Any complete biography of Qādī an-Nu'mān, the most illustrious of Ismā'īlī jurists, must necessarily be based on two kinds of sources, internal and external. He was a very prolific author, and although not all his works which were extant some 400 years ago have come down to us, a good many of his akhbār and fiqh works are still preserved. It would be necessary to go through all of these and collect all autobiographical information before the definitive biography of the Qāḍī can be attempted. Even purely fiqh works like the Mukhtaṣaru'l-Athār contain occasional references to contemporary events. The brief biography given below does not profess to be exhaustive; it is based in the main on three external sources, which seem to contain all that was definitely known of this great lawyer, the founder and the greatest exponent of Ismā'īlī jurisprudence. The difficulty of writing on Ismā'īlī subjects is well known; it is next to impossible to expect any co-operation from the sectarians themselves. I am trying, however, to obtain information from different sources, and if ever I am able to study all the works extant of the Qāḍī, a more comprehensive biography may be attempted.

The present study continues that published by the writer in JRAS., October, 1932. It comprises the transliteration, provisional translation, and commentary of the Second Tablet of the Ras-Shamra Epic as published by Virolleaud in Syria, October, 1932.

1. M.I. viii, 90 (wood, c. 16 × 1·5–2cm., complete; hole for string at r.; 1.1 of cursive dbu-can script).

49. M.I. i, 30 (wood, c. 10 × 2·5 cm., broken away at r.; 11. 2 recto + 3 verso, of neat, cursive dbu-can script).

[A 1] [] | : | Śa . cu . pho . ña . gcu … . [A 2] khal . boṅ . bu . rgyab . cha . sga . daṅ . cha[s] … [B 1] gcig | myi. gsum . gyi . zla . ba . gci … [B 2] do . ẖtshal. baẖi . thaṅ . du . brtsis . te . phye . khal . phye … [B 3] ñi . śu . gñis . la | pho . ñar . mchi. ba | b … .

Every student of Vedic literature is confronted by vast details of an uncommonly complicated ritual. This ritual engrossed the major part of the religious life of a householder. Every small act promised him riches in cattle and progeny, long life and bliss in the next world. On the other hand, the slightest negligence had to be assiduously atoned for, otherwise it would lead him into misery. Thus it is that even the ropes, the brooms, and their numbers have been carefully recorded, the materials of which they were made, their size, and their functions prescribed with the same thoroughness as the crushing of the soma-juice or the coronation of the king.

The Arabs believed in the existence of beings to which they gave commonly the generic name “djinn”. For convenience we may call them spirits. Muḥammad carried these ideas over into Islam where theologians developed and systematized them. These Muslim ideas are of no interest to the student of folk-lore unless it can be shown that they contain older material.

An inscription on one of the walls of one of the Koḍumbāḷūr temples in the Pudukkottai State accidentally mentions the Pallavas. This inscription has long been overlooked by the historians of the Pallavas. It is already high time to study this reference in the light of what we now know about the Pallava kingdom.

The Latin strāta is one of the words of culture which passed to the East. Greek has στρτα Aramaic has srṭy' Levy, Chaldäisches Wb., Dalman, Aram, nhebr. Wb., with plural srṭyn, as also the form 'sṭrṭy' in the same sense. For Syriac is quoted (Brockelmann, Lex. Syr.) 'sṭrṭ. Arabic has ṣirāṭ in the eschatological al-ṣirāṭu 'l-mustaqīmu of the Qur'ān. A similar narrow bridge is well known in the Zoroastrian činvatō pərəntuš of the Avesta.

Dualism is a term introduced into modern theology by the Englishman, Thomas Hyde, in 1700, and was first used to describe sthe fundamental principle of Persian Zoroastrism, namely the independent existence of good and evil. Ormazd the good god and Ahriman the evil god in the theology of the Persians represent an absolute dualism. For them Ahriman, corresponding to Satan of Judaism and Christianity, is entirely independent of the creator god. Good and evil, God and the Devil, are primeval supreme powers. Now I wish to trace the history of Satan or the Devil in Christianity back through Judaism, Hebrew, and Babylonian religion to its origin among the Sumerians. I shall endeavour to prove this Persian dualism, which admits that God did not create the Devil, to be totally foreign to Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hebrew speculation; and I shall then briefly examine the evidence on which modern scholars admit dualism to have been held by the Jews of the Apocalyptic period and by early Christianity as set forth in the New Testament. It is my conviction that Persian religion never had any influence upon Judaism or early Christianity. Satan, the Devil (diabolus), is traceable directly to Babylonian theology; there he is the creation of the gods.

The Ratnāvalī by Nāgārjuna was well known from the numerous quotations scattered in the Mahāyāna literature in India as well as in Tibet, but no manuscript of it was up to now available. Fortunately, Nepal, which has yielded so many treasures of ancient Indian literature, has recently rendered back to light a large fragment of this work, the importance of which cannot be overlooked by scholars. Nāgārjuna was certainly one of the greatest thinkers ever born in India, and whatever was written by him deserves our greatest attention. His thought has permeated, as it were, not only the Abhidharma of Mahāyāna, but also the mystical experiences of the Tantric systems. Therefore we must welcome anything written by him, because it will help our understanding of Buddhist, and therefore of Indian, mind.

The last few years have seen a great and almost universal interest in the history of medicine. It is strange that, in spite of the researches that have been made in the epidemics and diseases of ancient times, none of the writers who have worked on the various aspects of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis, as the Baghdād Boil is called in medical languagehas been able to trace the history of the disease before the nineteenth century. It is not as though it were a disease that could have escaped the notice of the ancients. Cutaneous Leishmaniasis is characterized by a superficial ulcer, sometimes as large as the top of a coffee cup, which runs a slow and protracted course. It is not as though it were a disease confined to some distant and uncivilized part of the globe. It is found in South America, North Africa, and all over the Middle and Near East. Why, then, is there no history of the disease ? Where did it start ? Who can claim the honour of introducing the Bouton de Biskra into Moroccothe Baghdād Boil into 'Irāq, the Delhi Boil into India, and the Tropical Sore into non-tropical Persia ?

According to Sanskrit Lexicons the word hiraṇyagarbha has two principal meanings. First, it is a well-known epithet of Lord Brahman; secondly, it is the name of one of the ṣōḍaśa-mahādāna, i.e. the sixteen Great Gifts, which are enumerated and explained in books like the Matsya-Purāṇa, Hēmādri's Vratakhaṇḍa, and Vallālasēna's Dānasāgara. The sixteen mahādānas are dāna (offering) of the following things:—

Twice recently (Journal, 1931, 572 and 899) I have touched on certain curious cases of compounds of Sanskrit lāpaya. Further inquiry has produced some other instances and suggested to me that the Buddhist technical term, lapanā, is connected with the same verbs. For though the commentators were presumably well aware of its meaning, their statements are so lacking in clarity that modern scholars are still in doubt regarding the exact sense, and their vagueness seems to me due to attempting to make their explanations fit in with a derivation from lap. But this etymology is negatived by the old phrases in which the term originated, such as janaṁ lāpayeyya (Suttanipāta, 929) and janaṁ lapetave (Udāna, 21), which cannot be reconciled with their suggestions that the sinner himself is the speaker (cf. Abhidharmakośa, vol. iii, 165, n. 4, and Visuddhimagga, 22 ff.). As it occurred to me that possibly the facts might be accounted for by a derivation from some root other than the recognized ones, lap and lī, I turned for light to the use of rap in the Rigveda and Avesta. Though the inquiry did not issue in a certain explanation of the words in question, it did bring me to a conclusion about the Vedic root, rap, which, despite its heterodoxy, seems inescapable.

Although Averroes is well known as a commentator on Aristotle—the scholastics called him The Commentator—very few scholars have so far taken any notice of his commentary on Plato's famous treatise. This paraphrase, however, deserves a thorough critical study, for a variety of reasons. First, it belongs to the Corpus of Averroes’ philosophical writings, even though—as Averroes states himself in his preface—it be only as a substitute for Aristotle's “Politics” which were not known to Averroes and which were not accessible to the scholastics until 1260. Secondly, it is an interesting example of the treatment of Platonism by Islamic scholars. Then: are the changes and deviations due to Islamictheory and thought, or to Averroes’ own way of adapting the “Politeia” to the Islamic “Empire” ? Was there any Platonic influence on Islam in its political theory and when, how, and where can we trace it ? Is it Plato himself or Plato in the light of Neo-Platonism that Averroes’ more or less inadequate paraphrase gives us ? These questions show that the linguistic task is only a preliminary towards the more importantand interesting question of the position and meaning of this treatise within the history of medieval political theory and of the interrelations between Eastern and Western conception of Man and State.

In spite of the hoary belief in the conservatism of the Chinese we find that exotic music and instruments of music found favour in “Far Cathay” from quite an early period, long before the Mughal régime. Thanks to the researches of M. Maurice Courant and others, we are able to appreciate with considerable definiteness the influence of the Middle East on the Far East in these matters. On the other hand, the Rev. A. C. Moule is of opinion that “the musical systems of Persia and Arabia seem to have had but little effect on Chinese music, and the use of only a few instruments can at all probably be traced to the great intercourse which existed between those countries and China in the middle ages”.

At first sight it must seem strange that words so commonplace and simple, in whatever language, as sons and grandsons, should deserve discussion in the Journal of our Society. But any reader who should endure to the end of the following pages would readily admit that simplicity is the last quality tha emerges from the fog of forms and symbols examined.

CT. xiv, 17, 1–2, and 15,1–2, and Matouš, Lex. Taf., No. 88, 2, 46–7, give the equivalences takKALAG.GA, tak(alu)KA. ŠAL.LA, and aban ki-su-si as all equal to taksû.

Hsü Shên in his postface to the Shuo wên gives a list of eight styles of script practised in the Ch'in period. The fourth of these is called ch'ung shu and a note is added by Hsü Ch'ieh one of the editors of the revised text which was published in a.d. 986 at the emperor's command. He remarks that the term is equivalent to niao shu “bird script”, so called because the tops of the characters represent bird forms. There is, however, tangible evidence that this fanciful variety of writing was in vogue earlier than the Ch'in period.

In regard to civil conditions in Chinese Turkestan the documents are not much more widely informative than in regard to other matters. The states along the northern trade route, Karashahr, Kuca, Aksu, Kashgar, although from about a.d. 675 they were dominated (not indeed occupied) by the Tibetans, appear to escape all mention; and this is the more regrettable as these states would seem from the culture objects recovered by archæological research to have enjoyed a rather fuller development of material civilization than those south of the desert. Their natural resources were not inferior, they were aligned along a more profitable route of trade and communication, they were less exposed to encroachment of the desert; their archæological remains are more extensive and better preserved. To these states, and to the Wu-sun people of the Tian-shan valleys, we have perhaps—unless the Khu chief (Khu Maṅ-po-rje) of the Tibetan Chronicle is really the Khu ruler of Kao-chang—not a single reference. The twin states of “Anterior” and “Posterior” Chü-shih, i.e. Turfan-Kao-chang and Gu-chen at the extreme east of the Tian-shan, do indeed seem to be indicated as goal of hostile expeditions (1931, pp. 821 sqq.). As has been made clear by Chavannes in Ancient Khotan, pp. 533–6, and Sir Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia, pp. 579–587, they maintained a precarious existence nearly to the end of the eighth century a.d., the Tibetans failing, despite their occupation of Kan-su, to secure possession of them either by diplomatic proposals to China or by force until the year a.d. 790.

In view of the fact that the study of Si-Hia is now attracting fresh interest, and that the problems it presents are fraught with some difficulty, it seems not untimely to review certain aspects of the matter upon which the status of the language and its position within the Tibeto-Burman family ultimately depend, viz. the problems of prefixes and consonantal finals.