Guza. a Throne.—Very frequent in the inscriptions. It always has the sign , the determinative of “wooden objects,” prefixed to it. I believe it to be a mere dialectic variation of the Hebrew solium regium (etiam Dei.— Jerem. iii. 17). In shurrat sarti-ya, sha as guza sarti rabish usibu; In the beginning of my reign, when I sat proudly on my royal throne.—Obel. line 22. Izpa u guza likim-su; Sceptre and throne may they take from him.—R42,73. Guza abi-su; his father's throne.—2R 38,32. Guza billuti; throne of power.—R39, 9. Guza nimidi; a palanquin.—R39, 36.

Every one who has turned his attention to the study of Indian antiquities will probably be inclined to admit that one of the most important desiderata at the present time is a scheme of Chronology which shall fix, within reasonable limits of error, the dates of the Tarious kings or dynasties who ruled between the Christian Era and the Hegira. It is not at present indispensable that any particular king's reign should be ascertained within ten or twenty years of deviation either way; but it is hopeless to attempt to understand the subject while we cannot make up our minds whether the Balabhi kings dated their inscriptions from their own Era or from that of Vikramâditya—a difference of 376 years—or whether the Guptas dated theirs before or after the Era bearing their name (318–19 A.D.). While such discrepancies as these exist, it is idle to suppose we can either understand the history of the Hindus, or appreciate the forms of their arts, or the development of their religions.

In the preceding number of the Journal, this poem had reached the birth of Abraham: the portion contained in the present issue consists of the life of Abraham, the history of the line of Isaac ending with Jesus Christ, and the line of Ishmael down to Heshim, great-grandfather of Muhammad. The description of the sacrifice of Ishmael brings to mind the mysteries or plays in which Abraham's sacrifice of his son is still represented in Spain at the Church festivals.

My attention had been for a long time directed to the immense mass of languages spoken in the Himalayas, when in 1866 I was appointed to the charge of the district of Champáran. This district lies at the foot of the hills, and its frontier is conterminous with that of Nepal for about a hundred miles. Through the kindness of Colonel G. Ramsay, Resident at the Court of Káthmánḍu I obtained from Maharaja Sir Jung Bahadoor, the de facto ruler of that country, two Magar soldiers, men of intelligence, and who spoke their native dialect with great purity. At the same time I accidentally took into my service two Gorkhális (Anglicé—Goor-khas) or Rajputs of the dominating or Khas race of Nepal. These men remained with me during several months of the cold season. We worked hard some hours each day, and I was getting on fairly with my task, when they suddenly, like all hill-men, got restless, and insisted on going back to their homes. The weather was getting warm (it was the first week in April), and I could not fairly detain them. Unfortunately I had only got as far as F in my dictionary. I had of course many words for the rest, but I had been going over it a second time, filling up gaps, and had made it pretty complete for the first six letters.

On comparing with one another the two most ancient periods of development of the Iranian mind, in language as well as in literature,—that primitive one, whose witness is the Avesta, with the period of renaissance under Sasanian rule,— we find at once this striking difference, that the former is purely national and Iranian, almost wholly free from any foreign influence, whilst the latter, as it appears in the Pahlavi translations and the inscriptions of the Sasanian kings, is overwhelmed by foreign, Semitic, or more accurately speaking, Aramæan elements. The difficulties in explaining the pure Persian substratum of the language of this latter period, for even here not every problem has yet been solved, are by no means to be compared with those offered by the Semitic forms and words, which appear to the Indo-german linguist utterly unknown, to the Semitic scholar more than strange. Though a great quantity of highly valuable material has already been collected and digested by European scholars, still I do not think it sufficient to enable us to decide in a satisfactory manner the following questions:—During what time did that close intercourse between the Iranian and Semitic races take place, the existence of which we are compelled to assume as the source of the Semitic portion of the Pahlavi language? Of what kind was this intercourse? And with which of the Aramæan nations in particular? The same questions demand an answer, in order to explain the numerous Iranian words which occur in the literature of the Babylonian Jews, in Syriac, in the Koran, and the most ancient Arabic poems.

In the following paper some illustrations of the method by which the Lamaist succession in Tibet is perpetuated, are drawn from a work published within the last few years by a Chinese officer of high rank. Its author, Meng Pao, was chief of the two Imperial Commissioners or Residents stationed in Tibet in 1840–44, and on his return to Peking printed, for private circulation, a small volume containing his official correspondence with the Emperor Tao Kwang in the course of some five or six transactions connected with the administration of Tibetan affairs.