On this my first occasion of lecturing to the Society I have a more light-hearted theme to treat than the solemn lecturer on an obscure problem. The emphasis on the first part of Irano-Indian in the title of this brief allocution is for the Iranian tinged with Indian and excluding the Arabian content of Islam. The interaction of these two disciplines, Iranian and Indian, has been constant since the 18th century when the sacred book of the Zoroastrians was revealed to Europe by the voyaging of Anquetil du Perron, who published his famous book The Zend-Avesta in 1771. The abundant Indian documents gave the greater certainty to the understanding of ancient Indian language and literature. The Indian had been further removed to the east; it had lost a considerable part of the older basic vocabulary of the “parent” language (called for want of a good word “Indo-European”), so that words had vanished or survived as isolated evidence for an older stage of the language. In this matter of vocabulary, Iranian was more conservative. The phonetic shape of the language was modified both in the Iranian and the Indian field, but such an Iranian word as myazda- for the “solid offering” is more archaic than the corresponding oldest Indian miyédha-s. To the present day a mountain-dweller in the Pamirs will say nayant “they churn butter“, though the word survived in the oldest Indian 3,000 years ago only in nīta- “churned stuff, butter” and netra- “churning-cord”.

1. A block of stone inscribed with a Greek ( = Gk.) version of the latter part of Aśsoka's Rock Edict ( = RE) XII and the beginning of RE XIII was discovered at Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1963. The text was published in 1964 by D. Schlumbergerand again in the same year by É. Benveniste ( = B.) in Journal Asiatique (=JA). A condensed version of these two articles, in English, was published in Epigraphia Indica (= Ep. Ind.) in 1968.

In a recent issue of this journal the writer essayed a reading of the fragmentary Parthian ostracon from the 1967 excavations by John Hansman and D. B. Stronach at Shahr-i Qūmis, near Dāmghān, Irān. The tentative reading in line 4 was as follows:

The round brackets at this point indicate the editor's hesitation between similar letter-forms, rather than actual defacement of the lettering. So far as they go, the traces are reasonably clear.

It is so long since Indo-Muslim numismatics first attracted scholarly attention and there have been so many devoted labourers in this field that it is gratifying to note a new coinage struck by yet another Indo-Muslim dynasty. To the best of the knowledge of the present writer no coinage of the Samma Jāms of Sind (14th–16th century a.d.) has yet been published. This paper records two varieties of their copper coinage, dating from the latest period of their rule.

Among the pre-Mutiny writings of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (1817–1898), the Indian Muslim reformer, Āsār al-ṣanādīd, a history and description of Delhi, and its principal buildings and monuments, is a most impressive achievement. From the day of its publication onwards it has repeatedly been acknowledged as an important contribution to our knowledge of the history and archaeology of Delhi. However, on the whole, and in spite of recent re-editions of the work, no due attention has been paid to the fact that as early as 1854, i.e. only seven years after the first edition, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān published a second one remarkably different in form and content. We should like, in what follows, to present some evidence that may help to explain why and how this significantly altered second edition came about. This will also contribute to a better knowledge of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān's early intellectual development.