In view of the inevitable delays which must always attend the publication of lengthy and illustrated reports in India, it was suggested to me a short time ago by the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society that it would serve a useful purpose if I contributed to the Journal, from year to year, an account of the chief discoveries made by the Archæological Department in India. It is particularly satisfactory to respond to this suggestion at the present juncture, not only because the prospects of systematic and steady work in the field of exploration are brighter now than they have ever yet been, but also because the particular season that has just gone by has been more than usually productive of interesting results. My only regret is that it is not possible to present these results in a more adequate form. Government orders, however, permit only the publication of very short preliminary accounts in European journals, and I must be content, therefore, to give the following brief summary, referring the reader who wishes for further information to the descriptive accounts of the discoveries which will appear in due course in our official reports.

During 1937–38, with my wife's tireless co-operation, I archæologically explored the Malay States of Kedah, Perak, and Johore, with the primary object of obtaining data on the spread of Indian civilization in South-East Asia. The full report, including that of the systematic excavation of many sites of the “Hindu period” in Kedah, was published in JRASMB, vol. xviii, part 1, 1940, with 89 plates and 15 figures. Subsequently we excavated one or two other sites in Kedah and also explored Province Wellesley. The report of this supplementary work, delayed by the war, will shortly appear in JRASMB. The object of the present paper is to give a summary of our main Malayan results in the sphere of cultural history, as well as to point out some wider implications in conjunction with my earlier excavations in Siam, which these Malayan investigations do much to complete and illuminate.

There are two passages in the Soma hymns of maṇḍala IX which deserve special attention. Both of them are concerned with Agni, who in this book is a rare and insignificant occurrence: in 9,5,11 he is, in a final line, said to witness, together with Vāyu, Bṛhaspati, Sūrya and Indra, a Soma ceremony; in 22, 2 and 88, 5 he figures in similes; in 96, 5 Soma is described as the father of Heaven, Earth, Agni, Sūrya, Indra and Viṣṇu. The more interesting are the two Agni passages in the last sūktas of the first part of this maṇḍala, viz. the triplet 9, 66, 19–21 and the six stanzas 9, 67, 22–27.

The following pages bring together passages from Chinese books, some of which have been translated before in a different context, illustrating them by reproductions of woodcuts which are unfamiliar and of great interest.

Some three years ago chance brought to light in the India Office Library a little book with an English title on the cover: First catechism of Sourashtra grammar. By T. M. Rama Rou. Madras, 1905. It challenged inquiry because the script was quite unfamiliar. With it was another little book in the same script and by the same author—Saurāṣṭra-bōdhini (1906)—which fortunately gave the alphabet, in the usual order, and lists of the complex combinations of all the vowels with all the consonants, so that the script could be read. The language is listed as Paṭṅūlī, but is not described, in the Linguistic Survey of India. The author of the two books had, however, provided the necessary clue to understanding in his grammar, the opening sections of which happen to be bilingual, quoting and translating the rules of Sanskrit grammarians. For the rest, since it was usually possible to anticipate what the writer must say, for example in denning grammatical terms, and since after all the book itself gave an account of the inflectional system of the language, it remained only to arrive at the meaning of words, so far as it was not obvious from analogues in other modern Indo-Aryan languages; and (a more difficult task) to grasp the part played in the language by certain striking forms of expression which have no Indo-Aryan parallels.—To learn a modern language by methods appropriate to the interpretation of lost languages of the past is of course a procedure difficult to defend, when it would be so simple, and so much better, to learn it from the lips of the speakers in India. But the better course was not open to me, and I was not willing to postpone indefinitely an investigation which promised to be interesting from other points besides the linguistic.

The present paper brings the much despised Mahāyāna form of Buddhism fully home to the very cradle-land of Buddhism in India, and invests itwith unexpected importance in the history of Indian Buddhism.

No one has yet realized the vast extent to which Mahāyāna and Tāntrik Buddhist remains cover India; nor sufficiently realized the leading part played by the Mahāyāna in Indian Buddhism during its most popular period.

That so attractive and useful a historical manual as the Kitábu'l-Fakhrí should be represented, so far as is known, by only one complete manuscript, on which all the printed editions are based, is a fact so remarkable that Ahlwardt, who first edited the text in 1860, has thought it necessary to suggest an explanation. Good as this manuscript appears to be, it presents several lacunæ, and in particular some uncertainty prevails as to the name of the author and the proper title of the work. On these questions the Persian manuscript which forms the subject of this notice throws a certain amount of light.

The history of the sixth century in Northern India is extremely difficult. As the Gupta empire fell to pieces petty states arose, of which but scanty records are available in the few inscriptions so far discovered. A recent find of coins seems to throw fresh light on the period, and in particular to afford material for fixing dates more exactly than has been possible hitherto.

It was a pleasant surprise during the Christmas vacation of 1966 to receive a letter from a Mrs. C. T. Williams, who described herself as “a graduate student in oriental art history at Harvard University” working on Khotanese painting, and enclosed the four photographs which are now published here. They provide four previously unpublished Khotanese inscriptions, which, though difficult to read and providing little information, are of interest because of their occurrence on objets d'art. Three are written in the late cursive script and one (Kha. i C 0096) in the old square script.

Among the recent acquisitions of the India Office Library is a volume of the Tārīḫ Baghdād of the Ḫaṭīb containing biographies of men with the names of 'Umar, 'Uthmān, and 'Alī. The MS. is acephalous, the end is missing, and many leaves have been lost, so that an edition of the whole text is out of the question. Paper and writing point to the beginning of the seventh century of the Hiğrah. This volume of the extensive biographical dictionary of the Ḫaṭīb does not appear to exist in other European libraries, the greater portion of the work having been lost. Salmon published in 1904 the geographical introduction of the book with a French translation; in his introduction he gives an account of the known MSS. and a biography of the author. With regard to the MSS. enumerated by Salmon, it must be noted that Amar (JA., vol. xi, 237, 1908) has shown that the MSS. Bibl. Nat. 2130 and 2131 are not the original work of the Ḫaṭīb, but parts of an amplification of his work by Ibn an-Nağğār (d. 643 a.h.). The fact that No. 2131 is called the twenty-eighth volume, and contains biographies of men named 'Alī following later, according to the alphabetical arrangement of the Ḫaṭīb, than those contained in the India Office MS., seems to prove that the latter is a portion of the twenty-seventh volume.

It has often struck me how helpless European students are when they are in search of books published in India. These books are so cheap, and their demand in Europe is so limited, that it does not pay Indian publishers to have agents for their sale here. In addition to this, students have no means of knowing what works are published in India; and even if they knew their names, that is no criterion of the value of their contents. I therefore put down the following notes regarding books which I myself have found useful in studying Hindī, in the hope that they may be acceptable to my fellowstudents.