In 1443 Zangi advanced with, his army to the neighbourhood of Edessa and besieged a fort to the east of the town which the Franks had surprised from an Arab, Mani' son of ‘utair. Zangi took the fort of Shann, marched close to Edessa, sent an ambassador to the townsmen, and said that he did not wish to fight the Franks but to be at peace with them. They sent him gifts and presents from the town, food and drink, and he passed on to Aleppo.

Besides De scientiis, there is another treatise attributed to Al-Fārābī known in Latin which contains references to music. This is De ortu scientiarum. At the same time it must be pointed out that, unlike De scientiis, we do not possess irrefutable proof of authorship, as we shall see. In its Latin dress, however, it appears to have been widely disseminated throughout the great culture centres of Medieval Europe, and for that reason it attracts more than passing interest.

In JRAS., 1932, pp. 789–814, the time of the comprehensive collection of Indian medical sciences is established approximately in the middle of the first millennium A.D. and later. In this connection a sketch of the local origin of the precepts chiefly current in the oldest Saṃhitās, which bear the names of Caraka and Suśruta (abbreviated: CaS and SuS), may be of interest. In the introduction (pp. 7–8) to his celebrated inquiry into Indian osteology, Hoernle answers this question: According to the tradition preserved in the Buddhist Jātakas, in the age of Buddha there were two great universities, Kāśi or Benares in the East, and the still more famous Takṣaśilā [the Taxila of the Greeks] on the Jhelam River in the West. Ātreya, whose doctrines are propagated in the CaS, lived at Takṣaśilā; the king of Kāśī instructed Suśruta in surgery. This would place the origin of surgery, as a science, in the Bast of India. Furthermore, Nemi, the lord of Videha (or Tirhut in the eastern province of Bihar) is regarded as the author of ophthalmic surgery.

It will one day be considered curious—the prejudiced and partial way in which the Pali Suttas, up to the present time, have been exploited. Buddhists, for instance, both Hīnayānists in their way and Mahāyānists in their way, had let it be known, that for them both the reality of the “man”, as an entity over and above body and mind, was illusory. He was but a name for a complex of fleeting dhammā. European writers on Buddhism, taking this assertion at its face-value, and not at its historical value, selected passages from the Suttas endorsing it. They made no search for passages which seemed to throw doubt, at least at some period, on the dogma. These passages remained overlooked by adherents and by external commentators alike. When are we going to develop a better historic flair ?

In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1930 Professor Langdon illustrates (Pl. IX, Fig. 4) a curious pottery stand found at Hursagkalamma, Kish. This, he states, is only found below the flood stratum down to waterlevel, i.e. prior to 3,200 B.C., according to his dating; and it may possibly be the niḳnaḳḳu of Babylonian ritual which was in common use, according to the texts, right down to the Persian Period. During my work at Kish I found a similar stand—now in the Field Museum, Chicago—in the same area of the site. These stands which average 2½ feet in height are shaped rather like an hour-glass, and are open throughout at the topand base. Moreover, they are ornamented with triangular incisions which sometimes pierce the side entirely, sometimes only partially so.

The last few decades have seen the publication of several hitherto unedited Arab sources relative to the history of the 'Abbāsid empire in the tenth century—such as Kitāb ta'rīkh al-wuzarā' by Hilāl aṣ-Ṣābi, the volumes of Miskawaihi's Kitāb tajārib al-umam, and at-Tanūkhī's Nishwār al-muḥāḍarā—that are a veritable storehouse of information on the social, economic, and political situation of that period. These works have revealed a completely new world to us: they show us, so to speak, the back stage of tenth century 'Abbāsid administration and we see the governmental machinery with all its ramifications in action.

Sir Charles Bell has given in this Journal (July, p. 710) a detailed account of this important book on Tibet, which, though already edited in Italian by Puini, has remained for many years insufficiently known. It is not, therefore, my purpose to write a new review of the book.

When Griffini published an account of the latest acquisition of a “collection of South-Arabian MSS.” by the Ambrosian Library, Milan, the distinguished orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher, to whom oriental scholarship is indebted for his able researches on the doctrines and history of the Isma'īlīs, welcomed the news, for most of the information on the subject of the Ismā'īlīs he and his forerunners were able to communicate to us was derived either from inadequate sources or from the anti-Ismā'īlī polemical literature. Similarly, Professor Louis Massignon expressed the hope that modern scholars would throw further light on the history of the Ismā'īlīs and their doctrine by study of this literature.

Under the rule of Buddhist ecclesiastics, fostered originally by foreign (Mongol) suzerains, Tibet has not been a military power. Probably no religion is more potent than Buddhism in damping the fighting spirit; of which developement Mongolia itself has in modern times afforded a signal example. The Tibetan people, though in some districts rough and turbulent, is not warlike: the brigand tribes of the northeast belong to a region which, since the overthrow (A.D. 1226) of the Tangut kingdom by Cingiz Khan, has been largely Mongolized, as even the geographical nomenclature proves, and which in native Tibetan times must have presented a quite different aspect. The Tibetan armies, when such are required, consist mainly of levies from the great monasteries; the creation of a small standing army in the most recent period has encountered prejudice.