Although there are several works still extant which are ascribed, correctly or wrongly, to the authorship of the great Sufic saint of Herat, ‘Abdu’l-lah Anṣārī (died a.h. 481/a.d. 1088), his hagiological treatise, dealing with the early period of Sufism, was so far believed to have been lost. It was an enlarged Persian version of Abū ‘Abdi’r-Raḥmān Muḥammad Sulamī's (d. a.h. 412/a.d. 1021) book Ṭabaqātu'ṣ-Ṣūfiyyīn, which was composed in Arabic. All we knew so far about Anṣārī's work was derived almost exclusively from Jami's description given by him in the preface to Nafaḥātu'l-Uns. As it appears now, a copy of that version came to light as early as 1809, when it was purchased for the library of the College of Fort William at Calcutta. It is at present preserved in the library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and bears the mark D 232 (or old 536).

In his review of my book on the newly deciphered Sinai inscriptions (JRAS., 1920, p. 301) the Rev. Professor A. H. Sayce has already been good enough to mention my recent discovery of some short alphabetic biliteral inscriptions on certain copper ingots, unearthed from the very border-line of the so-called “ Middle Minoan III ” and “ Late Minoan I ” layers of the Hagia Triada palace by the excavation mission in Crete of Messrs. Halbherr, Pernier, Stefani, and Paribeni in 1903 as well as on similar pieces from Tylissos and Mochlos, none being from Phaistos. All of them are at present in the museum of Heraklea, under the care of Professor Josef Hazzidakis, to whose kindness I owe the photographs reproduced in figures 1–8. Similar inscriptions have come from Serra Ilixi (Sardinia), and are now in the royal museum of Cagliari. I have to thank Professor Taramelli, director of this collection, for his kindness in sending me the excellent paper squeezes of these scribings, which the reader will find reproduced in fig. 10.

The full story of the Turki book on which, in Kehr's Codex, Ilminski based his Bābur-nāma (1857) is a very comedy of blameless error and mischance, primarily due to textual poverty; it has yet to be told but is too long for admission in the Journal; hence the purpose of this article is restricted to showing, on the evidence of its colophon and contents, that it is not the Bābur-nāma proper it passed for in Europe from 1725 to 1903, but is a work of independent authorship, plan, and date.