The late Dr. Vincent A. Smith published an article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1898 in which he sought to disprove Sir Alexander Cunningham's identifications of Kauśāmbī and Śrāvastī with Kosam in the district of Allahabad and Set-Maheth (Saheṭh-Maheṭh) on the borders of the Gonda and Bahraich districts respectively. He himself located Śrāvastī in the vicinity of the village of Khajura near Balapur in Nepal and Kauśāmbī at or near Sutna in the Riwa state. In 1907–8 and 1908–9, when I had the privilege of co-operating with Dr. J. Ph. Vogel and Sir John Marshall in the exploration of the ancient mounds at Saheth-Maheth, I found two inportant imscriptions which fiṇally and conclusively established the identity of those remains with Śrāvastī. I am now in a position to announce the discovery of an equally important inscription in the vicinity of Kosam which makes it certain that the extensive remains near that village mark the actual site of the city of Kauśāmbī. I have also carefully studied the three inscriptions mentioning the name of Kausambi which were known to Dr. Smith, and find that they definitely support the same view.

Two years ago, in the JRAS., an article of mine was published on the leaden rolls with Hittite hieroglyphic texts discovered by the German excavators on the site of Assur (JRAS., Oct., 1925, pp. 707 seq.). The chief purport of the article was to point out the verification the texts afforded of my decipherment of the Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions; where I had postulated the same phonetic value for two or more different characters, these characters are found interchanging with one another, while the geographical and personal names we should expect to meet with are to be read if we give the characters the values I have assigned to them. The nature of the texts, moreover, if my system of decipherment is accepted, agrees with what analogy would suggest it ought to be. What makes them so especially important for the purpose of verification is that they are long, complete, with every character clearly defined, and, above all, that they belong to a locality and period when the script was affected by the contemporaneous use of the Phrygian alphabet and accordingly is phonetic rather than ideographic besides marking the divsions between the words.

The paradigms given below are the result of efforts to obtain what may be regarded as standard conjugational forms of the Transitive Verb in the chief dialects of Shina.

Shina (Ṣiṇ'a) is the principal language of the Gilgit Political Agency. It is the sole or primary language of the people inhabiting:—

1. The portion of the Indus Valley lying within the Gilgit Agency, i.e. from the neighbourhood of Haramosh to Thor; including the whole Chilas District;

2. The Gilgit Valley from Dahimal, 14 miles west of Gupis, to the junction of the Gilgit River with the Indus;

3. The lower portions of the Ishkoman and Hunza-Nagir Valleys;

4. The valley of the Astor River and its tributaries;

5. The Gurez Valley in Kashmir proper.

6. It is also the language of the people inhabiting the Darel and Tangir Valleys, situated in Independent Territory to the south of the mountain range that forms the southern boundary of the mid portion of the Gilgit Valley. These valleys drain southwards into the Indus. The use of Shina does not stop here, but extends further down the Indus Valley, according to Dr. Grahame Bailey, to a point more than halfway from Chilas to Amb.

Three years ago the native Arabs of Tello discovered a group of remarkably fine statuettes in low ground on the western side of Tablet Hill, mound V on the plan of de Sarzec, where Captain Cros found a small headless statuette of Gudea in 1903. The head, however, had been previously found by de Sarzec, and was joined to the torso by Leon Heuzey. A photograph of this statuette is published on plate I of the Revue d'Assyriologie, vol. vi. The monuments recovered by the Arabs from the temple of the god Ningishzida in the Tablet Hill are curiously enough all statuettes. All, with the exception of one, which is published in this communication, were illegally transported out of Iraq, and fortunately one was secured by the Louvre, where it rightfully joined the magnificent group of Gudea statues in the national museum of France. This is a fine alabaster statuette of Ur-Ningirsu, son of Gudea, 46 centimetres high, in standing position, and headless. It is reproduced in Monuments et Memoires publié par L' Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, tome xxvii, Statuettes de Tello, par F. Thureau-Dangin, plate ix; the circular base is sculptured in relief with two files of four figures each, which meet just below the feet of the patesi of Lagash.

The enlightened generosity of certain anonymous Japanese gentlemen has given to the author of the Ku Chou P'ien the power to publish the outcome of some thirty-five years' researches on the ancient writing of China in the splendid form in which it now appears. As a scholar thus allowed to see such a result in his own lifetime, Mr. Tadasuke Tanata should he a happy man.

This was found at Ur during last season's excavation by the British Museum and University Museum of Pennsylvania Joint Expedition. I thank Mr. Woolley, the Director of the Joint Expedition, for leave to use the Expedition's photograph and for permission to publish.

The two following inscriptions were found last season by the British Museum and University Museum of Pennsylvania Expedition to Ur. My thanks are due to the Joint Expedition, and to Mr. Woolley acting on its behalf, for permission to publish them.

In this article I have collected a certain number of documents where of the subject matter has at least some special connexion with the Śa-cu district. A good portion of the matter contained in the previous article (“I: The Ḫa-za,” supra, pp. 51–85) may be regarded as no less apposite here, and the reader, comparing the two papers, may find on the whole little dissimilarity in the contents, except that in the former case we have adhered closely to the Ḫa-za people. In order to show some system in the papers, the references in which I am naturally not in a position to restrict, I have grouped them under four heads, representing the chief purpose of their selection, namely (A) Places, (B) Clans and Nomenclature, (0) Paper and Copying of MSS., (D) Monasteries and a Historic Foundation.