The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. x, nr: 36, pp. 263–309 (Colombo, 1890), contains an article by Donald Ferguson entitled “Captain João Eibeiro: his work on Ceylon and the French translation thereof by the Abbé Le Grand”. The present article summarizes what has been discovered about Ribeiro and his work since that date, and makes a brief comparison of his Fatalidade Historica da ilha de Ceilão with the more celebrated Historical Relation of the island of Ceylon by Captain Robert Knox.

During the eighteenth century the East India Company did not consider the education of its own European civil servants as a necessary care. Appointment was by patronage, and it was assumed that the parents and friends of a writer would have subjected him to the ordinary education of his class. With no more than this background a young writer would sail for India at the age of about seventeen years. The Indian Service was confined to comparatively few families and he might reasonably expect to find relatives or friends of relatives at any of the three Presidencies, and these would give him hospitality and guidance. His initial employment would be as a copying clerk; as such hewould become familiar with the routine of the service before being given a post of responsibility. The only concession made by the Company to his need for any other instruction than that given by his daily employment was the payment to him of a Munshi's allowance, so that he might hire an Indian to teach him Persian and the local language.

This is a fuller version of the paper which I read at the recent International Congress of Orientalists at Cambridge. It has been prepared in compliance with several requests from those who heard it for something on paper which they could study at leisure.

Professor Edgerton has offered us in his recent work on Buddhist Sanskrit (a monument to almost twenty years' labour) a material of delightful richness. It required both courage to undertake such a work and great persistence to carry it through. No doubt each reader will at first look eagerly to see how the cruces which have long baffled him have been resolved here; then to see how much new matter is offered in the elucidation of texts where he has himself after long searching been able to gather up some small amount of the widely scattered evidence. He may even venture to estimate how much of the harvest has been garnered and how much still remains to be brought in.

Maka terkadang kechil rupa dalam chermin itu sebab kechil chermin, dan terkadang panjang ia sebab panjang chermin; dan terkadang bergerak ia sebab bergerak chermin, dan terkadang bergerak ia sebab bergerak chermin, dan terkadang berbalēk ia, apabila ada chermin itu di-atas atau di-bawah; dan terkadang berbetulan kanan-nya dengan kanan yang berchermin (E. 148) tatkala banyak chermin, dan terkadang berbetulan kanan-nya dengan kiri-nya, apabila ada chermin itu di-hadapannya. Maka ada-lah sakalian itu menunjokkan kapada rupa yang kelihatan dalam (C. 56a) chermin, bukan ia sa-kali-kali diri yang berchermin dan bukan ia lain daripada-nya pun karena yang berchermin itu tetap jua ia saperti ada-nya, tiada ia berubah; hanya yang berubah-ubah itu kenyataan-nya dalam chermin jua sebab berubah-ubah penerimaan chermin: demikian-lah kita hendak mithalkan dengan tiada tashbih akan tajalli Hakk ta'ala pada hamba-nya berbagai-bagai ia, sebab berbagai-bagai hamba-nya dan segala hal merēka itu jua.

In 1930 Pandit Kameshwar Dayal, then Deputy Collector at Cawnpore, published a note on a mound situated on a bend of the river Rind about two miles to the east of Bhikdeo, an important village in the Derapur tahsil of the Cawnpore district. The mound covers an area of about 35 bighas and rises to a height of 35 feet. It contained large bricks measuring 30 in. by 20 in. by 4½ in., evidently used for building purposes, and had yielded beads, coins, and other objects. Among the coins recovered from the site were copper coins of the Mathura Satrap Hagamasha. From these finds Pt. Dayal concluded that the mound of Ujjhān was a site of archæological interest which would repay excavation and ought to be declared protected under the Ancient Monuments Act. These recommendations however do not appear to have been acted upon.

In the JRAS., 1954, pp. 119 ff., Professor Enno Littmann, the Nestor of Ethiopic epigraphists, published a Gə'əz inscription from Egypt together with two photographs, a vocalized version and a translation. His decipherment covers seven lines of widely varying legibility, but it appears from scratches visible in fig. 1 that the original inscription contained at least two further lines of which nothing can be recognized to-day. Littmann acknowledges (ibid., p. 121) that most of the restorations, especially those following upon line 3, are “mere conjectures”. This view is, indeed, borne out by study of the inscription and by its very bad state of preservation. In other words: of an inscription of probably nine lines barely a third is in a condition offering a reasonable basis for decipherment. When one remembers that most Ethiopic inscriptions (as, indeed, Oriental epigraphic documents in general) are provided with a generous portion of a preliminary and introductory character, one soon realizes that hopes of a substantial enrichment of Gə'əz epigraphy are bound to be disappointed. This does not mean that the remaining three lines are of no value; any contribution to the not over-abundant inscriptional material of early Ethiopic deserves attention. Professor Littmann and Mr. Meredith have placed Semitists in their debt by making this still unvocalized Gə'əz inscription available for general discussion.

The Pahlavi text presented here has already been published, summarized, and translated (once with and once without transcription). Its contents cannot be said to be of great value, since no new light is thrown on the main theme—the advent of Shah Vahrām after the end of the Zaratušt-millennium. Yetthe text deserves to be treated again, if only for the fact, hitherto unnoticed, that it is a poem with rhyme. This fact must be welcomed for several reasons: firstly, as being of interest in itself; secondly as providing fresh material for the general study of prosody in pre-Islamic times; and finally as affording valuable help for the correct interpretation of the text.

In January and February of 1954 the writer travelled some 4,000 miles through the Northern Eegion of Nigeria in search of Arabic manuscripts for the Library of the University College of Ibadan, and also to make a survey of the indigenous Arabic literature of the peoples of the Western Sudan. There was no means beforehand of determining whether any manuscripts would be found at all, or whether, if they still existed, their possessors would part with them. The tour proved profitable in both respects, however; over 150 works were obtained, most of which are unknown outside Nigeria and very few of which have ever been printed. Some were generously donated, but most were purchased at the “market price”, for the scribes are still busy in the more remote districts, although the popularity of the printed texts from Egypt is an increasing threat to their livelihood. In Kano, the largest town of the Northern Region, it was impossible to find a scribe at work and there Arabic manuscripts were, in consequence, rare and expensive. Some local bibliophiles, understandably reluctant to give or sell volumes which they could not replace, nevertheless lent them for microfilming. There was, generally, considerable interest shown towards this work and, since returning to Ibadan, manuscripts have been received by post from self-appointed agents, which is most encouraging.

Of the Dharmasamuccaya, a collection of stanzas from the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānā Sūtra and the only part of that Siitra known to survive in Sanskrit, the first five chapters were published in 1946 by the late Mr. Lin Li-Kouang from a modern Devanāgarī transcription of a presumably still extant twelfth-century Nepalese MS. From this deeply corrupt source (how far the corruptions derive from the original and how far from the copy I cannot say) it would be impossible to construct anything like a satisfactory text were it not for the existence of a Tibetan version of the Siitra in the Kanjur. The relevant verses in this and in two out of three extant Chinese versions were extracted by Lin Li-Kouang from their prose environment and accompany the Sanskrit in his edition. But even with these aids many uncertainties remain. For the Tibetans were evidently working from a text which had already suffered some deterioration and their renderings must be used with more than ordinary circumspection. Of the two published Chinese versions the first contains some helpful indications but, as is usually the case, its value as a clue to the original is small in comparison with the more literal Tibetan. The second is so free as to be nearly useless.

Orthodoxy, as a rule, makes less appeal to the imagination than heresy, and this holds true of seventeenth-century Sumatran Suiism as of mysticism elsewhere. Some of the works of Shamsu'1-Dīn and Hamzah, the foremost exponents of the heterodox pantheistic mysticism of that time, have been published. al-Rānīrī, as an accomplished polemist, cuts a colourful figure whose Tibyān fī ma'rifat al-adyān has been photographically reproduced. The works of ‘Abd al-Ra'ūf, of Singkel, apart from Rinkes’ thesis and one or two monographs have been comparatively neglected. This neglect is not surprising. His works are largely translations and his favourite subject, the dhikr (recitation), does not arouse such a sjympathetic interest as the metaphysical speculations of the heterodox which find an echo in form as well as substance in the history of Western thought.