South-East Persia, the history of which I propose to discuss very briefly, consists of the provinces of Kirmān and Persian Baluchistān, in which I have been travelling since 1893, and where I was commissioned to found a consulate in 1894. Before, however, approaching their history, it seems advisable to recapitulate the physical featuresof these desert provinces, which, aselsewhere, have mainly owed their history to their geographical conditions.

The Academy of Sciences of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic published in 1941 through the Institute of History, Tiflis, a report in Russian (231 pp. + 132 illustrations and 126 plates, of which 19 are coloured) by Mr. B. A. Kuftin on some remarkable archæological discoveries in Trialeti. The report contains a 16 page summary of its contents in English and an up-to-date bibliography of more than 500 references. The appearance in the middle of the war of a volume devoted to Russian research is in itself an event. It is evidence of the vitality of Russian archæology and of the confidence of the author and editor in ultimate victory at the very moment when the invader was carrying fire and sword to the foot of the Caucasus.

In the title of my paper the stress is to be laid upon the word ‘etymological.’ The vocabulary does not contain all the Māldivian words which I collected during the last five or six years, either from printed books, or from manuscripts hitherto unpublished, or from the lips of Māldivian natives. For it was by no means my intention to compile a Māldivian dictionary for practical use: this would be premature; it may perhaps be done at some future time. For the present my purpose is purely philological. The present object is to publish linguistic materials which may serve as a basis for a scientific phonology of the Māldivian language. My vocabulary is, therefore, both an introduction and a supplement to the third part of my “Māldivian Studies,” which deals with that subject. First, I have excluded, of course, from my vocabulary the numerous words borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, as they do not belong to the original stock of the Māldivian dialect. But I have omitted also generally those words which cannot be explained in a satisfactory way by the help of phonetic laws confirmed by other etymologies which are not open to doubt. There remains, nevertheless, a sufficient number of words to show clearly the character of the Māldivian language. It is merely a dialect, and not even a very ancient dialect, of Sinhalese. This result is, I think, also of historical interest; for it appears from it that the Māldive islands were occupied by Sinhalese people, but hardly at an earlier period than about eight or nine centuries ago.

The Ḥisba jurisdiction, which is the subject of the twentieth and concluding chapter of Māwardi's work, is akin to those dealing with the Ḳaḍi and with the Maẓālim tribunal; these have been discussed in the Journal (1910, p. 761, and 1911, p. 635). In the following pages an attempt is made to give, in an abridged form, the substance of the Ḥisba chapter (ed. Enger, Bonn, 1853, pp. 404–31), to be followed by some observations on the working of the rules there laid down, and on their effect in practice.

The Greco-Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara has for a long time been of singular attraction for students of Indian art. These sculptures of greyish-blue schist found in such quantities in the inaccessible valleys of the Indo-Afghan frontier, have from the outset been noted for their classical affinities, and many were brought to Europe by art-loving dilettanti. The particular qualities distinguishing them from all other Indian sculpture were duly extolled; they came to be recognized as the earliest examples of new ideas which changed the whole development of Indian art and propagated Western influence throughout the Buddhist world. But the rôle so enthusiastically assigned to them has not remained unchallenged. A younger generation, more eager to discover the truly national qualities of the arts of Asia, maintained that the only reason for this admiration was that on account of their Greek affinities the Gandhara sculptures were less strange to Europeans than Asiatic art proper. They considered Greco-Buddhist sculpture a weak and provincial offshoot of Western art, without much influence in the East, and for the most part of a quality which could not compete with the broad current of the Indian tradition. Even those iconographical innovations with which the sculptors of Gandhara had generally been credited, such as the creation of the Buddha image, were attributed by these scholars to other and more “national” schools. To this day no satisfactory solution of the problem has come forward.

For convenience of reference, the following list of MSS. which have existed or do exist is reproduced from the J.R.A.S., July, 1900:—

I. Bābar's autograph MS.

II. Khwāja Kilān's MS.

III. (Humāyūn's transcript.)

IV. Elphinstone MS.

V. British Museum MS.

VI. India Office MS. (Bib. Leydeniana).

VII. Asiatic Society of Bengal MS.

VIII. Mysore MS. (Tīpū's).

IX. Bibliotheca Lindesiana MS.

X. Hyderābād MS.

XI. St. Petersburg University Library MS.

XII. St. Petersburg Foreign Office MS.

XIII. St. Petersburg Asiatic Museum MS. (Senkovskī).

XIV. Bukhārā MS.

XV. Nazar Bay Turkestānī MS.

In trying to decipher texts of which we know neither the language nor the values of the written characters it is evident that the first steps must be taken by conjecture. It is only when the conjectures corroborate one another that progress can be made. I have tried to restrict my guesses to what is in itself probable, and had not intended to publish them without further investigation. But investigation takes time, and for special reasons it seemed best to print now such of my results as appear to be fairly well justified. It is unnecessary to criticize other attempts at decipherment, as I have tried to start entirely afresh, without a prejudice for or against any previous system. Several of the identifications of Professor Sayce, the pioneer in this as in many other lines of research, have, however, been adopted without discussion, because they appeared on consideration to be certainly right. Much else may be derived unconsciously from him, for we have often discussed the problem together, and but for his encouragement I should long ago have given it up altogether. The notes relate almost entirely to texts in Messerschmidt's Corpus, and only to the more legible of those. A valuable addition to the material has been made by the publication of excellent facsimiles of inscriptions at Carchemish (Jerabis) by Hogarth, Lawrence, & Woolley, with which I hope to deal on another occasion.

The 26 inscribed stones which are described here were found during a visit to the north-western part of the territory, close to the border with the Yemen. It was realized that they were important for palaeographic and historical reasons and that they belonged to the later period of Saba'.

In his paper L'Arrivée des Portugais en Chine, published in T'oung Pao in 1912, M. Cordier, before giving a more detailed account of the events in the Further East following on the taking of Malacca in 1511, gave a lucid sketch of the events accompanying the first establishment of Portuguese power in Eastern seas. I consider that these events require to be further set forth, for as far as I am aware the existing histories do not give any adequate and consecutive account of the struggle for the mastery of the Arabian Sea carried out by the Portuguese against the Muḥammadan states, and more especially against the Turks, who in the sixteenth century were the most powerful military state in the world. In this paper I propose to deal with this subject to the best of my ability.

By rejecting animism and ritualism and emphasizing a rational outlook which treats reality as a causally and functionally determined system of plural synergies (saṁskāras), the emergence of Buddhism marks an important event in the history of Indian thought. The most distinctive feature of Buddhist ethics is its freedom from theism, which leaves room for rationalism and rules out submission to some superhuman power controlling the world-process. Prior to the advent of Buddhism even the Upaniṣads were not completely free from theistic influence in their speculations. It is proposed here to point to the Buddhist contribution to the growth of scientific outlook and methodology in India.

The great storm of 1737 is one of the few events still remembered in the early history of Calcutta. The traditional account of the matter is that given by “Asiaticus,” which he professes to have derived from the Gentleman's Magazine. It is as follows:—“In the night of the 11th October, 1737, there happened a furious hurricane at the mouth of the Ganges, which reached sixty leagues up the river. There was at the same time a violent earthquake, which threw down a great many houses along the river side; in Golgota (i.e. Calcutta) alone, a port belonging to the English, two hundred houses were thrown down, and the high and magnificent steeple of the English Church sunk into the ground without breaking. It is computed that twenty thousand ships, barques, sloops, boats, canoes, etc., have been cast away; of nine English ships then in the Ganges, eight were lost, and most of the crews drowned. Barques of sixty tons were blown two leagues up into land over the tops of high trees; of four Dutch ships in the river, three were lost, with their men and cargoes; 300,000 souls are said to have perished. The water rose forty feet higher than usual in the Ganges.” Then follows the story of the voracious crocodile in the hold of the stranded ship.

The two principal terms of lineal measure adopted by Fa-hian, Yuan Chwang, and other Chinese pilgrims, in their narratives of the different countries in India and on its frontiers, are the yojana and the li.

The main interest of the world's history centres so indisputably in the doings of the Aryan and Semitic races, that even those whose attention has been chiefly devoted to other areas of human development cannot but concur in the judgment which assigns to the object of their studies a secondary place. At the same time, the second place, and even the third, has a claim to some hearing; and if we grant (as we are bound to do) the second place to China as the intellectual, and to some extent the political leader of Eastern Asia, the third place will perhaps be allowed to belong to Japan. Pending the settlement of the disputed Accadian question, Japanese literature takes us back many centuries further than the oldest documents of the Mongols, Mantchus, Turks, Finns, or any other nation of the Altaic stock; and, as the Archaic Japanese language may, on account of its superior antiquity, lay claim to the title of the Sanskrit of the Altaic tongues, so, also, is it to be presumed that the early Japanese civilization and religion present us with the most original features of Altaic thought and life.