The following songs are a portion of those collected by me last hot weather, when acting as Magistrate of Patna. They were written down for me in the heart of Bihār by Bābū Shiv Nandan Lāl Rāy, Deputy Magistrate, a gentleman born and bred in the neighbourhood of Ārā (Arrah), who takes a most lively and intelligent interest in his own beautiful native language. I have printed them exactly as they have been taken from the mouths of the reciters, a few obvious slips of the pen being alone corrected. I have allowed no theories of my own to interfere with the text obtained, and I have religiously abstained from consulting even competent native scholars as to probable or possible emendations. Natives in such cases are, as is well known, only too ready to invent readings which have never existed. They have no reverence whatever for the words or matter of songs in the vernacular, and feel themselves justified in making any alterations or additions on the spur of the moment, which may seem required by the metre, or more adapted to their present temperament.

The low ebb of sinological studies in this country is all too clearly indicated by the fact that the present text is actually the first to be published out of the enormous mass of Chinese manuscripts brought home by Sir Aurel Stein tive years ago. It is not altogether unbefitting, however, that the place of honour should be accorded to a brochure giving some account of the Tunhuang district, and including a description of the famous grottos where the whole collection of manuscripts was found. The Tun Huang Lu is indeed tantalizingly brief, consisting as it does of only 893 characters all told. But within that small compass it touches on many interesting points, the proper discussion of which would require more space than can be given to them here; and one passage, at least, throws a flood of light 011 a vexed question of topography which has never yet been solved. It is worth reading, in any case, as a short summary of what was known about this remote but highly important region towards the close of the T'ang dynasty. My reasons for assigning the text to this period are duly set forth in the accompanying notes. The handwriting is bold, and for the most part clear enough. A few characters, however, are to be found which the penman has allowed to lapse into “grassiness”—the especial bane of every foreign student. These I have deciphered to the best of my ability, but in the lack of any assistance from native or other experts I cannot feel quite certain of the correctness of my readings. As regards the style of the document, its terseness frequently verges on obscurity, and the punctuation (omitted as in nearly all Chinese MSS.) has been by no means easy to supply in certain passages.

A field of study which has hitherto been neglected in Sri Lanka is that connected with the technical aspects of arts and crafts. There is a large volume of information, mainly confined to ola manuscripts, having as their subject matter architecture, sculpture, painting, and other minor arts and crafts. In the Indian sub-continent such works dealing with the techniques of art and architecture have been studied exhaustively wherever possible and the results published in printed form. Unfortunately for us, scholars in Sri Lanka have rarely been inclined to pursue studies connected with this aspect, with the result that all relevant data have remained confined within the circles of artisans and craftsmen practising their traditional systems.

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.

Exactly two years ago it was my good fortune to lay before this Society my discovery of the system on which the hymns of the Rig-Veda were arranged,—a discovery of the highest interest to the student of the Vedas, not only by throwing unexpected light on ancient philosophical theology; but by giving back to the world the Liturgy of the ancient Brahmans,—all knowledge of the true character of which had been lost, even in India itself, for about 3000 years. Again I appear before you in the character of Veda-Vyasa, in order to lay before you the system on which the hymns of the Adi Granth are arranged.

The Book of Zambasta is not without importance in the history of Buddhist studies. We know that Khotan was a major centre of Mahāyāna studies when Fa-hsien visited it about a.d. 400 on his way to India, and it had expanded in this direction when Hsüan-tsang in the 7th century spent several months in Khotan on his way back from India to China. Khotan was, if not the cradle, at any rate the stronghold of the Mahāyānist movement. We know of its importance in the transmission of Buddhist teaching to the East. Even the well-known term Zen represents Sanskrit dhyāna “meditation” only through the intermediacy of a Prakrit form such as the Khotanese loan-word jāna. In the Chinese Tripiṭaka we have translations made by Khotanese missionaries such as Devaprajña, Śikṣānanda, and Śīladharma. In the 5th century a certain marquis of An iang hou journeyed to Khotan in his youth to study the Dhyāna. A Chinese catalogue finished in a.d. 515 tells how eight Chinese monks came to Khotan and there heard the stories that later they made into the well-known collection “The Sūtra of the Wise man and the Fool”. The famous monk Jinagupta, who taught the Turks about Buddhist doctrines in the 6th century, had studied in Khotan for many years.

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.

In his interesting paper on “The Nāgarakretāgama List of Countries on the Indo-Chinese Mainland,” Colonel Gerini objects, reasonably enough, to the claim set up by the Javanese author of the Nāgara Krĕtāgama that the states of Kĕdah, Kĕlantan, Trĕngganu, and Pahang in the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore at the south of it were dependencies of the Javanese empire of Majapahit. This alleged Javanese supremacy over the Peninsula cannot, in view of the known facts of Malay history, have been much more than a mere pretension, never substantiated by any real effective occupation. The claim was no doubt made under the influence of the stirring events which in or about the year 1377 a.d. culminated in a great, though transient, expansion of the Javanese sway. Palembang, Jambi, Pasei, and Samudra (in Sumatra), Ujong Tanah (the “Land's End” of the Malay Peninsula, now known as Johor), Bangka, Bĕlitung, Riau, Lingga, Bentan, and a number of other small islands in this region, as well as certain points on the coast of Borneo and other places to the eastward, are in the Pasei Chronicle recorded as having been conquered by Majapahit at this period or as being tributary to it about this time.

In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October, 1894, I showed that the Kelishin inscription (No. lvi) was a bilingual, the Assyrian transcript of it having been discovered by M. de Morgan, and I was thereby enabled to confirm some of my interpretations of Vannic words and grammatical forms and to correct others. My conclusion was disputed by Drs. Belck, Lehmann, and Scheil, but the question has now been decided in my favour. Dr. Leopold Messerschmidt, together with Dr. Belck, has made a careful examination of a cast of M. de Morgan's squeeze in the light of the fresh materials obtained by Drs. Belck and Lehmann in their scientific mission to Armenia, and the result is to prove that the Vannic and Assyrian texts are close representatives one of the other. The revised texts have been published by Drs. Belck and Messerschmidt in Anatole I (1904), and Dr. Lehmann has written upon them in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, lvi, 4 (1904), pp. 825–829.

Some three years ago, I published a note on the above mentioned subject. Since then, I have been able to collect such additional material as to afford conclusive proof of what at first could only be advanced as a hypothesis. In laying my conclusions before the readers of this Journal, I may be excused for first summarizing the contents of my previous paper, which appeared in a publication and in a language accessible only to a limited number of students.

The Canaanite poem of Aliyan Ba'al and Mot, discovered at Ras Shamra (Ugarit), is now familiar to most students of ancient Semitic literature. As I have repeatedly pointed out, it is the libretto of a seasonal pantomime representing the victory of Rain over Drought. By comparison with the Arabic terms ba'l and mawulh, the names of the two antagonists may be rendered “Sir Rain” and “Sir Drought”.