A difficulty has arisen in exegesis of the gospels. Allowing for variations, scholars figure in two main classes, the first largely introverted, the specialists, and the second “outsiders” who attempt to collaborate with them. The first, far the more numerous, comprises those who examine internally the New Testament, using Qumran and other intertestamental material, and Old Testament texts where they are cited or quoted in the New Testament, to enable the gospels to comment upon themselves and each other, employing in this procedure skills adequately described as “literary-historical”. One may refer to these scholars as “the critics”. Fashion gives great credence to “redaction-criticism”, heir to “source-criticism” and “form-criticism”. National traits tend to emerge, as is not surprising since subjective criteria are bound to operate in an estimate of what the evangelists were about, and national traits easily escape notice amongst their victims. In fact no one knows who the evangelists were or how they worked. Internal evidence alone leads to unending contradictions. Scepticism continues to play a role, and passages (such as one to which we come) which are not internally “corroborated” are more or less confidently dismissed as fabrications. The history, the archaeology of the New Testament is, at its most sensitive and useful point, at the mercy of skills that are principally literary and unashamedly academic. What is literary is of enormous value, but in no other field would it claim to exclude parallel sources of information.

It will not have escaped the notice of anyone reading the Aśokan inscriptions that the emperor's attitude towards the killing of animals, including human beings, was not entirely consistent. In RE I(B) we read hiddā no kichi jive ālabhitu pajohitaviye (in the version at K), “Here no living being must be killed and sacrificed.” In RE III(D) we find pānānaṃ anālaṃbhe sādhu, “Abstention from killing animals is meritorious.” In RE IV(C) we read vaḍhite … anālaṃbhe pānānaṃ avihisā bhūtānaṃ, “There are now promoted … abstention from killing animals, abstention from hurting living beings.” In RE XI(C) pānānaṃ anālaṃbhe occurs again. PE V contains a long list of animals which Aśoka had made inviolable (avadhiyāni) and not to be killed (no haṃtaviyāni). In PE VII(NN) we read dhaṃmavaḍhi vaḍhitā avihiṃsāye bhūtānaṃ anālaṃbhāye pānānaṃ, “The progress of morality has been promoted (because it leads) to abstention from hurting living beings (and) to abstention from killing animals.” With specific regard to men, Aśoka expresses his regret about the number of persons killed in, or as a consequence of, the war in Kaliṅga (RE XIII(E)), and states his hope that the forest dwellers will repent so that they may not be killed (avatrapeyu na ca haṃñeyasu, in the reading of Sh at RE XIII(N)). It appears, however, from PE IV that men could be sentenced to death in Aśoka's empire.

The aim of this article is to present a complete bibliography of the works of Cuvāmi Vētācalam (popularly known as Maṟaimalai Aṭikaḷ, 1876–1950) which are available at the British Museum (Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts), the India Office Library, and the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. This may be of some help to students of Tamil language and literature and also to persons dealing with the history of the Madras Presidency in the first half of this century. Also included at the end is a list of works of Aṭikaḷ that are not available in London.

In a chapter on “loanwords” in his book The Japanese language, Roy Andrew Miller quotes the following poem composed by H.I.H. the Crown Prince of Japan on the occasion of the New Year's Poetry Ceremony at the Imperial Palace in 1965:

This can be translated as follows: “The conveyor-belt which brings in the feed revolves and thousands of young birds cluster about it to eat.” I quote the poem not as a gem of literature, but as in a sense symbolic of modern Japan, a country which loves and clings to tradition, but is very ready to adapt it. The poem is a modern example of the ancient traditional form called tanka, or “short song”, consisting of five unrhymed lines containing 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables respectively—a form which has existed and been practised for over twelve hundred years. This tanka, though, is one which must surely have ancient tanka poets turning in their graves, not simply because the syllable count of the last two lines is all wrong, but because—horror of horrors!—it admits words of foreign origin among native Japanese words. This is obvious enough in the case of the ultra-modern word which drew Miller's attention to the poem, beruto konbea. But it applies equally to another type of word which the poem uses, namely words of Chinese origin. Words like these were available to poets in the hey-day of tanka poetry, from say 900—1300, but they were shunned like the plague. At that time, they would have stuck out like a sore thumb just as beruto konbea does today.

The great and important Armenian colony of New Julfa in Iṣfahān, Iran, was in existence from the very beginning of the seventeenth century, when Shāh ‘Abbās I deported large groups of Armenians from their homeland to the districts of Chahār Maḥāl and Iṣfahān, the capital, and to Perria (Aleppo). In a very short time, expatriate Armenians made New Julfa a great suburb of the city, gaining universal recognition as an important eastern centre of trade and commerce and glowingly described by all European travellers who visited Iṣfahān in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.