Since writing the article in the October number of the Journal for 1910 (pp. 1283 ff.), I have been further examining some of the manuscript treasures which Dr. Stein succeeded in recovering from the immured Temple Library near Tun-huang. In that article I gave extracts from two “bilingual” texts which I discovered among those treasures, and which promised to furnish us with the key to the southern of the two unknown languages of Eastern Turkestan. In the present article I propose to report another discovery, which seems to throw light on some phonetic peculiarities of that language.

THE excavations at Bhīṭā, near Allahabad, which I am about to describe, signalize a new departure in Indian Archaeology; for they mark the first occasion on which a serious effort has been made to explore the remains of an ancient Indian town, and the results attained from hem consequently deserve a somewhat more detailed description than would otherwise be given here. The site at Bhīṭā is far from being an extensive one, and the old town, of which even the name is uncertain, could never have been of any great importance, except perhaps from a military standpoint; yet in spite of this, and in spite, too, of the fact that the digging was confined to a very small part of it, the discoveries that have been made are full of archaeological interest, and serve to indicate very clearly what a rich harvest of finds may be expected when the sites of the great cities like Taxila, Pataliputra, and Vidiśā come to be systematically and thoroughly investigated, as I sincerely hope they will be in the course of the next decade. I myself had hoped to start on the exploration of the last-named city during the past winter, but owing to unforeseen difficulties raised by the Gwalior Darbar the project had to be abandoned, and at the last moment I was reluctantly compelled to fall back on the much inferior site at Bhīṭā, where it was manifest from the outset that, whatever other discoveries might be brought to light, little or nothing of a highly artistic order or of great historical value need be looked for.

The Synaxaria, as also the Menologia, are not among the oldest of hagiographical texts, and consequently their use in public worship in Oriental churches is relatively modern. In the case of the Coptic—Alexandrine Church with which I am now dealing, at the date when its I Synaxarium was composed, Arabic had for long past; taken the place of Coptic as the living language; indeed, in my view, its compilation was an outcome of that religious and literary movement which, from the thirteenth century onwards, gavefresh life and improved order to the Church of Alexandria. The question of the immediate sources of this work—one not as yet ripe for treatment— cannot be dealt with in this place; it may, however, be pointed out that the Synaxarium, as the product of Arabic speaking people, could be easilyput together from all the hagiographical works in use throughout Eastern Christendom by speakers of that tongue. Hagiographical literature is to a great extent a monastic product, and its Greek branch had for its main centre Palestine, and the convents of St. Sabas and of Sinai—witness the names of Cyril of Skythopolis, of John Moschos, of Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, etc.

Though large numbers of the temple-records of Tel-loh have been published, and notwithstanding that they are mainly texts of but little importance, linguistic and minor historical details, to say nothing of the questions involved in Babylonian manners, customs, and religious beliefs, require that as many of these seemingly worthless records of the people who used the wedge-formed characters of the Sumerians should be published as is possible. On this account I need not crave the indulgence of the reader for issuing here these minor texts from the little Southern Babylonian state of Lagas. Their contents will be their own justification for claiming the attention of the student, as they have claimed mine.

The Kaliyuga era is a Hindū reckoning beginning at mean sunrise, 6.0 a.m., Laṇkā or Ujjain time, on Friday, 18 February, b.c. 3102. Its 5013th year will have begun just before the time when these pages come into the hands of readers of this Journal.

IT is only with the greatest diffidence that I offer the following notes on the document, in a hitherto unknown script, of which a facsimile is appended in the accompanying plate. My remarks may appear premature, and in any case the results obtained are very slight, but it was thought advisable to publish them as a preliminary notice, in the hope that some more competent scholar might be able to help in the decipherment.

Un folio (papier), slanting brāhmī, 367 X 80 mm. Même format, même écriture que les autres fragments Ch. vii, 001. Numéro d'ordre, au verso, peu lisible.

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.

The short and much damaged edict of Aśōka at Sāņchi is not without interest, because it supplements and explains the still more fragmentary Allahabad edict and the mutilated fourth line of the Sarnath edict. The beginning of the Sanchi edict is lost, and the legible words of the first and second of the preserved lines do not yield a complete sentence. The end of the second line and the beginning of the third have not yet been deciphered completely.

Le fascicule du mois de Janvier 1911 du JRAS. contient un memoire de M. A. Cowley intitule “Another Unknown Language from Eastern Turkestan”. dont il parait impossible de dire qu'il n'est pas “sensationnel”. nous apporte en effet une ecriture inconnue d'origine arameenne, une langue mysterieuse, des documents d'un type precieux et rare puisqu'il s'agit de lettres et non de textes publics religieux ou civils; il nous fournit enfin des textes dont il est possible de determiner l'age de facon approximative, dont la haute antiquite est a peu pres certaine et qui proviennent du limes chinois lui-meme, d'un point situe, il est vrai a l'ouest de Touenhouang mais a l'extreme limite de ce que Ton peut appeler le Turkestan. Pour tous ceux qui s'interessent a l'histoire de l'Asie, a la resurrection des langues, des peuples, et des civilisations qui ont vecu entre la Chine, la Perse, et l'lnde, que d'attraits nouveaux et de problemes irritants!

It is generally supposed that the lingual ḷa is a very rare letter in the inscriptions north of the Narmadā before the time of the Guptas. From the Sānchi inscriptions BÜuhler quotes one instance only: Vāḷīvahanikāyā in B; 344 (EI., ii, 378, No. 199): the ḷī is reproduced in Bühler'sIndische Palaeographie, table ii, 41, xviii: the form of the letter is practically the same as that appearing in the Allahabad Praśasti. The second instance is furnished by the word Āḷikāyāṁ in the inscription B, 43 (JBBRAS., xx, 269 f.), the find-place of which is unknown, but which must come from Northern India: there is no reproduction of this inscription. A third la is found in, kālavāḷasa in the archaic Mathurā inscription B, 94 (EI., i, 396, No. 33). According to the reproduction of this inscription in the Ep. Ind. there seems to be a great difference between the Sānchi and the Mathurā signs. But this is actually not the case. Two beautiful impressions before me clearly show that the sign in the plate has been “corrected”. In reality the long line slanting upwards, which in the reproduction forms the tail of the ḷa, is not connected with it, but is the i-stroke of the ti of the mutilated word prati[ṣṭhāpito] in the next line. The whole difference of the two signs thus consists in the greater cursiveness of the Sānchi sign.

Some time after the descriptions of the coins collected by Mr. G. P. Tate were published in the Journal for 1904 and 1905 Sir Henry McMahon brought home the collections which he had made during the time he was the Boundary Commissioner in Seistan, but unfortunately there has been much delay in giving a description of them.

In an article entitled “Vyuthena 256”, published in the Journal Asiatique, 1911, part 1, pp. 119–26, M. Sylvain Lévi has reopened the subject of that record of Aśōka which we have, in various recensions, at Sahasrām, Rūpnāth, and Bairāt in Northern India, and at the Brahmagiri hill, Siddāpura, and the Jaṭṭiṅga-Rāmēśvara hill in Mysore. He has taken us another step towards the right understanding of the record, by showing that the words misā and amisā, which stand in one of the opening clauses, cannot mean mṛishā, ‘in vain, wrongly’, and amṛishā, ‘not in vain, not wrongly’, and do not represent the ablatives of misha, ‘false appearance, fraud, deceit’, and its converse amisha, but stand for missā and amissā, Pāli forms of the Sanskṛit nominatives plural miśrāḥ, ‘mixed’, and amiśrāḥ, ‘not mixed’. But we cannot agree with him in taking the word dēva in the same clause as denoting ‘kings’: in a record of Aśōka dēva can only mean ‘a god’. Nor can we agree with him in his interpretation of the general purport of the record.