The text published by Lutz in PBS. i, 2, No. 129, is partially restored by K. 9830 + 11768, published in Gray, The Šamaš Religious Texts, pl. iii. This latter tablet is of great interest as belonging to the series bît rimki (House of Washing). The object of the prayer is to free the suppliant from witchcraft (cf. II. 8 ff.), and the principal act of the ceremony appears to be washing with water (cf. II. 5, 17, and 19) of purification. The prayer has some affinities with maḳlû and šurpu texts and is followed, after a short ritual, by a Sumerian prayer apparently identical with V R. 50, 1 ff. Hence, and for other reasons, it is not improbable that V R. 50–1 contains the text of the ensuing portion of bîtrimki. It is worthy of notice that the catchline of V R. 50–1 is the first line of šurpu, Tablet IX. The Sumerian prayer above referred to is also quoted, along with other bît rimki prayers, in the ritual published by Myhrman, PBS. i, 1, No. 15.

This “Sanad” had been issued in favour of Mahārājā Bijaysingh of Mārwār by the Mughal Emperor Shāh 'Ālam II of Delhi on the 9th Jumāda-ul-ākhir of the 17th year of his reign.

Emperor Shāh 'Ālam II, whose original name was 'Ālīgauhar, was son of Emperor 'Ālamgīr II.

The original version of the Assassin biography of al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ṣabbāḥ, called sar-gudhasht-i sayyidnā, is not extant. All we possess are two recensions of it, if such a term is apposite, in the notes taken on the work by the two seventh/thirteenth century historians, ‘Aṭā-Malik al-Juwaynī (work completed 658/1260) and the Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍdl Allāh (work completed 710/1310–11). For unless we may suppose that al-Juwaynī, who discovered the book in the library of the Assassin headquarters at Alamūt, afterwards condensed the notes that he first took, and that the Rashīd later incorporated these first longer notes in his history, we can only conclude that the Rashīd consulted the original work afresh, since his version is in fact very much fuller than al-Juwaynī's. Which the Rashīd did it is impossible to say. There is one fact, however, that points to the first course as the likelier, namely that in introducing their, extracts both use almost the same words (which cannot have appeared in the original work). Moreover, the copy used by al-Juwaynī was burnt after perusal with the other pernicious writings of the heretics. So the second course would involve the (improbable) existence of another copy.

The following translations are from the texts in my Assyrian Medical Textsfor sick men suffering from ear-trouble.

No. 80. AM. 34, 4 (K. 2422) + 37, 2 (K. 7096 + 9059 + 11916 + 16434) + 35, 4 (K. 10787) + 4, 7 (81–7–27, 61, already translated as a fragment, No. 14, PRSM. 1924, 15); AM. 33, 1, and 34, 1 (K. 3215 + 3666 + 8109 + 10453) + 36, 1 (K. 3696 + 7221 + 10767 + 11788) + 12, 2 (K. 10019) + 34, 5 (S. 379); AM. 97, 6 (K. 3486); AM. 38, 4 (K. 6661) + 37, 10 (K. 10498) + 38, 1 (K. 13492). From an examination of these four pieces of tablets it seems reasonably certain that they form parts of the same original whole. At the same time it should be observed that AM. 37, 2, rev., has three air holes in the body of the text, and that these occur in the others only in the vertical lines whch divide the columns. Three of the above are in KMI. 18, K. 6661, K. 10498, and 19, S. 379.

The Kurdish language resembles the Persian in that it belongs to the Western Iranian group, but is distinguished from it by striking differences of sound, form, vocabulary, and syntax. Before the year 1919 Kurdish was not ordinarily written: only poetry had been to any extent committed to writing, although a newspaper in the Bohtan dialect is recorded to have been published in Cairo and England between 1892 and 1902, and there was a certain amount of journalistic activity in Constantinople about 1912, following the Turkish revolution.

A Little to the north of Latakia on the Phœnician coast important discoveries have been made by French excavators. Bronze Age necropolises, now known as Minet el-Baida, and dating from about 1700 to 1200 B.C., have been found, and on an adjoining site, Has Shamra, the remains of a palace have been uncovered, the most flourishing age of which would seem to have been the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. In the ruins of the palace an armoury, or, rather, workshop, filled with bronze weapons and implementshas been brought to light, as well as a library. The latter was not only once filled with inscribed papyri, but fortunately also with clay tablets which have survived to our time. At least five different languages are represented by the cuneiform texts of which the clay tablets were a necessary accompaniment. One of these was the official Babylonian of the Tel el-Amarna period. Another was Sumerian, a third probably Mitannian, while a fourth provesto be Canaanite, that is to say, Early Phoenician or Hebrew, written in avery simplified form of cuneiform script which has been reduced into an alphabet of twenty-eight letters. The words, moreover, are divided one from the other.

The connection of Naṣīru'd-dīn Ṭūsī with the Ismailites is a well-known fact, familiar to every student of Persian literature. Even a beginner cannot pass without paying attention to his important treatise on ethics, the Akhlāq-i-Nāṣirī. This latter work was composed for and dedicated to the enlightened Ismailite governor (ra'īs) of the province of Quhistān, Nāṣiru'd-dīn Muḥtasham, or 'Abdu'r-Raḥīm b. Abī Manṣūr, of Qā'in, who was a well-known patron of men of letters. The original version of the work (as Ṭūsī himself states in the preface to the book as it stands at present) was subsequently altered by him when he dissociated himself from the Ismailites; it included apparently a doxology with praises to Ismailite Imams.

In our days and in our country very little interest is taken in the contents of MSS. of the Hebrew Bible. This statement is supported by the facts of my own experience. For five years, 1917–22, I was working among Bible MSS. in the Library at Trinity College and in the University Library at Cambridge, and for the last seven years I have been working among similar treasures in the British Museum. The Register of MSS., given above in Section I, will shew that at present I have in use what is practically the whole collection of MSS. of ancient date belonging to the Museum which contain the Hebrew Psalms, as well as MS. 42, kindly lent me by the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, and MS. 20, reproduced as regards Psalms in photograph. And throughout all these years it has always been matter of surprise when, at rare intervals, some other scholar has applied for permission to consult some one of the many MSS. in use by me. So it is that the corner of the field in which I find myself growing old is a very lonely corner; indeed, the whole field, as well as my corner in it, cries aloud for workers, and is unheeded. By the rulers of Biblical studies in our times the field of the Hebrew MSS. of the Bible has been treated as an expanse of desert, wholly unprofitable for working, and rightly condemned to be left severely unvisifeed. As regards my own corner of this field, under date 11th July, 1925, the whole bulk of my own work among the Bible MSS. and Editions, itself in manuscript, was accepted by the Trustees of the British Museum, under the title “Studies in Hebrew Bible”, and with the Press-mark for the whole, Oriental 9624. The number of volumes of notes and texts to be eventually included will be large, but the first seven volumes already catalogued and available for use by scholars are complete in themselves, in so far as they contain the whole of the Text of Psalms in Ginsburg's (1913) edition, with full tables, notes, and a complete Concordance of the accents of every word of Psalms in that edition.

The Dragon is a Being, or rather, a nonentity, that though he never existed, has had to be invented. The human race soon found that it could not get on without him, and the imaginative fecundity of primitive man was called in to redress a biological oversight of Nature. When summoned to mythologic but influential life, he discovered no sinecure in his functions. Constant appeals from Oriental Rulers, Shamans, and the populace generally, to “co-ordinate” and “rationalize” his resources, in other words, to distribute rain more often, more widely, and more seasonably, may have seemed hardly compensated by his decorative popularity, or the flattering attentions of his pious but insistent devotees., Still noblesse oblige, and so the Dragon reigns among the thunder clouds above, and the thunder clouds (sooner or later) rain upon the earth beneath. Considerable research has been devoted to the Dragon by Western scholars, among whom may be mentioned Elliot Smith, and especially M. W. de Visser, who cites abundant passages from Chinese and Japanese authorities in his attractive volume. Japanese authorities in his attractive volume. And much earlier than either of the above, Gustave Schlegel had descanted fully upon the Dragon and its astronomic symbolism. The present essay, however, has a less ambitious aim, and a more restricted scope. Its object is twofold. In the first part it will present and publish (among the others) a form of the character lung “dragon”, which seems to have escaped the notice of all the Oriental epigraphists, whether Chinese or Japanese, so far as I can ascertain, but must be one of the most archaic, as it is perhaps the most elaborate, of the designs for the character in question.

Some apology is perhaps needed for publishing these notes, which are not the work of a professed Pali scholar, and I would plead in extenuation that, apart from a few cases suggesting new interpretations of certain difficult terms, most of the words have been chosen for discussion because of their interest for Sanskrit lexicography and other general Indian subjects and that I have avoided Buddhist technical terms.

The “Staël-Holstein Scroll” is a convenient name to give to the document on which are inscribed the texts recently published by Professor Thomas and Professor Sten Konow in “Two Mediaeval Documents from Tun Huang”, Oslo Etnografiske Museums Skrifter, Bind 3, Hefte 3 (Oslo, 1929). It bears on one side a Buddhist Sūtra in Chinese and on the other one document in Tibetan and one in the Śaka language (also sometimes called “Khotanese” and “Nord-Arisch”). These latter have no relation to the Chinese text and were written on it when it had become waste paper.

SINCE, during the last few years, Si-Hia texts with transliterations into Tibetan character have been brought to light, it seems that a new aspect may be put upon the morphology of this language.

Previously the texts studied provided us only with transcriptions into Chinese characters, and it is on their evidence that reconstructions of Si-Hia words were first based. Writing in 1916 with this class of material before him, Laufer consequently stated that “consonantal prefixes can be pointed out only in four cases: k-ṅü or k-ṅu(‘five’), k-ṅum (‘heaven‘), r-ni (‘ear’), and possibly m-ru, m-lu (‘worm’)”.

This year M. L. Ch. Watelin, director of excavations for the Oxford Field Museum Expedition at Kish, has found another seal of the early Indus Valley civilization at plain level, 9 metres below the surface of the soil. According to our stratifications at this site, the object should be pre-Sargonic, but it was found with a stone pommel bearing an inscription clearly not earlier than Sargon of Agade. Both objects, therefore, may have fallen from above.

Some texts mentioning the Dru-gu have been given above (1927, pp. 68, 80, 85, 808; 1929, pp. 78 sqq., 559, 560, 583; 1930, pp. 56, 84–5, 274, 281), and reference was made to the divergent views of Colonel Waddell and Professor Pelliot, the former having identified the Dru-gu with the Tu-yü-hun of Chinese history, and the latter with the Turkish Uigurs. The name Drug-gu was first made known by Rockhill, who cited (The Life of the Buddha, p. 240) from the Tibetan Annals of Khotan a reference to a destructive invasion of the Khotan country by that people during the reign of King Vijaya-Kīrti, whose date is not known, but who evidently belonged to a comparatively early generation. The name of the Dru-gu king appears as 'A-no-śos or 'A-no-mo-śoṅ. From the same Annals some further citations were given in an appendix to Sir A. Stein's Ancient Khotan (pp. 581–3).

Since the manuscript of The Caliphs and their non-Muslim Subjects was given to the printer further material has accumulated. Most of it, though interesting or amusing, only confirms what was said in the book. The Ecclesiastical History of Bar Hebraeus, however, gives a clearer idea of the relations between the state and the church.

The manner in which Mānī presented to the Sāsānian court his new doctrine seems to demonstrate that the mazdayasnian theology of that period conceived time, zrvan-, as the highest principle. Zarathuštra's own doctrine had been distinctively monotheistic and spiritual. But it had fallen into oblivion and had been superseded by a polytheistic system such as was the official creed of the Achaemenian empire and such as it is recorded in the later Avesta. At a certain moment religious reaction appears to have made itself felt against the alteration of the true spirit of Zarathuštra's teaching. In trying to reconstruct this doctrine the mazdaïst theologians had hit upon speculations considering time as the supreme essence. The question, when this system may have been first evolved, will be treated later on. For the present, it may suffice to state that the Zervanite theology was officially recognized during the beginning of the Sāsānian epoch, but without leaving traces in the Avesta or in the bulk of the Pahlavī literature.

The following tablets were excaved by M. L. Ch. Watelin in the course of two weeks' intensive work at Kish in the spring of 1927. See Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, vol. vii, for abbreviations.

En, 1887, Léon Heuzey consacra au kaunakès une étude fondamentale dont il n'est pas superflu de reproduire ici les passages essentiels, car cet article n'est pas mentionné dans plusieurs travaux récents dont j'aurai ci-après à discuter les conclusions.

The texts which narrated the episodes of the death, burial in a tomb, the sojourn in Hades, and the resurrection of Marduk, have not been recovered. The contents of this remarkable myth, which transferred the Tammuz legends to Bel-Marduk, must be reconstructed from the rituals and commentaries. On it the Babylonians based a ritual or mystery play in which the entire myth was represented. The rubrics which contained full directions of the details of this play also remain unknown. If they are ever recovered they will correspond to the directions for the zagmuk or New Year's festival at Babylon and Erech. The only sources for reconstructing this mystery play are the commentaries of the scribes on the mythical meaning of each act in this play, corresponding to one fragment of a commentary on the ritual of the zagmuk at Babylon. Two large fragments of the commentary on the Death and Resurrection of Bêl as celebrated at Assur, are published by E. Ebeling, Keilschrifttexte aus Assur Religiösen Inhalts, Nos. 143 and duplicate, No. 219, both of which were used for an edition by Professor Zimmern. The writer gave an edition in his Babylonian Epic of Creation, pp. 34–49, together with two fragments from the library of Asurbanipal, Rm. 275 and K. 9138. Soon after the appearance of my book, Mr. C. J. Gadd found two more fragments of the same collection in the British Museum, K. 6330, which joins K. 9138, and K. 6359. Both fragments are published here, by permission of the Trustees of the Museum. As with the previously published fragments no connected text can be extracted from them. In my notes to the transcription, the passages in the large Assur texts which seem to be parallels have been noted; any new information on this remarkable myth and ceremony which can be gleaned from them has been indicated in the notes. At Assur the national of god Assyria replaced BS1- Marduk in the ceremony, but the texts of the commentaries were undoubtedly copied from the original tablets at Babylon. The contents leave no doubt at all but that the mystery play refers to Bel-Marduk.

The importance of the history of costumes and fashions cannot be emphasized enough. Concerning India practically nothing has been published in this line, barring some discussions on the costumes of the Mughal period. A thorough examination of small details would possibly yield very valuable results, and the following two brief notes may be considered as a modest contribution to such a study of Indian head-dress.