In the introduction to my Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms was derived, from early rubrics attached to Sumerian songs, the principle that the Sumerians classified their psalms and liturgical services chiefly by the names of the instruments employed in accompaniments. The Babylonians and the Assyrians adopted the Sumerian chants for their own sacred music, and throughout the history of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian temple music each psalm and liturgy was usually said to the accompaniment of a single instrument. The early Sumerian psalms usually have the title eršemma or melody to the flute. But the drum, balag, Syriac pelaggā, and the kettledrum, liles, Babylonian lilissu, were freely employed in sacred music. The harp was also employed in early Sumer, as we know from a monument of Lagash, but the Sumerian and Babylonian name of the harp is unknown. The Sumerians classified their chants by the names of these instruments.

34. The general evolution of the PI consonants, together with the special question of dialectical differences arising therefrom, has been set forth by Dr. Bloch. It will be sufficient here to note the chief features in that development, with special reference to Gujarātī.

In his paper L'Arrivée des Portugais en Chine, published in T'oung Pao in 1912, M. Cordier, before giving a more detailed account of the events in the Further East following on the taking of Malacca in 1511, gave a lucid sketch of the events accompanying the first establishment of Portuguese power in Eastern seas. I consider that these events require to be further set forth, for as far as I am aware the existing histories do not give any adequate and consecutive account of the struggle for the mastery of the Arabian Sea carried out by the Portuguese against the Muḥammadan states, and more especially against the Turks, who in the sixteenth century were the most powerful military state in the world. In this paper I propose to deal with this subject to the best of my ability.

1. In India, perhaps as much as in any linguistic area, we are faced with an extensive mixture of dialects from the earliest times. The conditions have seldom been such as make for the evolution of a number of sharply differentiated languages. Constant invasions, the movements of great armies, the attraction of vast crowds of pilgrims from distant parts to centres of religious worship, the far wanderings of innumerable ascetics, the influence on illiterate peoples of travelling bards, the absence in the great plains of the north at least of pronounced natural boundaries, the continual interplay of kingdom with kingdom, a district being now in this political area now in that—these conditions have all made for widespread borrowings in language, the extension of common linguistic changes over large areas and the formation of common mixed languages, of which modern Hindōstānī, spoken and understood in varying degree over the whole of northern and central India, is an excellent example.

Towards the beginning of the fifth century a.d. Kālidāsa made his début with an apology for his temerity in addressing an audience accustomed to such old, wellestablished authors as “Bhāsa and others”. After the lapse of fifteen centuries Kālidāsa has held his own, while Bhāsa is practically forgotten. The reason is not the decisive verdict of Time, but the unfortunate loss of his works. But lately came a surprise. In 1912 Gaṇapati Śāstrī discovered and published thirteen dramas in the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series, and claimed them as Bhāsa's. For the past eight years Orientalists have been considering this claim, the general trend of opinion being unfavourable. The present article proposes to supplement the progress already made in the investigation of this question, and to point out the facts practically settled, thus paving the way for further research.

It is a genuine pleasure to report the accession of another Chinese critic and investigator of the Shang dynasty writing, in the person of Mr. Wang Kuo-wei of Hai-ning Chou , in the Central Chinese Province of Chehkiang.

I propose to lay before the readers of the Journal one or two of the more interesting results of his decipherments, together with a few notes of my own upon these.

In the January number of this Journal there appeared a most interesting article by Mr. M. Longworth Dames on “The Portuguese and Turks in the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century”. The article furnishes an admirable introduction to this engrossing, if little known, subject; and it is only by way of supplement that I am writing the following notes.

I. Manyō. Of the four thousand one hundred short poems in the Manyōshū, about two hundred have been translated, by Florenz, Aston, Dickins, and others. Many more deserve translation, particularly the dialect-songs, which have been avoided by previous translators. A few of these (noted as such when they occur), and some fifty other songs not hitherto translated, will be found below, with text and rendering.

The territory occupied by the Kurdish race in historic times seems to have been the district called by the Greeks Kardûchia, and by both Greeks and Romans Corduene or Gordiaea, and by the Syriac writers Qardū, whence the earliest Arabic authorities derived the name Qardā, the country bounded roughly on the north by Armenia, on the west by the river Euphrates, on the south by the Arabian desert, and on the east by the ancient kingdom of Media. Strabo, the Greek geographer, states that Armenia and Atropatene consisted of prosperous districts, but that the northern part was a mountainous country occupied by wild tribes, such as the Kyrtii, nomads and brigands dispersed over the whole of Armenia and extending eastwards over the Zagros mountains. More closely he defines the land of the Gordiaei, whom the earlier writers called Kardūchi, by locating it on the banks of the Tigris and by adding that one of its chief cities was Pinaka, the modern Finik, “a very strong fortress, having three hill-tops, each fortified with its own wall, so as to form as it were a threefold city; yet Armenians subjugated it and Romans took it by storm, although the Gordiaei were apparently good builders and skilled in siege-works, for which reason Tigranes so employed them.”

As historical inscriptions of this, the last king of Assyria, are wanting, any additional light on his reign, however meagre that light may be, will probably be regarded as welcome, and this must be my excuse for the publication of this interesting but comparatively unimportant inscription.

Like his predecessors, Saracos (Sin-šar-iškun) called himself “the great king, the powerful king, the king of the world, the king of Assyria”. He was also “the favourite of Aššur, Enlil, and Ninlil; the beloved of Merodach, and Zēr-panîtum, the choice of the heart's desire of Nebo and Merodach”, etc. From the phrasing of this cylinder-inscription, it is clear that he regarded himself as much king of Babylon as of Assyria, and from the fact that the text came from.Nineveh, it might be supposed that his sympathies were as much with the one country as with the other—indeed, as neighbouring nations, speaking the same language, this feeling would in no wise be unreasonable. Less than sixty years, however, had passed since the death of the somewhat ruthless Sennacherib, and this was probably too short a time to allow the Babylonians to forget what had happened during the earlier years of his reign and in the time of Aššur-bani-âpli—the “great and noble Asnapper”, when the latter was in conflict with Šamaš-šum-ukîn (Saosduchinos), his brother. That they had the right to resist the Assyrian claim to over-lordship there is no doubt, and it is therefore certain that the action of the armies of Aššur-bani-apli, king of Assyria, aroused again Babylonian resentment against the dominion of the more northerly power.

The name of the important Seleucid city which occupied the site of the ancient Carchemish is still uncertain. German scholars have identified it with the Oropus or Europus of classical geography, but as is pointed out by Commander Hogarth, who has discussed the question very fully in Carchemish, pt. i, pp. 19 sqq. (1914), if Oropus is identified with the town placed by the Peutinger Table between Birejik and the Sajur, and this again is identified with Carchemish, the mileage attached to it will not agree with the actual facts. There is the further difficulty that, although one of the modern names given to the site is Jerabîs, which could be derived from Oropus, or rather its later Greek deformation Europus, the more usual and probably older name is Jerablûs, which is Hierapolis.

ʻAzīz koka, “the beloved foster-brother” of the Emperor Akbar, is, I think, the most interesting character among the Agra courtiers of the sixteenth century, nnd the enduring, David and Jonathan like, friendship between him and Akbar is the most touching thing in the ponderous volumes of Abul Fazl's history. Not that 'Azīz was the best man among Akbar's servants, or that he was superior to his age. He was violent and full of faults, and there is little doubt the Hindu Rajah Todar Mal and the Muhammedan historian Nizāmu-d-dī Aḥmad were better men. But 'Azīz is more interesting and likeable, and we know more about him, and feel towards him as we do to the crabbed Badayūnī. Both men were honest and fearless, and had an outspokenness which is very refreshing after the pedantry and tortuousness of Abul Fazl. The author of the Masiru-l-Umara accuses 'Azīz of treachery (nifāq), because he wrote plainly to a friend and comrade of Akbar's faults, but he also admits, that 'Azīz had not a particle of timeservingness in his nature: “Aṣia zamāna-sāz nabūd.” He was the only man who had the courage to stand up against Akbar's sciolism and crude heresies, and he acted upon his convictions, for he relinquished his office and his emoluments and went off to Mecca rather than continue to serve an infidel king.

This Semitic root occurs regularly in Hebrew, Phœnician, and Aramaic in the form r-š-p, although Syriac agrees with Assyrian in having the metathesis š-r-b. The regular Semitic form of this root exists in Assyrian in the word raššubatu, flame, conflagration, brilliancy, terror, and is the cognate of Hebrew réšeph. The root rašābu, blaze, has been entered in the lexicons with the meaning “be powerful, terrible”, and the error still persists, although Jensen indicated the correct root of rašābu, rašbu, and rašubbu, blazing, in his Mythen und Epen, 580. A passage which finally disposes of the old error is CT. 19, 22, 11, izi ú-gug-ga = rà-šub-bat īšāti, Syn. of kibbat īšāti, flame of fire. The syllable ra is written with the sign UD, which has the value ra, RA. 10, 74, 18. But it is a rare value and consequently the passage was never understood. The Sumerian word ugug is a derivative of the root gug, to burn.

In the Annals of Ashurbanipal (Rassam Cylinder, col. iv, 1. 85) for attaddi ana nakamāti Streck adopts the variant at-ta-ad-di a-na ka-ma-a-ti, which he translates “ich warf sie auf den Maueranger”. He apparently follows Delitzsch (Ass. Handw.,p. 334, col. ii) and Muss-Arnolt (Lexicon, p. 399) in taking kamâtu as the plural of a noun kamātu, outer gate (Jensen, K.B. vi, 496), derived from kamû, to bind, to surround. Now there is here a variant reading na-ka-ma-a-ti, heaps, which gives the preferable sense “I cast them forth in heaps”. It has therefore occurred to the writer that kamâti in our text is the plural not of kamâtu but of a word kâmtum. This I take to be derived from a root kâmu, to cover over, to heap up, which is found in some of the cognate languages (Arabic I, covered; II, heaped up; heap; Syriac concealed). Thus kâmâtu in this passage would be an alternative, with the same meaning, for nakamâti, which may originally have been a gloss or scribal conjecture for the rare kâmtum.

In the following text an attempt has been made to represent as accurately as possible the speech of Mr. H. Perera, a form of speech which we believe to be fairly typical of that of the educated Sinhalese of Colombo. The form of speech here recorded is that used in familiar conversation and will be found to differ greatly from the literary or semi-literary language of the ordinary textbook

The Anthology is a manuscript furnished by Dr. Sa'iīd, of Sina, to the British Museum, numbered Or. 6444; the writer is working from a photographic reproduction made for him in 1908 by order of Mr. A. G. Ellis.

The distance from the Oriental Department of the British Museum and absence of sufficient books of reference—this article is being written in Sulaimania, South Kurdistan—is a handicap on adequate comparison of words.

In July, 1914, the Journal printed the Latin text, with English translation, of various documents relating to the Minor or Franciscan Friars in China. Of these the most important were three letters written from China and other extracts from a fourteenth century chronicle, which is preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris (MS. Latin 5006). On p. 555 of the article referred to I wrote: “Monsieur H. Cordier tells me that he knows of no other copy of the Chronicles, but at the same time is inclined to doubt that the Paris MS. (Latin 5006) is the copy used by Wadding.” Wadding, readers may be glad to be reminded, was the author of a great work called Annales Minorum, in which the three letters from China were printed for the first time, and, indeed, for the only time until 1914 from a manuscript. All the other Latin texts with which I am acquainted and all the versions are obviously based on Wadding's text. In spite of M. Cordier's opinion I continued to think that it was at least possible that Wadding had copied rather carelessly the MS. which is now at Paris.

In recent years a large number of economic tablets from Senkereh have appeared in the commerce of antiquity dealers. The Louvre in Paris and the Yale Babylonian Collection in America secured a great many. A small collection was sold to the Museum of the University of Wales in 1914, which contains a contract of sale written at Ellasar. The Rev. Chas. Overy, M.A., of Radley College, near Oxford, secured a perfect specimen of the Senkereh archives when he was in the service of the British Army in Mesopotamia. He has kindly shown me the tablet and permitted its publication in our Journal.

In my article on “The Persian Manuscripts of the late Sir Albert Houtum-Schindler, K.C.I.E.”, published in the JRAS. of October, 1917, pp. 657–94, brief mention was made (on p. 672) of a book entitled Silsilatu'n-Nasdb-i-Ṣafawiyya, on the genealogy and history of the Ṣafawís. I can find no notice of another copy, and as the work is of considerable interest and importance, I think that a somewhat fuller account of its scope and contents may be acceptable to students of Persian history.