The present short study examines the problems encountered in the translation in England of Ottoman documents addressed from the Porte or from the North African Regencies to the English Crown in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In particular it studies in some detail the translations undertaken, and the problems faced by, the polymath scholar Thomas Hyde (1636-1702/3), Librarian of the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford and translator of Oriental documents to the Crown, but reference is also made to translations undertaken by William Seaman (1606/7-1680) and his son, and by the Rev. William Hayley (c.1657-1715).

The supreme importance of the Rig-veda in all questions bearing on the history of the Aryan mind, and on the development of the religious idea in man, gives interest to every attempt to throw light on that priceless heir-loom of India. Much has already been done by able scholars, in many ways, to investigate the language and ideas enshrined in the Rig-veda-sanhitâ; but no one has yet discovered the principle on which the hymns are arranged among themselves, or has advanced beyond the mere consciousness expressed by Prof. Max Müller in his History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, that “there is some system,” “some priestly influence,” “traces of one superintending spirit,” and such-like generalities. The object of the following paper is to show the principle which regulated the formation of the Sanhitâ, the aggregation of hymns into Maṇḍalas, the reason for the positions assigned to the Maṇḍalas, and the method followed in placing each particular hymn. If my deductions prove accurate, it is evident that a fresh impetus will be given to the study of these remarkable documents, for the clue to the labyrinth will be in the hands of future investigators.

The Arabs believed in the existence of beings to which they gave commonly the generic name “djinn”. For convenience we may call them spirits. Muḥammad carried these ideas over into Islam where theologians developed and systematized them. These Muslim ideas are of no interest to the student of folk-lore unless it can be shown that they contain older material.

Among the treasures brought to light by Dr. Stein in his excavations in Chinese Turkestan and lodged by him last summer in the British Museum, not the least interesting was a collection of fragmentary Tibetan manuscripts. These were found in the ruins of a Buddhist shrine buried in a site beyond the Endere stream, at the extreme eastern limit of the region explored, under circumstances which have already been detailed in Dr. Stein's “Preliminary Report,” pp. 55—56. It suffices here to say that the conditions under which the fragments were discovered were such as to make it practically impossible to date them later than the eighth century; and the evidence of a Chinese sgraffito in the same building has since proved this conclusion to be right. Hence they came to us as the earliest known relics of Tibetan literature.

The new Has Shamra text published by Virolleaud is, despite better preservation, considerably more difficult to interpret than its two immediate predecessors, and in this regard resembles rather the fragments of 1929.

The Royal Asiatic Society has recently been a beneficiary from the estate of Mrs Dorothy Wales, widow of H. G. Quaritch Wales, the erudite scholar of early Southeast Asian history who died in 1981. The occasion of this bequest, the contents of which are discussed in the Librarian's report herein (pp. 169–70), prompts this note on the contribution of Quaritch Wales to Southeast Asian studies.

Quaritch Wales was born in 1900 and educated at Charterhouse and Queens' College, Cambridge. He immediately embarked on a career in Southeast Asia, from which he was never to be deflected. At the age of 23 he entered the service of the Siamese Government where he served from 1924 to 1928 as an adviser to the courts of King Rama VI and King Rama VII. The first-hand knowledge gained from this experience formed the basis of his pioneering study Siamese State Ceremonies (1931), which remains a work of unrivalled insight into the Brahmanical rituals and Buddhist accretions of Thai kingship. He followed this with another work based on his experiences of Thai court and state functions, Ancient Siamese Government and Administration (1934).

Of the ten incarnations of Viṣṇu which he is believed in classical Hinduism to have undergone for the welfare of the human beings on earth, the sixth is that of Paraśurāma, a Brahmanic hero whose characteristic feature was the axe (paraśu) with which he is reported to have slain innumerable Kṣatriya warriors in 21 combats. We may perhaps recall here the most important events of the legend as it occurs in the Mahābhārata (III.116, XII.49.27–60, cf. also XIII.153) and in the Purāṇas: Harivaṃśa (I.33), Vāyu (Adhy.94), Matsya (Adhy.43), Viṣṇu (IV.11.9–20), Bhāgavata (IX.15, 16), Mārkaṇḍeya (Adhy.17), Brahmāḍḍa (III.26–47, very extensive!), and Viṣṇudharmottara (I.Adhy.25–7 ff.):

The only Pai. quotation connected directly with the Bṛh. is given by Mārkaṇḍeya (seventeenth century): Bṛhatkathāyām kupaci pisāḷam (Grierson, EPG., 134). Keith, HSL., p. 269, observes, “We really cannot be sure that we have a single relic of the Bṝhatkathā, still less that so late a grammarian as Mārkaṇḍeya actually had the text before him.” Pisālaṃ, moreover, is a neo-Indian form, which normally would not occur before the twelfth century, for the words in AMg pisalla (PG 595) and in Pkt. pisalla (Hem., i, 193) are normal Mid-Indian as contrasted with Mar. pisāḷeṇ “madness”.

Until 1918 only a small amount of desultory work had been done on the prehistory of the Malay Peninsula. Systematic excavating, collecting, and recording was started in that year by Mr. I. H. N. Evans, Curator of the Perak Museum at Taiping, and continued until his retirement in 1932.

The earliest Malay literature extant belongs to a time five hundred years ago, when in spite of having embraced Islam the Malay still cared enough for the Mahabharata and the Ramayana to translate them into a vernacular already full of Arabic loanwords. In addition he borrowed from India folk romances tricked out with motifs and descriptive passages from the two great Hindu epics. For example, in one such romance, the Hikayat Parang Puting, when the fairy lover “burning as if he would set fairyland on fire” is rejected by his mistress, he tosses sleepless until “the cocks crow, the birds of paradise sing in the sky, the parrots chatter in the angsoka trees, parroquets on the boughs of the nagasari and mynahs on the chempaka trees, and a drizzle of rain makes all the flowers bloom”. The Indian genius, like our own, will readily sentimentalize landscape to accord with human moods. But turn to the Malay version of a scene in the garden at Hastinapura that “astonished the moon by its beauty”:—“about midnight was seen a portent of the city's imminent doom. It was utterly still and the moon looked like a lovely woman peeping from behind a door. Gentle rain fell and a light breeze stirred in the distance. There were banks of clouds of all shapes and the birds were restless, flying here and there like a man with two wives.” So far as I know that last simile is a gloss by the observant, cynical Malay. In modern jargon, the Indian is an introvert, the Malay an extravert.

“Soon after my arrival in Nipál (now six years ago), I began to devise “means of procuring some accurate information relative to Buddhism: “for, though the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign “to my pursuits, my respect for sci ence in general led me cheerfully “to avail myself of the opportunity afforded, by my residence in a “Bauddha country, for collecting and transmitting to Calcutta the “materials for such investigation. There were, however, serious “obstacles in my way, arising out of the jealousy of the people in “regard to any profanation of their sacred things by an European, and “yet more, resulting from the Chinese notions of policy adopted by this “government. I nevertheless persevered; and time, patience, and “dexterous applications to the superior intelligence of the chief minister, “at length rewarded my toils.

The object of this essay is not so much to propound a new theory of my own, as to draw more prominent attention to one put forth by Mr. Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar in two papers contributed by him to the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1903. They are entitled Gūrjaras and Epigraphic Notes and Questions, No. III. Stated quite briefly, the theory is that the well-known ‘ Kings of Mahodaya ’ were Gūrjaras. Mr. Bhandarkar does not claim the whole credit of it for himself. Much of his material, as he himself admits, has been drawn by him from the Bombay Gazetteer. But he has added to it new material and fresh points of view, and worked up the whole into a consistent theory. To me it appears that, in the main, the theory is sound, and throws unexpected light on a period of Indian history until now very dark. I will first briefly explain the main positions of the theory, as I gather them from the two papers above referred to: the evidence, in detail, must be read in the papers themselves. Next, I shall set out, in detail, such further particulars as a closer examination of the contemporary records of that period appears to me to yield, partly in corroboration, partly in modification of Mr. Bhandarkar's theory.