's article (“K voprosam formalnogo izucheniya poezii turetskikh narodov” in the Izvestiya Vostochnogo Fakulteta Azerbaidžanskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, t. i, Baku, 1926, pp. 139–201), criticizing the work of T. Kowalski (Ze studjów nad formą poezji ludów turechich, 1922) on Turkish popular prosody, deals with some new details connected in one way or another with prosody. Among them the author draws attention on p. 180 to the soft pronunciation of the Turkish r, at the same time he refers to analogous results in one of the previous treatises of Messrs. Kowalski and Bergsträsser (ibid.). This fact is so interesting that it can be examined without reference to its influence upon the character of the rhymes and can properly be made the subject of a separate article.

Nabataean sepulchral inscriptions from El-Ḥejra in the El-Ḥejraejaz, 40 miles south of Teima and 300 miles S.S.E. of Petra, frequently mention the Nabateaans and Shalamians. The Aramaic-Nabataean inscriptions may be found in Professor Cooke's North Semitic Inscriptions, Nos. 78–109, and Professor Lidbarski's Nordsemitische Epigraphik, pp. 448–457. In them occur the names of the old Arabic deities, Dūsharā of Petra, Manūthu, a goddess of Qudaid in the southern Ḥejaz south of Medīna, Qaishā, Allat, principal goddess of the Arabians, and Hubalu of Mekka. According to Hommel, Grundriss, 715, n. 1, Allat may have been the principal deity of the Shalamians, but this is uncertain, and the exact location of this tribe is unknown. The “Shalamians” occur in three tomb inscriptions from El-Ḥejra, Cooke, ibid., 79 (1 b.c.), No. 81 (a.d. 4), No. 86 (a.d. 26).

I Copied this fragment in 1919, and discovered that it is the text erroneously cited by Delitzsch in his Assyrisches Handwörterbuch as DT. 59. It contains so many important contributions to Sumerian and Accadian lexicography, that its publication in extenso is desirable. Its contents are similar to the Shurpu series, and I suggest that it is the still missing first tablet of that series. Zimmern, who is the editor of the Shurpu series, suggested in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, vol. 30, 187, that either CT. 17, 34–5 (restored by him in ZA. 28, 75–80) or Craig, Religious Texts, 56–9, is the missing first tablet. Clearly DT. 57 has more claim to that distinction by reason of its similarity with the other tablets of the Shurpu series.