Bshumaihun ḏ hiia rbia qadmaiia nukhraia mn almia ḏ nhura yatiria ḏ 'lawia kulhun 'ubadia asutha uzakutha hathamta uzarazta unaṭarta rabtia ḏ sharara nhuilia Idilia Plan br Plana uzawai ubnai ubnathai udaurai hikhlai ukulẖ binianai mn hiia umn Manda ḏ hiia asia maraihun ḏ kulhun asawatha 'zha u'tazha aina bishta ukabihta waina zruqtia waina (10) bruqtia waina kbishtia waina qliqtia waina 'kiltia kth abun Bil nsib mia urmẖ lrishia qirib rma 'l kwakiatha unsab tagha wathnẖ brishia uzaina tla '1 kadfẖ huṭra ḏ mura b'dẖ (or b'adia) am qarbala (?) lauma kulẖ bgumra tagha nad unfal mn rishia uzaina nfal mn kadfẖ huṭra ḏ mura nfal mn 'dẖ urishia (20)ṣmar ubarsa nfal gibta ḏ gaubat 'lẖ usilqit [sic] shgibun [sic] bshuba shibiahia kth taghaiun traṣlun brishaihun uzaina tlilia lkadfaiun huṭra ḏ mura nfal mn 'daihun umdabrania lalma kulẖ bgumura huṭra ḏ mura nfal mn 'daihun urishaihun ṣmar ubarsa nfal gibta ḏ gabat 'lh usilqit [sic] upagibun [sic] byama (30) k th mlia mia wazlia mia bgauẖ warbita piria u'nbia u'lania ḏ 'lawia rauzia wamarat kma shapiria yama ushapiria ḏ masgin bgauẖ ḏ 'bdit piria u'nbia u'lania ḏ 'lawiẖ rauzia wamarat kma shapiria yama ushapiria ḏ masgin bgauẖ ḏ rbita piria u'nbia u'lania d 'lawiẖ ṣba gibta ḏ gabat 'lawaihun usilqat pagibun baqnia ḏ hush raiia ushapir bnaiun ubnathun ushapiria baqaria ḏ masgin abathraiun aqnia lgaṭ pumaiun mn miria (40) ubnaiun lgaṭ pumaiun mn mimaṣ waramatha la masgin abathraiun gubta ḏ gaubat 'lawaihun usilqat pagibun btauria ḏ pirun malka ḏ miṣraiia

The indifference of the ancient Indian to the maintenance of definite chronicles even when a voluminous literature of a philosophical and religious kind existed, has left the historian, apart from meagre foreign accounts, with little written evidence of the course of Indian events other than fanciful epics and legends. Under such circumstances, he has had to utilize to the utmost such deductions as can be drawn from material sources, and among these one of the most important has been the ancient coinage. The aftermath of Alexander's invasion left various Græco-Bactrian kingdoms and principalities extending through Afghanistan and the Punjab as far as Muttra, of which many coins have been found, and these have often proved useful for dating purposes. In this paper, however, investigation is confined to the much more obscure early indigenous coins of the years previous or not long subsequent to the Christian era, with a view to discovering what weight standards are present, and what they imply.

Having already discussed the first of the two forms used for Summer, we may examine the second, and attractive theory of its origin put forward by Mr. Yeh Yü-sên. This theory is freely cited by Mr. Tung Tso-pin in Part 3 of the Excavations at Anyang (Academia Sinica), 1931, especially on pp. 511–514. Mr. Yeh observes: “When the ancients invented characters for the Four Seasons—Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter—I surmise that in each case they drew their imagery from the object most conspicuous in that season. Now the character hsia, summer, is not found in the oracular sentences, but on the analogy of the example previously adduced, the words chin ch'un ‘the present Spring’, I have secured three instances where, following chin, there occurs a single character, in each case a pictogram.” Here Mr. Yeh cites three passages from Bone inscriptions, two from Lo Chên-yü's Yin Hsü Shu Ch'i, and one from a work not accessible to me. The three figures below I have copied direct from Lo's plates, as cited by Mr. Yeh, but not from the minuscule forms as constricted into the text of Mr. Tung Tso-pin's article.

The solution about to be proposed is quite new. By such Chinese specialists as may see it, if any, I confidently expect it to be derided. By the few Western students who concern themselves with this branch of inquiry, it will perhaps seem rather improper, rather improbable, and “rather interesting, all the same”.

The Catalogue of the Coins of Ancient India in the British Museum, by Mr. J. Allan, published last year, has made the silver punch-marked coins available to all, and the clear system of classification which Mr. Allan has followed and his scholarly and complete Introduction give all the information about these coins that is at present available, while the large number of the coins which are illustrated in the plates enable the conclusions arrived at in the Introduction to be confirmed or questioned. General thanks are due to Mr. Allan for this important work. As this Catalogue will be the standard source of reference for the consideration and classification of these coins, it is important to note any points that arise from its consideration.

In a former number of this journal I published a specimen translation of one of the Rasā'il of Junayd, as an announcement of my intention to make that famous personage the subject of a monograph. It will be useful at this stage to print the text and translation of what is one of the most interesting of the little treatises preserved in the Istanbul manuscript, both because of its contents, and also for the reason that it is the only work of Junayd for which we have a second authority. It is unfortunately true that the Istanbul manuscript, as the copyist himself is at pains to admit. is derived from a very faulty archetype, and with such an author as Junayd the work of emendation is necessarily attended with countless pitfalls. The Cairo manuscript of the Kitāb Dawā' al-arwāḥ exhibits roughly ninety variants as compared with the Istanbul manuscript, in the space of rather less than 2½ folios. In by far the majority of places the Istanbul manuscript appears to be the more correct.

The Chinese numeral 4 is a syllable pronounced ssŭ, and was originally written by four horizontal lines, , but by the time of the Han Dynasty (and perhaps before, for the formoccurs on the Stone Drums), and ever since, the scription as above was substituted. And the question with which this note is concerned is: What was the origin of this substituted form ? The author of the Shuo Wen makes the Lesser Seal Version , his 503rd Radical, and describes it thus, hsiang ssŭ fên chih hsing, depicts division into quarters. This is a poor explanation. If a quadrilateral was chosen as an adequate symbol of the numeral 4, that was surely enough, and the two interior strokes are supernous, irrelevant, and misleading.

If a man is sick of a swelling, the colour of his sickness being black, thou shalt [pound] (and) strain the tops (juice) of oleander (?), mix in fine-ground flour, mash in rose-water (I), bind on; (or) tops (juice) of tamarisk.

That sūrah IX of the Qur'ān contains a proclamation made to the people at the pilgrimage is stated in v. 3 of the sūrah itself. As to how much of the sūrah was contained in the proclamation, there is, however, no agreement either in Moslem tradition or among European scholars. The tradition that the proclamation was made by 'Alī at the pilgrimage of the year IX is very generally accepted. The story is given by Ibn Hishām (ed. Wuestenfeld, p. 921): “When the Barā'a (sūrah IX) was revealed to the messenger of Allah, it was suggested to him that he should send it to Abū Bakr, who had already been sent to lead the pilgrimage. But he said: ‘No one shall act instead of me but a man of my own household.’ Thereupon he summoned 'Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, and said to him, ‘Go with this message from the beginning of the (sūrah) Barā'a, and proclaim among the people on the day of sacrifice, when they are gathered in Minā, that no unbeliever will enter Paradise, and that after this year no polytheist shall perform the pilgrimage, and no naked person shall make the circuit of the House.’” The story then proceeds to relate that 'Alī set out on the prophet's camel, overtook Abū Bakr and made the proclamation at the time and in the terms which the prophet had appointed.

The purpose of the present somewhat desultory notes may be said to be twofold: firstly, to emphasize the necessity of comparing the word stock of one Indo-Chinese language with that of another by word families only, secondly, to make a preliminary investigation into certain variations of a particular type within such families, as there are here certain anomalies of which very careful note will have to be taken in any comparative work along these lines.

At Oxford, in 1927, while hunting up references to the verses of an unknown anthology of ancient Arabic poetry, which I hope to present shortly to the students of Arabic, I came to find mention of another unknown anthology of Ancient Arabic poetry: Muntaha 'l-Ṭalab min Ash'dr-i 'l-'Arab by Muḥammad b. al-Mubârak b. Muhammad b. Maimûn, said to contain one thousand Arabic odes. Although the anthologist, Muḥammad b. al-Mubârak b. Muhammad b. Maimûn, was no familiar figure in Arabic literary history, the name of the anthology and the note about its enormous extent at once struck me and led me to think that it was a very valuable work. So I at once consulted the well-known expert, Mr. (now Dr.) F. Krenkow about it. Mr. Krenkow informed me that he also had come across the name of this anthology, most probably in the catalogue of the books in the late De Slane's library. Afterwards, when I visited Germany and met Dr. Hommel of Munich, he felt immensely interested in this anthology, and suggested to me to be on the look-out for it in my intended Near East tour especially in the libraries of Istanbul and Damascus. As a matter of fact, in Istanbul I came upon a codex of this work in the library of Laleli, where it is numbered 1941. But this codex, 2·1 cm. × 1·5 cm., containing 164 folios, was only a small part—one-sixth—of the whole work. Again in Cairo I found two manuscripts of the Muntaha 'l-Ṭalab in the Royal library.

One of the fundamental tasks of archæological research in regard to thedating of archaic Chinese bronzes is to determine which bronzes date in the Chou period and which are pre-Chou, i.e. of the Yin (Shang) period. In my work “Yin and Chou in Chinese Bronzes” (in Yin and Chou Researches, 1935, also in Bull. Mus. Far East Ant., 1936), I have tried to establish a real dating in regard to a great number of inscribed bronzes by aid of their inscriptions. I found three types of inscriptions which I concluded to be of pre-Chou time: those containing the so-called ya hing, those which had the three symbols traditionally (but very tentatively) interpreted as si tsï sun, and those which had the symbol traditionally transcribed as kü. In this way I obtained a considerable number of illustrated bronzes which I used as research material for determining the types of bronzes existing prior to the Chou era.

It was in reference to this claim that I was once asked by the author of Musik des Orients (1929), Dr. Robert Lachmann, now the director of the Department of Extra European Music at the University of Jerusalem, whether I had actual evidence in regard to frets on the Arabian and Persian lute in the Middle Ages. He asked the question because a German writer, Karl Geiringer, had searched Arabic and Persian manuscripts which gave delineations of the lute without finding a solitary example which revealed the presence of frets on the instrument.

The history of the musical scale in the Near and Middle East is full of perplexities. In my Histoire abrégée de I'échelle de la musique arabe, which I submitted to the Congress of Arabian Music at Cairo in 1932, and in my article Mūsīqī contributed to the Encyclopædia of Islām, I have endeavoured to show how this scale developed among the Arabs and Persians. In spite of the appearance of a gradual and natural evolution there are still many problems to be solved in the history of this scale, and one of them is the scale propounded by Ibn Sīnā, better known in the Occident as Avicenna.

The country with which we are concerned—Nubia, Sennār, and Kordofān—is a comparatively recent conquest of Islam, and it does not properly emerge into the light of history before the sixteenth century. Of its state during the Middle Ages we are very imperfectly informed. Nubia had adopted Coptic Christianity in the sixth century, and there were two kingdoms, Maqarra in the north, with its capital at Dongola, and Aiwa in the south, with its capital at Soba near the modern Khartoum. The Arabs twice overran northern Nubia within a decade or two of the Muslim conquest of Egypt, and in their second expedition they sacked Dongola and destroyed its church; but there was no attempt at annexation, and for some five or six centuries the relations between Muslims and Nubians were based on a treaty concluded in 651–2, which precluded either party from settling in the territory of the other; it also imposed on the Nubians an annual payment of 300 or 360 slaves in exchange for gifts of cloth and grain. The treaty was but indifferently observed, and from time to time there were raids and counter-raids, but Nubia preserved its independence and its isolation from the worlds both of Islam and Christendom. Intercourse with the Muslim lands was not entirely lacking, and in the tenth century two Arabic authors composed accounts of the state of Nubia: I refer to the famous al-Mas'ūdī and to a certain Ibn Salīm or Ibn Sulaym of Aswān, extracts from whose work are preserved in Maqrīzī's Topography of Egypt.

In the summer of 1933, within the short space of two months, Egypt, and with her the whole Islamic world, was twice plunged into deep mourning, by the deaths of two men who, widely divergent in circumstances and character though they were, were in their generation the greatest and the most universally esteemed of Arabic poets. In their own country they had won titles which well indicate the appreciation, even the affection which they enjoyed: Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm was called the “Poet of the Nile”, but Shauqī was called the “Prince of Poets”.

I am not referring to the simile (and its fate) of the Jetawood and the faggots. That at least I have not overlooked, nor have others. Charles Eliot once wrote to us, that it seemed to imply the existence of a self that was other and more than body and mind (as the wood was there, and other, and more than the faggots). I remarked, Was it not a curious way of teaching the existence of a something (about which there might be a doubt), merely by implication ? I was then blind to two things: the tremendous emphasis on the immanence of Deity as ‘Self’ current in the lifetime of the ‘Buddha’ (rendering any assertion of It unnecessary); the decline in that emphasis by the time the Suttas came to be finally worded and canonized. To very few was awareness of this earlier and later constantly present. ‘Was?’ It is still true of most.

Sulamī's tractate on the Malāmatīs (Risālat al-Malāmatīya), as preserved in the Berlin manuscript, has been fully and scientifically analysed and described by Professor E. Hartmann in Der Islam, vol. viii, pp. 157–203. There remains nothing to be added to the conclusions reached there. It is, however, to be remarked that Hartmann's article takes no account of the Cairo manuscript of the tract: this, indeed, could hardly have been available at the time the article was written. The Cairo manuscript has been noted and utilized by Massignon: a striking feature of this copy, however, which distinguishes it from that preserved at Berlin, appears to have escaped attention, and the purpose of the present note is to call attention to this peculiarity.

The following is an attempt at a rendering of the Minæan inscription found on the side of a sarcophagus now in the Cairo Museum, which is dealt with in the Répertoire d'Epigraphie Sémitique, tome vi, 3427, based on the assumption that K. Conti-Kossini in his Chrestomathia is correct in identifying the first word of the inscription with the Ethiopic , “loculus sepulchralis.”