In the article on “The Iron Pillar of Delhi” I noticed that another iron pillar exists at Dhār in Central India, but observed that no detailed description of that pillar was known to me.

I now find that a description of this very remarkable monument has been printed—I can hardly say published—in a report by the indefatigable Dr. Führer.

The Kurdish dialect of Persian has so far received very little attention from Oriental students, though it fully merits study, for while actually nothing more than a Persian dialect it has not submitted to the erosion which time brings about in every language, and which is so marked a feature in the development of modern Persian. Nor has it been subject to that admixture of Arabic words which has become so great a part of Persian since the invasion of the early Muhammadan Arabs. As a consequence it has preserved intact many words now obsolete in the mother language.

E. W. West (born 1824, died 1905) received the Gold Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1900. In his answer to a letter of congratulations sent to him by a fellow worker in the field of Iranian studies, L. C. Casartelli, later Bishop of Salford, he describes how he became attracted to the study of Zoroastrianism and this curriculum vitae was published in part in a French translation in Casartelli's obituary notice of West (Le Musèon, 1905). West's translations of the main works of later Zoroastrianism make difficult reading for those unacquainted with the language of the original texts, but never fail to elicit admiration on the part of modern scholars who cannot but acknowledge that West, for all his selftraining, possessed an unparalleled grasp of Pahlavi long before the reading of the script acquired some measure of certainty through the discovery of the Manichsean texts from Turfan. Still more valuable than his translations were his numerous notes on Pahlavi MSS., scattered throughout his introductions to his Pahlavi Texts and rather summarily collected in his article in the Grundriss.

The Coimbatore District, containing more than 8000 square miles, is almost centrally situated in the south of the Peninsula, within the region occupied by the Tamil-speaking race, being about 250 miles west of Madras, and 80 east of the Malabar coast. Mysore bounds it on the north, and the Madras and Tinnevelly districts lie between it and Cape Comorin. Megalithic monuments are found in all the Madras districts, but I am inclined to think are most numerous in Coimbatore, where singly, in twos or threes, or in assemblages of scores or hundreds, they occur in every variety of situation, high on the ghauts and wild mountainsides, in remote jungles and malarious river-valleys, on wide open plains, on cultivated land, amid fertile gardens and rice tracts. Excluding the Nilgiri Hills, which, though belonging to Coimbatore, are a separate region, with a group of remains peculiar to themselves, the Coimbatore monuments are all sepulchral, consisting of kistvaens or tumuli, containing cists or chambers, originally underground, but now often more or less exposed. Stone-circles and standing stones are almost always associated with the tumuli, but never, so far as I know, found independently, as in other parts of India and in Europe. Neither am I aware of any true cromlech in Coimbatore. It may be interesting to give some account of two of the principal assemblages of these remains, one on the east, and another on the west side of the district. Seven miles north of Perămdoŏry, the chief town of a talook of the same name, midway between the towns of Salem and Coimbatore, after passing along a tract of fertile bottom-land, luxuriant with topes and gardens, the ground, iust beyond the village of Năllămpătti, rises into one of the wide rolling barren maidans characteristic of Southern India, on which a great cairn-cemetery is situated. Many hundreds of cairns are spread over a considerable tract; in general appearance heaps of blackened stones, some very small, and thence of every size up to 30 feet and more in diameter, they vary in height from one to four feet, but have evidently been much worn down by lapse of time and weather.

In our article on the Aśokan inscriptions, Dr Raymond Allchin and I pointed out the need for a new edition of Hultzsch's Inscriptions of Asoka, bringing it up to date by including the Aśokan inscriptions in Prakrit found in India, and those in Greek and Aramaic found in Afghanistan, since the publication of Hultzsch's work in 1925. Our statement was particularly applicable to the MREs, since only ten versions of MRE I were known to Hultzsch, of which three had the extra portion at the end usually designated as MRE II. To some extent the need for a replacement of Hultzsch's work had been filled by D. C. Sircar's Aśokan Studies which included reprints of all Sircar's articles dealing with new Aśokan inscriptions. Sircar had published a synoptic version of the 17 versions of MRE I and the seven versions of MRE II which are known to date, and a corrected version of this appeared in his Aśokan Studies, but even the corrected version was not entirely satisfactory, in as much as it did not give new editions of the versions already known to Hultzsch.

The maps which will be noticed here are evidently closely related to the wellknown Portolan charts of Italian and Catalan origin, of which some dozens of examples survive from the period of approximately A.D. 1300–1600.

This article examines the functions of Chinese and foreign intermediary elites in the commercial and political world of Shanghai, an international city in the nineteenth century mainly consisting of British, American, European and Chinese residents. Specifically, it focuses on the formation of the socio-economic network of Tong Mow-chee (Tang Maozhi 唐茂枝) (1828–1897), a well-known Chinese comprador-merchant serving the British firm Jardine Matheson & Co. and other anglophone and Chinese figures, including William Venn Drummond and Tong King-sing who supported Mow-chee's commercial and political activities. My research mainly draws on English and Chinese sources and enables a deeper understanding of the unofficial figures who contributed to the management of the international society of Shanghai in the late nineteenth century, offering new insight into social roles of the middlemen operating in an area of Britain's informal empire in China.

The extensive literature of Buddhist legends may be divided into three groups: (1) the legends on the rebirths of the Buddha anterior to his last life in this world, these are the ‘Jātakas’ (proper); (2) legends of the Buddha in his last, historical, existence; (3) legends of the Buddhist disciples, these are the ‘Avadānas,’ which last name, however, is also applied to legends in general.

This glossary presents 80 items of textile terminology that are found in the Chinese documents from Dunhuang and Turfan, or in historical texts. Some of these terms can be identified with actual textiles found at sites in north-western China. Readers should be aware that there are variations in textile terminology in this international field of research: for example, we have used “plain weave” where other textile specialists might prefer “tabby”; and “damask” where others might prefer “twill”.

A pseudo-Aristotelian treatise called de pomo et morte incliti principis philosophorum Aristotelis has been printed several times in Europe, the earliest editions being without place or date. This work is a Latin translation of a Hebrew tract bearing the name “The Book of the Apple,” the translator being Manfred, King of Sicily (ob. 1266), or, as Steinschneider suggests, a Jew employed by him. The Hebrew text professes to be a translation from the Arabic made by R. Abraham B. Hisdai, an author who flourished at the end of the thirteenth century. There are MSS. of B. Hisdai's work in the Vatican and at Oxford, and it has been repeatedly printed, first at Venice, 1519. It was republished with a new Latin translation and a copious but irrelevant commentary by J. J. Losius, at Giessen, in 1706.

Besides Ṡubḥ-i-Ezel and his family, there reside at Famagusta, in Cyprus, three Ezelīs, all natives of Zanjān, who have settled there in order to be near their master. Two of these, Ustā Maḥmūd and Sheykh 'Alī Bakhsh, are brothers, sons of a certain Hājī Muḥammad Ḥuseyn, who was one of the Bābīs put to death in cold blood by Amīr Aslān Khān after the suppression of the Bābī rising at Zanjān in the winter of 1850. The third, named Āqā 'Abdu'1-Aḥad, who is the author of the following narrative, is the most interesting personality of the three. Living alone in a small, bare lodging, surrounded by unsympathetic and suspicious Turks, and admitted to the presence of Ṡubḥ-i-Ezel (for whose sake he has thus cut himself off from his friends, his relatives, and his native land) only, perhaps, once in ten days or a fortnight, he nevertheless exhibits a constant cheerfulness of demeanour, a scrupulous neatness of apparel, and an uncomplaining resignation and patience which command one's respect. I first made his acquaintance, and that of his two fellow-townsmen, during the fortnight which I spent at Famagusta in the spring of 1890; but it was not until the spring of last year (March 18–25, 1896) that I had an opportunity of seeing him again, and only then did I learn that a suggestion which I had formerly made to him, that he should set down in writing his recollections of the siege of Zanjān and of the calamities which subsequently befell the Bābīs there, had actually led him to compile the interesting narrative of which I here offer a translation.

By the Scientific Expedition to the Northern Etbai, despatched by his Highness the Khedive in the beginning of the year, that part of the eastern desert of Egypt which lies south of a line between Kina and Kosair and reaches rather below the twenty-fourth parallel of latitude, was rapidly examined and surveyed. The map is in the hands of the engraver of the Royal Geographical Society; the geology exhibited in a map and sections is before the Geological Society; and a map of the antiquities is attached to the present memoir. The country embraces an area of 23,000 square miles of mountain and desert, and is called by the inhabitants the Northern Etbai.

The fact that fossils are found at Perim has been noticed by Baron Hugel, Captain Fulljames, and others.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, May, 1836, Captain Fulljames, who has obtained certain of these fossils, has accurately described the general appearance of the island, and the matrix in which the greater portion of the fossils are found, viz., a conglomerate of sandstone, clay, and silex. In addition to what has been written on the subject, I would observe, that the appearance of the island at the ebb of spring tides is extraordinary; and accounts for, if it will not countenance, the legend, that Perim was formerly connected with the main.

In his review of my book The Making of Greater India (JRAS, 1951, p. 216) Professor Heine-Geldem said that he could not agree that the local genius which moulded Khmer culture and art was that of the Older Megalithic. He considered that the evidence I adduced pointed only to the existence of megalithic elements in the pre-Hindu culture of the Khmers, and he saw no evidence of their ever having had a “full megalithic culture”. He asks why, if megalithic monuments in the plains were destroyed or used for temple building by Indianized Khmers, no such monuments have been reported from among related tribes surviving in the neighbouring hills, where there would have been no incentive to build temples. And he concludes: “I am fully prepared to revise my view if megalithic monuments of the respective type should be discovered in south-eastern Indo-China, but I cannot see how the terraces and stepped pyramids of the Khmer could be derived from megalithic terraces and pyramids, the nearest of which are found at a distance of many hundred miles in the hills of Burma and Assam.” So Professor Heine-Geldern sees nothing in my characterization of the Khmer cultural evolution incompatible with my premise that it is guided by the Older Megalithic genius, but requires further evidence which the present paper will show to be available.

In the British Museum there is a gold coin issued by the Zanj rebels, hitherto inedited, and consequently of sufficient historical importance to warrant special publication. There is, so far as the present writer is aware, only one other coin (also in gold) surviving as a witness of that disastrous Slave Revolt which is estimated to have cost over 1,000,000 lives. This latter coin was published by Casanova in the Revue Numisrnatique (1893, pp. 510-516) and is now in the Paris Cabinet. By kind permission of the Conservateur I have been enabled to have it photographed. The mint, in both instances is the same, but the specimen in the British Museum is three years earlier in date, and preserves for us a more complete portion of the peculiar reverse marginal legend, that enables us to emend to a great extent the conjectural rendering suggested by Casanova in his article above mentioned.

The IAVs. closely follow the rules of the Sanskrit stress-accent (as distinct from the ancient musical accent) which have been noted by Prof. Jacobi in ZDMG. xlvii. 574 and ff. The only difference is that the IAVs. do not usually throw the accent further back than the antepenultimate if the word ends in a long syllable. The general rules are as follows:—

(1) The stress-accent falls on the penultimate if it be long. Examples—Skr. and Ts. kīrti ‘fame’; G. janōi ‘a sacrificial thread’; M. gīdh(a) ‘a vulture’; kāṇā ‘one-eyed’; S. rahāū ‘a dweller’; H. asūj'hā ‘invisible’; kisān(a) ‘a husbandman’; B. choṭákkā ‘small.’

The city of Yazd is situated on the edge of the Dasht-i Kavīr in the Ardistān-Yazd basin, which stretches some 250 miles from near Kāshān to south of Bāfq. It lies at a height of 4,000 ft. West of Yazd, the Shīr Kūh massif rises to 13,370 ft. It receives considerable moisture including heavy snow but the rainfall of Yazd itself is less than 5 in. per annum. Near Yazd groundwater which originates in the Shīr Kūh mountains follows a northward slope from Mihrīz towards Ardakān. Before the sinking of semi-deep power-operated wells from about 1950 onwards, Yazd obtained its water from long qanāts originating in the mountains west of Taft and Mihrīz. The qanāts of the villages to the north-west of Yazd tap water in the highest elevations of the basins to the north-east. Some of these qanāts flow underneath Yazd, while a few originate in Yazd itself.

About the middle of 1836 I sent to the late Mr. J. Prinsep, then Secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a brief account of a hill of ashes, situate at Budigunta, about eleven miles W. from Bellary, in the Ceded Districts, which he published in the Journal of the Society for October of the same year under the head of “Note on the occurrence of Volcanic Scoria in the Southern Peninsula;”—a title given by himself to the communication, from which it may be inferred that he was inclined to consider the ashes (specimens of which were forwarded) as of volcanic origin.

The Risālat al-Laduniyya is a short treatise giving an account of al-Ghazālī's religious philosophy, in a compact form. It includes his theory of Knowledge, which is discussed very fully in regard to its nature, its different types, and the means by which it is acquired. The author gives special attention here to Revealed Knowledge and distinguishes between Revelation (), which was limited to the prophets and ceased with them, and Inspiration (), which is granted also to the saints and is, in fact, the awakening of the individual, human soul, by Universal Soul.