The author of the Tohfat-al-Giráni states, that “the country of Sindh takes its name from Sind, the brother of Hind, the son of Noah. It is reckoned the forty-third of the sixty-one countries of the universe. The line of the second climate passes, from the north, directly through its centre; and although Sindh is situated in the five first climates, it nevertheless chiefly appertains to the second, and, consequently, lies in the region of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.” It would be difficult to discover where the author quoted has found these grandsons of the patriarch; indeed, as is usual in such genealogies, they are probably altogether imaginary. The Hindú writings may, perhaps, afford some more satisfactory explanation of the name; but I have not been so fortunate as to meet with it. As far as I can learn from such sources, this country was called Sindhúdès, or “the country of the ocean,” alluding doubtless to the river Indus, which receives that dignified appellation in their sacred writings. The same authorities also state Sindh to have been governed by a Xhuthi, named Jayadrat'ha, who was slain in the civil wars of the Pandús; and it has, in consequence, sometimes received the name of Jayadrat'hadès, after that chieftain.

No one can fully appreciate the great value of this work to all students of ethnology until they realize the historical importance of an accurate classification of the characteristic differences which divide the social strata known as the castes living in a country occupying the geographical position of Bengal. Bengal is practically the country of the Deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, and of the Western rivers, which rise in the Vindhyan range, called by Hindu geographers the Sukti mountains, and flow down thence to the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. It has always been one of the great highways by which Southern tribes moved northward and Northern tribes southward, and was, owing to its geographical advantages and its fertile soil, civilized and settled before the advent of the Aryan conquerors to North-western India. It is for this reason that we find in Bengal the undisturbed remains and the still living and almost unchanged representatives of some of the principal races who are described by the poets of the Rigveda under the general name of Dasyus, a name which, as Zimmer shows, merely means the people of the country or “desh.” It was from the union of the people of Bengal called the Maghadas or Mughs with the Northern Kushikas or sons of Kush the tortoise that the first great Indian Empire arose, which was formed by the two races ruled by the king called in the Mahābhārata Jarasandha.

In the course of my research into the character, role and influence of the British officials in Tibet during the 1904–47 period, it became apparent that previous scholarship had failed fully to confront an issue which would explain the clear decline in Anglo-Tibetan relations during the latter half of the 1920s. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the British officer then in immediate charge of Anglo-Tibetan relations attempted to promote a coup d'état in Tibet, in order to transfer secular power from the Dalai Lama and his court to Tsarong Shape, the forward-thinking Commander-in-Chief of the Tibetan Army. This possibility has been rejected by the leading European historians of the period, but their conclusions are, I will argue, in need of reassessment.

Exact investigation, assisted by some recent fortunate discoveries, has proved that the reputed identifications of many of the ancient sites famous in early Indian history are beyond doubt erroneous. Almost every such identification requires to be submitted to searching criticism before it can be accepted as correct. If any ancient site could be regarded as satisfactorily identified, that of the city of Kauśāmbī might apparently be so regarded. Nevertheless, the current belief is mistaken.

When at Lhasa in 1904 I found, in addition to the two earliest historical Tibetan documents yet known (as notified inthis Journal), a very long inscription of the Chinese emperor Chia-ch'ing, of 1808 a.d., which is of considerable historical interest and importance. It gives an official account of the origin of the Grand Lamaship and of the theory of succession to the same by divine reincarnations; it also prescribes the “Ordeal of the Urn” for the selection of the candidate, one of the steps taken by China to secure political control over the succession to the pontifical throne; and it records the building of the Potala palace at Lhasa as one of “the three Potalas”, and of a fourth “Potala”-academy erected by a Chinese emperor at Jehol, to the north-west of Peking.

[Since the publication in this Journal of Paṇḍit Bhagvānlāl's article on the Western Kshatrapas, a period of no less than four years has elapsed. The delay in issuing this, the final portion of his notes, is due to the fact that a study of these notes convinced me of the impossibility of publishing them in anything like their original form; and my task was postponed, until Dr. Bühler most generously undertook to revise the most important part of the Paṇḍit's work, viz. that which deals with the inscriptions engraved on the Lion Capital. Dr. Bühler's results, which are published in another article in the present number, have enabled me to deal with the rest of the work. While I have been obliged to omit some portions and to correct others, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to give a concise and connected exposition of the Paṇḍit's own views.

Annette Susannah Beveridge (1842–1929) was one of the outstanding oriental scholars of the early twentieth century. The work which established her reputation is her translation of the Bābur-nāma, the autobiographical memoir of the first Mughal emperor, published in 1922 by the Royal Asiatic Society. It was the first English translation from the Chaghatai Turki in which Babur wrote his famous account. A monumental work of scholarship, it is all the more remarkable for having been completed at a time when Chaghatai language studies were in their infancy. The translation is characterized by utter reliability and precision, exhaustive footnotes and numerous appendices: Western and Asian scholars continue to consult it as the standard translation of this classic Timurid text. Yet, despite the stature of her work, little is known about Beveridge herself, an unusual figure in the British orientalist landscape if only because she was a woman who raised four children and learned oriental languages when she was past the age of 50.

Mr. Golénischeff has just published in the Transactions of the Russian Imperial Society of Oriental Archæology (vol. xiii) a new Vannic inscription of considerable interest and importance. As my memoir on the Vannic Inscriptions is not likely to be continued after the publication of the rich materials collected by Drs. Belck and Lehmann during their exploration of Armenia and Kurdistan, I will deal with this inscription separately, and provisionally number it LXXXVI in continuation of my former notation. The stone on which the inscription is engraved was found in the church of St. Gregory, four versts east of the monastery of Eshmiadzin, and is 2·70 metres high, 63 cent, broad, and 36 cent, thick. It will be seen that it is a record of Ruśas, the son of Argistis, whose existence, first asserted by Dr. Belck, but doubted by myself (J.R.A.S., Oct., 1894, pp. 705, 706), is thus certified.

Mr. J. P. Rawlins, late of the Panjāb Police, who is well known to Indian numismatists as a successful collector of rare coins, some time ago sent me for publication a batch of curious copper coins which he obtained while serving in the Hoshyārpur District. These coins all come from a very remarkable locality, which has been explored by Mr. Rawlins, but seems to be unknown to other archæologists. It is described as the Plateau of Manaswāl, situated on the outer range of the Siwālik Hills, at an elevation of about two thousand feet, in the Hoshyārpur District. This plateau is extensive, being about ten miles in length and six in breadth. The principal village is Manaswāl, distant about thirty miles in a south-easterly direction from Hoshyārpur, between that town and Rūpar in the Ambāla (Umballa) District. Other villages, or hamlets, enumerated by Mr. Rawlins are Biniwāl, Hanand, Daleywāl, Kharali, and Bhawānipur. The whole region is full of ancient sites, marked by mounds, and all the villages named are included in the area containing the remains of ancient settlements, which may have formed one great city.

For many years the official folk-lore of British India has included a story that Lord William Bentinck once contemplated the demolition of the Taj Mahal in order to sell its marble. The point of the story has varied with the mental climate of the time: at first it was an illustration of Bentinck's supposed meanness; the arch “clipper” would even lay hands on the Taj in order to make money. Later it became evidence of the supposed vandalism of the British in early nineteenth-century India; even Bentinck, the otherwise praiseworthy economical reformer, saw nothing in the Taj worthy of preservation. For many years, after the circumstances of its origin and its early expressions had been forgotten, the story lived on in the realm of verbal folk-lore, but more recently it has been revived in print and its truth largely taken for granted. The story, if true, would be a serious reflection on Bentinck according to the standards of any civilized age, and it is therefore worth asking with some particularity upon what basis of fact it rests.

In the sixth, century a.d. Chinese and Persian merchants used to meet regularly in Ceylon for the exchange of their products: this is clear from Cosmas Indicopleustes, xi, 336, and Procopius, Persian Wars, i, 20, 9–13. In addition to this the existence of direct sea-commerce between the Sassanid Empire and China has often been asserted as an established fact, e.g. by J. T. Reinaud, Relations des voyages faits far les Arabes, etc. (Paris, 1845), p. xxxv; H. Yule, Marco Polo (London, 1903), p. 83; L. Caetani, Annali dell'Islam (Milan, 1905–1926), ii, 2, 12 A.H., sect. 133, note 1; iii, 16 A.H., sect. 328; E. H. Warmington, The commerce between the Roman Empire and India (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 138, 358, note 146; and others. But this assertion rests on slender evidence and requires discussion. I shall endeavour to set down all the passages which might be adduced and to assess the value of each one.

At the meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society, on the 21st Nov., 1864, I undertook the task of establishing the identity of the Xandrames of Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius, the undesignated king of the Gangetic provinces of other Classic Authors—with the potentate whose name appears on a very extensive series of local mintages under the bilingual Bactrian and Indo-Pali form of Kraṇanda.

In examining the development of colonial capitalism in India historians have increasingly recognized the importance of specific cultural contexts in determining the character of the emergent industrial sector. In particular, the impact of pre-capitalist mores on the recruitment, organization and supervision of industrial workers has been an important concern. In the Calcutta jute industry, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty has concluded that the authority of factory sardars was derived largely from a pre-capitalist culture with “a strong emphasis on religion, community, kinship, language, and other similar loyalties”. Similarly, Ranajit Das Gupta's exploration of the industrial labour market in north eastern India has revealed that “indebtedness, primordial loyalties and relations of personal dependency were extensively used to keep labour under control”. Studies of trade union development have also acknowledged the enduring importance of the cultural milieu carried by workers to the mills, mines and plantations of colonial India.