Various associations have long existed in China, of which secrecy was at an early period the prominent feature, since the jealousy of the imperial government declares the association of even five persons to be illegal, and punishes the crime of belonging to these associations with death. Among these fraternities may be enumerated—1st, the Great Ascending Society; 2nd, the Society of Glory and Splendour; 3rd, the Union of the Three Great Towers, viz., Heaven, Earth, and Man; 4th, the White Jackets; 5th, the Red Beards; 6th, the Short Swords; 7th, the White Water-Lily; 8th, the Sea and Land Society; 9th, the Righteous Rising Society, &c. The third of these associations, which, from all that can be gathered, assimilate in their origin, is the one that prevails in Canton, and obtains almost exclusively in the Straits of Malacca, and the vast islands of the Indian Archipelago; and which will principally form the subject of this notice. It is commonly known under the terms of Tien-ti-huih, or San-ho-huih, and is sometimes divided into two branches—the Canton and Fokien, to which provinces most of the Chinese emigrants belong. Those from Canton, are, I believe, by far the most numerous. Other societies or Kongsis exist, with the benevolent object of raising funds for the assistance and support of those among their number in distress; but they are almost all subject, more or less, to some of the objections that exist against the Tien-ti-huih.

Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṣṭrī is the name of a particular script used in Afghanistan, the Punjab, and portions of Central Asia from the fourth or fifth centuries before Christ to the third or fourth centuries of the Christian era. In the third or fourth centuries a.d. it gradually went out of use, the place being taken by one or more forms of the mediaeval Brāhmī. In the eighteenth century the earlier generation of epigraphists and archæologists used to call this script “Bactrian”, “Indo-Bactrian”, “Bactro-Pali”, “Ariano-Pali”, etc. Then it was identified with the Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṭṭhī lipi, on the evidence of the Fa-wan-shu-lin. The Chinese work describes the “ass-lip” (Kham-oṣṭha in Sanskrit) script, invented by one Kharoṣṭha, in which the writing ran from the right to left. This identification, proposed by George Bühler, has since met with general acceptance.

Having had the advantage of journeying through the Deltas, and for nearly 400 miles up the two famous rivers of Asia and Africa (the Indus and the Nile), I venture to record briefly my general impressions on these two grand features of nature.

The Nile runs in a direction directly contrary to that of the Indus, and has its source in the most torrid regions of the globe, whilst the Asiatic stream rises in perpetual snow. The climates, therefore, are directly reversed; yet, passing through the same degrees of latitude, there are in some portions of the countries penetrated by the two rivers very curious coincidences in. productions and climate, to which we will refer hereafter.

The Svayambhūpurāṇa [Paris, dev. 78] is probably a literary recast of the Svayambhūpurāṇa named by copyists Vṛhat˚ and Mahāsvayambhūpurāṇa, and existing in many copies in the Paris, Cambridge, and London (A. S.) Libraries, and also in India. The topics of this work are identical, but the language is, to some extent, different, and the treatment of the matter fairly independent. The same can be said, so far as I am acquainted with the facts, about the Madhyama recension of the S. P. [London A. S. Library and Cambridge]. The number of chapters differs in the S. P. [Paris, dev. 78], and other redactions (being respectively 12, 20, and 8); prose and verse of very varied rhythm occur intermingled throughout the book, whilst, on the contrary, the Vṛhat˚ and the Mahāsvayambhūpurāṇa are both, from beginning to end, written in classic çlokas. The Mahā˚, as noticed in Bendall's Buddhist MSS. Catalogue, is only a second recension of the Vṛhat˚: all the verses of the Mahā˚, together with the prologue itself, are faithfully reproduced in the Vṛhat˚ edition, the distinctive mark of the two redactions being the separation between the first and the second chapters.

Omitting the various other passages in the Mahābhārata which might be cited to support our thesis, and viewing synthetically the results of our study so far, we find that, to use Hopkins's phrase, “the more important building operations” of the epic are of pronouncedly Persian character. In the excavations of Pāṭaliputra we find that the palaces of Chandragupta were of pronouncedly Persian character, as well. The Mahābhārata ascribes its buildings to supernatural agency. The Chinese pilgrims tell us that the Mauryan halls were built by genii. The general attributes, as well as the very name, of the agent, Asura Maya, are found to be directly reminiscent of Ahura Mazda. It was by Ahura Mazda's grace the Achæmenian monarchs reared the palaces of Persepolis, which served as models for the Mauryan king. The epic tells us Maya wrought his works by magic. Pāṭaliputra is “wrought by magic” in the Kathāsaritsāgara. Moreover, the description which the Asura Maya gives us of the palaces he built agrees most strikingly with the account of Chandragupta's palaces recorded by Megasthenes. Both are inferentially confirmed by the stratigraphical evidences in the soil, and by the general topography of the site, at Pāṭaliputra.

In reviewing the discoveries that have been made by the Archæological Department in India during the year 1908–9, I propose to start with one of unique historical interest—the only lithic record that has yet been found in which reference is made to the Indo-Greek rulers of the Panjab.

A Student of Indian History is often surprised to find that what he has been accustomed to look upon from boyhood as sheet anchors of Indian Chronology prove, on closer scrutiny, to be very far from being so. The year 322–321 B.C. for the accession of Candragupta Mauryya is one of such dates.

The language specimen here reproduced was brought in to me while in the Darjeeling neighbourhood in 1931, having been taken down in the recently revived Limbu alphabet by an educated Limbu, by name Iman Singha Chemjong, direct from the dictation of the speaker himself. Though pressure of work on other languages of the “pronominalized” group prevented my seeing the actual speaker, who Was off in another part of the hills, there is no difficulty in placing the dialect with its nearest relatives in the Linguistic Survey. It is, without doubt, a form of Rungchhēnbūng, and a near relative of Wāling. To the former the Linguistic Survey was able to devote, through lack of material, only some two pages, to the latter, for the same reason about a page and a half, no specimen being available in either case. I, therefore, give what follows as a small supplement to our knowledge of this little-known form of speech.

As the Swat valley, and neighbourhood, which constitute the principal portion of the old province of Udyāna, have hitherto been inaccessible for archæological research, the following rough notes (made during the little time at my disposal as Chief Political Officer with the Chitral Relief Force, and lately as Political Officer for Dir and Swat) may induce others better qualified to devote some attention to this interesting neighbourhood. They are principally connected with the travels of the Chinese pilgrim Huan Tsiang, as given in Beal's “Buddhist Records of the Western World.”

The short tenth century account of the Nile in the Delta, which is published here for the first time, is an extract from a unique Arabic MS. on geography preserved at the British Museum (23379 Add.).

My subject is the relation between Hindu religion and morality. After some comments on this relation in traditional Indian society, I describe changes in religious thought and practice in a village which has become part of the industrial city of Bangalore; and I use this local example to support general conclusions about the development of values of autonomy in Indian industrial society.

The following translations are from the texts in my Assyrian Medical Texts for sick men suffering from diseases brought about by the “hand of a ghost”.

When we consider the progress made by comparative Indo-European philology, we can only wonder that even after the discovery of Assyrian, which undoubtedly represents the Sanskrit of the Semitic languages, no attempt has been made to form a comparative Semitic grammar. Assyrian has hitherto been regarded as at most useful for the explanation of certain questions of Hebrew lexicography; as for the morphology of the Semitic tongues, scholars have been content with simply stating the analogies which exist between Assyrian and the allied languages. The cause of this lies mainly in the fact that Assyrian is regarded as a corrupt branch of the Semitic family of speech; and much that is peculiar in its structure, the preservation of which really implies the highest antiquity, is treated as so many new formations, so that the possibility of properly utilizing Assyrian grammatical forms for the explanation of Semitic grammar is at the outset taken away. Hence, as long as such thoroughly perverse views are not given up, a scientific philology of the Semitic languages can never take its place by the side of that of the Indo-European languages.

In the Jewish Quarterly Review for April, 1905, Dr. Hirschfeld published a poem discovered by him in the Cambridge Genizah Collection, attributed to Samau’al, and in Hebrew characters. This Samau’al is naturally identified by him with the Jewish hero of Taimā, whose name is commemorated in an Arabic proverb, and to whom certain poems preserved in the Aṣma‘iyyāt and the Ḥamāsah are ascribed. An account of him was given by Nöldeke in his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Poesie der alten Araber, 1864, pp. 57–64. Verses would naturally be ascribed to such a person, as it is the habit of the Arabs to attribute at least a few to almost every famous man; thus they can recite to us the ode in which Adam bewailed Abel. Samau’al being a person on the confines of myth and history, the supposition that any verses ascribed to him were really by him is extremely hazardous.

In 1824 the governor of the important southern Siamese city of Nakhon Sri Thammarat, and of the large region which fell under Nakhon's jurisdiction, was chao phraya Nakhon (Noi). He ruled the city from 1811–39 and was a man of extraordinary character, a vigorous and determined ruler who was reputed to be the son of a former king of Siam, Taksin. This attribution of royal birth was current in his own lifetime, and was recorded by Henry Burney in 1826, and by Lieutenant James Low a little later (Munro-Hay, in press). At that time the British, at war with Burma, Siam's western neighbour, were concerned by developments relating to the Rangoon expedition, and it was determined to send an envoy from the Government of India on a mission to the Siamese governor to discuss outstanding problems and possible co-operation.

Although Arnold J. Toynbee's reputation as a historian does not depend on his Turkic studies, yet they are an integral part of his work as a whole. Early in his career he devoted three books to the subject; and throughout A Study of History —the definitive statement of his historical philosophy—Toynbee gives considerable thought to the significance of the Turks in the Near and Middle East, according to his more general interpretation of history.