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.

Je suis très reconnaissant au Dr. M. A. Stein de m'avoir confié l'étude de la plupart des documents sanscrits qu'il a découverts au cours de sa seconde expédition en Asie Centrale, au prix de quels labeurs, et grâce à quelle ingéniosité prudente et hardie, il nous a permis, avec autant d'humour que de modestie, de le deviner.

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 They provide four previously unpublished Khotanese inscriptions, which, though difficult to read and providing little information, are of interest because of their occurrence on objets d'art.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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article focuses on the authorship of the Kül Tégin and Bilge Kağan inscriptions and manages to reveal the different layers of the text. Through a careful analysis of the Old Turkic inscriptions and the relative Chinese accounts concerning the Türk royal lineage after Bilge Kağan, it concludes that the text on the south side of the Kül Tégin Inscription and the north side of the Bilge Kağan Inscription were narrated by the younger son of Bilge Kağan, Teŋri Teg Teŋride Bolmış Türk Bilge Kağan, in Kaiyuan XXVIII (ca. 740). In that year his elder brother (Teŋri Teg Teŋri Yaratmış Türk Bilge Kağan) passed away, so the Chinese emperor sent envoys to ‘appoint’ him as the new Türk kağan. He took the opportunity of the visit of Chinese delegates led by Li Zhi to ask the Chinese craftsmen to inscribe his words onto his father's memorial. The same text was also inscribed onto the blank side of his uncle's memorial, while inserting a quotation of his father's words.

In a former number of this journal I published a specimen translation of one of the Rasā'il of Junayd, as an announcement of my intention to make that famous personage the subject of a monograph. It will be useful at this stage to print the text and translation of what is one of the most interesting of the little treatises preserved in the Istanbul manuscript, both because of its contents, and also for the reason that it is the only work of Junayd for which we have a second authority. It is unfortunately true that the Istanbul manuscript, as the copyist himself is at pains to admit. is derived from a very faulty archetype, and with such an author as Junayd the work of emendation is necessarily attended with countless pitfalls. The Cairo manuscript of the Kitāb Dawā' al-arwāḥ exhibits roughly ninety variants as compared with the Istanbul manuscript, in the space of rather less than 2½ folios. In by far the majority of places the Istanbul manuscript appears to be the more correct.

A Letter from a man called Ishkun-Dagan has been published by M. Thureau-Dangin in Revue d'Assyriologie, xxiii, pp. 23 ff. Another letter of this man has recently been presented to the Trustees of the British Museum by Dr. N. L. Corkill, formerly Civil Surgeon, Baghdad, who very kindly allowed me to study and copy it at Baghdad; it is now numbered 121205. The tablet was obtained in Nasiriyah, and though the statement of the fellaḥ to whom it once belonged that it was found at Sinkarah is of no value, it certainly came from a site in the Muntafik area, very possibly from illicit excavations which are known to have been conducted at Warka. The tablet was probably found at the same time and in the same place as the tablet now in the Louvre, so that they were found in the archive of the sender, not of the addressee, a curious circumstance for which many parallels could be cited. The writing is delicate, very accurate, and large. Owing to an accident when I was examining the tablet at Baghdad, after making my copy of the text which was then complete, the tablet was broken and some signs have now been injured in lines 21–4.

On a recent-excursion through part of Asia Minor, being accompanied by a friend who spoke Turkish and Armenian perfectly, I noted some information that he collected, first regarding the long famed silvery white-hair goat of Angora, and next about a goat resembling the shawl goat of Thibet, that exists throughout the country to which the first beautiful animal is peculiar. I was about to forward the said notes from Constantinople, with a box of specimens for the Society, when learning that the second species of goat alluded to abounded in other parts of Turkey, through or near which I should shortly travel, I put my memorandums aside in the hope of being able to extend them. I now beg to offer the result of the whole inquiry thus far, having for the convenience of illustration separated the details concerning each race of the animal under remark.

The MS. from which the text of the Nile Service is taken, is numbered Or. 4951, and is a recent acquisition of the British Museum. It consists of 69 paper leaves, measuring about 6£ ins. by 5 ins., with mostly 15 lines to a page. The quires, 7 in number, are of 10 leaves each (the last leaf being blank). The Syriac letters by which the quires are numbered are written in the middle of the lower margin, both on the last and the first page of each quire. Thus, on fol. 10b, the letter denotes the end of the first quire, and the same letter also stands on fol. 11a; the letters etc., are similarly written on foil. 20 b and 21 a, foil. 30b and 31a, etc. The only exception is the absence of the letter on fol. 61a. The style of writing, though smaller, approaches yery nearly to that of pi. xx (representing fol. 34 of Add. 14,664) in vol. iii of Wright's “Catalogue of the Syriac MSS. in the British Museum,” which has been assigned to the twelfth or thirteenth century. The letter “rlsh” is, with very few exceptions, written (with two dots instead of one), and the “daleth” is, as a rule, not distinguished by a dot below. There are no diacritic points below the letters, and points over the text (see the first facsimile, representing fol. 38b of the MS. chosen to exemplify some of the characteristics mentioned here)are mainly employed in the following cases: