The question of caste, with a branch of which I am to deal, is, I need hardly observe, the most important of all social subjects connected with India. As the most prominent feature in the organization of the community, it enters into every ramification of the administration, and these, as we all know, are many. As admittedly the mainstay of the religious belief of the majority of the population, it has received a place in the sacred lore of the priesthood such has been given to no similar institution in any other known system; and on this consideration, therefore, it has been discussed for the last century and more with all the scholarship and power of laborious investigation that are associated with the great names that adorn the roll of the Asiatic Society.

The interesting and scholarly volume of Mr. McCrindle, recently published by A. Constable and Co., invites an attempt to settle more precisely the line on which Alexander reached the bank of the Indus. Mr. McCrindle loses the clue when Alexander reaches Nikaia. This place he is inclined to fix somewhere near Bagraâm, and he thinks that a part of Alexander's troops then passed through the Khaibar to the district called Peukelaôtis, somewhere near Hashtnagar on the river Landai. The formation of the country makes such a course improbable; but Mr. McCrindle admits that the geography of Kâfiristân, Chitrâl, and Swât is too little known to enable him to trace the course of the Macedonian army at this point. I will here try to supply that information.

Since the publication of my last paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Van (J.R.A.S. Jan. 1893) a discovery of considerable importance has taken place. In 1890 Mr. de Morgan, now Director of the Service of Antiquities in Egypt, succeeded, at the risk of his life, in taking a squeeze of the inscription on the pillar of Keli-shin Ushnei, which I have described in the first part of this Memoir (J.R.A.S. XIV. p. 66, No. LVI.). He found that there was engraved upon the stele, not only the Vannic text which I have published, but also an Assyrian text which had never been noticed before.

The Khaláṣat-at-Tawáríkh is a history of India from the days of the Pandus and Kurus down to the defeat of Dárá Shikoh and the beginning of the reign of Aurangzeb. It was written two hundred years ago (1695–96) by an upcountry Hindu, whose name has been variously given as Sanjan, Suján, Saján, Shuján, and Subhán Rái. He does not name himself in his history, but he tells us that he was a native of Batála, in the Panjáb, and that he had been from his youth up in the employment of high officials as a munshi or secretary. Apparently he was a kshatriya by caste, but in my opinion he was almost, if not quite, a Sikh by religion.

The Sutta of which the Pāli text, together with a translation, is here given is No. 82 of the Majjhima Nikāya. I have availed myself throughout of Buddhaghosa's Commentary, the Papañca-Sūdanī; but only so much of it is here reproduced, in the form of extracts, as I thought was necessary either to support a rendering, or to illustrate a point, of the text. Such extracts are marked ‘Pap. Sūd.’ I have added, at the end of the text, a few further references of general interest.

In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for October, 1887 (p. 655), I gave the text of a tablet of the Babylonian Chronicle referring to the period immediately following 747 B.C. Since then I have copied and studied the rather difficult text of an earlier tablet of the series, of which I now give a rendering, accompanied by the Babylonian text, a transcription, and notes.