The Gurjara Pratīhāras have long been recognised as the leading royal house of northern India during the ninth and tenth centuries. A considerable number of copper plate and stone inscriptions have survived from Pratīhāra times and these have provided the requisite data for a reconstruction of the dynasty's political and social history. Following conventions established in the Gupta period if not before, the copper-plates of the Pratīhāras record grants of villages or land, while stone inscriptions typically recount the building of temples and the provision of gifts to enshrined divinities. A large number of temples from the Pratīhāra age have been preserved; some of these buildings have enjoyed the recent scholarly attention of the team working on the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture as well as the Temple Survey of the Archaeological Survey of India. In contrast, palatial architecture is virtually unknown. This is neither surprising nor unusual, there being little left of such buildings in any part of India from before the fourteenth century. This is due to the wide use of perishable building materials, notably wood, brick and stucco. In the case of the Pratīhāra rulers there is also the fact that their capital city of Kannauj (anc. Kānyakubja) has been completely destroyed. That the Pratīhāras were responsible for some building at Kannauj is indicated by the inscription, dated Harṣa year 276 (A.D. 882–3), from the shrine of Garībnāth at Pehowa. This inscription records, among many other things, that a temple of Viṣṇu Garuḍāsana was built by the Brāhmaṇa Bhūvaka on the banks of the river Gaṅgā in Bhojapura near Kānyakubja.

I present here a short tract from Mdo, vol. cxxxiii, foil. 330–2, entitled Īśvarakartṛtranirākṛtir Viṣṇorekakartṛtvanirākaraṋam, or “Refutation of the idea of God as Creator (sic): Refutation of the idea of Viṣṇu as sole Creator (sic).” It is ascribed to Nāgārjuna, who is named as the author of about one hundred works noted by me in the Tanjur. The fact that it appears in one of the last volumes of the Mdo, and that both the Sanskrit and the native versions are given, seem to indicate that the work was a comparatively late accession to the Tibetan collection. I give both versions in order to fix the text. The work is, as will be seen, of a simple type, adapted, as it states, to the learner (suśiṣyapratibodhārtham), and in character quite different from the famous nyāya treatise of Udayana, the Kusumāñjali, which seeks to establish the contrary.

A Student of Indian History is often surprised to find that what he has been accustomed to look upon from boyhood as sheet anchors of Indian Chronology prove, on closer scrutiny, to be very far from being so. The year 322–321 B.C. for the accession of Candragupta Mauryya is one of such dates.

The following translations are from the texts in my Assyrian Medical Texts for sick men suffering from diseases brought about by the “hand of a ghost”.

In 1896 A. Querry published in the Mémoires de la Société de linguistique de Paris (vol. ix, pp. 110–24), a short note on the dialect spoken in Nain. His materials were collected by some of his Persian friends at Tehran where they chanced to meet a Naini on his visit to the capital. Since that time nothing has appeared in the press to add to our information concerning the linguistics in that corner of Persia.

There are several recensions of the Hikayat Seri Rama or Malay Ramayana. There are three folk-versions: Seri Rama of Sumatran origin, edited with an outline in English by W. E. Maxwell (JRAS. Straits Branch, 17, 1886); Hikayat Maharaja Ravana, by H. Overbeck (JRAS. Malayan Branch, xi, pt. ii, 1933); and a Patani version, of which an outline was given by me in the Royal Batavian Society's Feestbundel, Batavia, 1929. Of literary recensions the best known are Archbishop Laud's text in the Bodleian, ed. W. G. Shellabear (JRAS. Straits Branch, 71, 1915, with outline, ibid., 70, 1917) = Sh. in this article, and that printed by Roorda van Eysinga (Amsterdam, 1843) = Ro. in this article. The last two have been compared by A. Zeiseniss in his Die Rāma-Sage bei den Malaien (Hamburg, 1928), which has a fairly complete bibliography except for the folk-tale versions. But beyond a few lines in van der Tuuk's catalogue (reprinted in Essays on Indochina, 2nd series, vol. ii) nothing has been written of Raffles Malay MS. 22 in the Library of this Society, which for various reasons is of unique interest. Throughout my description I retain the Malay forms for Sanskrit words.

I am grateful to the Society for letting me see the above paper before publication and giving me space for a few comments. Circumstances at the moment debar me from access to libraries; and, as it is also hard to answer briefly arguments depending on assumptions which appear to me unwarranted by the available evidence, this note may be found incomplete.

It is only in the ninth and tenth books of the Rig Veda that there is any very distinct and prominent reference made to a future life. It is true that the Ṛbhus, on account of their artistic skill, are said to have been promised, and to have attained, immortality and divine honours (i. 161, 2; iv. 35, 3, 7, 8); but this is a special case of deification, and does not prove that ordinary mortals were considered to survive after the termination of their earthly existence. There are, however, a few other passages which may be understood as intimating a belief in a future state of blessedness. Thus (i. 91, 1) it is said, that “by the guidance of Soma the sage ancestors of the worshippers had obtained treasures among the gods;” and again, in v. 18, “Soma, becoming abundant to (produce) immortality, place for us excellent food in the sky.”