As is well known, the authors of the earlier Persian anthologies do not give specimens of Omar Khayyam's poetry. In fact, they did not regard him as a poet, but as a ḥakīm, or philosopher, who occasionally wrote verses, and perhaps this view is more correct than the ordinary European one, and the estimate which Omar himself would have made. Poetry with him was the amusement of his leisure hours, and we might style his quatrains, in the words used by Palgrave about Bacon's stanzas, as “a fine example of a peculiar class of poetry—that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little.” Such intermittent springs of poetry are not much appreciated by Orientals, who like quantity as well as quality. In speaking of a poet, they are generally careful to tell us how many thousand couplets he wrote. They admire Firdusi perhaps more for his having written 50,000 couplets—exclusive of his Joseph and Zulaika—than for his really fine passages, though it must be admitted that they seldom read him through, and practically only know him in extracts. As Professor Cowell has remarked in his excellent notice of Omar, which well deserves reprinting, “Every other poet of Persia has written too much—even her noblest sons of genius weary with their prolixity.

On reading Professor Hilprecht's remarks upon the names in Professor Clay's “Business Documents of Murašû Sons of Nippur,” those upon the element îlu seemed to be especially interesting, and certain lists of gods in the British Museum occurred to me as possibly illustrating the point whether, in Assyro-Babylonian, the word îlu, ‘god,’ was ever used before the name of a deity, and pronounced with it. The inscription printed on the next page is from one of the tablets bearing upon the question.

This article carries on and amends my notes on the Turkī manuscripts of the Bābar-nāma which appeared in this Journal in July 1900, and July 1902. It serves too, as broader basis to the formal preface of the photographic reproduction of the Haydarabad Codex which has been published recently under the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust.

Every Persian scholar must, I suppose, have meditated at some time or other on the extraordinary disproportion between the vast number of Persian poets whose names are familiar to him, and whose lives are enshrined in the Biographies of ‘Awfí, Dawlatsháh, Taqiyyu'd-Dín Káshí, Luṭf ‘Alí Beg, and other tadhkira-writers, and the small number whose works are read, even in the East, save by the very curious or diligent student. So far as the West is concerned, it may be said, I think, that of only four, Firdawsí, Sa‘dí, ‘Umar Khayyám, and Ḥáfi, does any clear and definite idea exist amongst educated Europeans not specially interested in Oriental literature. Of these four, thanks primarily to Edward FitzGerald, ‘Umar Khayyám is certainly the most popular in the West, especially in Europe and America; though ‘Awfí, writing exactly a century after his death, totally ignores him, and Dawlatsháh only mentions him incidentally in the course of another biography; while even his personal friend and admirer, Niámí-i-‘Arúḍí of Samarqand, places him in his Chahár Maqála not in the section which he devotes to poets, but in that which deals with astronomers. Ḥáfi, accessible to non-Orientalists in England in at least three good metrical translations, those of Hermann Bicknell, Miss Gertrude Bell, and Mr. Walter Leaf, and in Germany in the complete versified translation of Rosenzweig-Schwannau, certainly comes next in point of popularity.

It will probably be long before the dīwāns of the Arabic poets are fully utilized by compilers of Moslem history. Widely read in Eastern countries, they are rarely attractive to European taste, trained on quite different models. European editions, such as might be expected to make the most of the historical and archæological matter which they contain, are not in many cases likely to be attempted; and the Oriental editions, though sufficiently trustworthy in point of text, usually provide the historical student with little in the way of help. Guided by the example of Mr. Guest, who indexed Maḳrīzī for this Journal, the present writer hopes to make the access to some of these dīwāns rather easier, by furnishing them with indices of places, persons, and certain other matters. The first dīwān with which he will deal is that of the leader of the great Abbasid trio which consists of Abū Tammām, Buḥturī, and Mutanabbī.

I believe I shall be doing good service to students of Moslem literature if I venture to call their attention to a recently published book, which at first sight may seem quite foreign to their special subject. Dr. Caird's recent Gifford Lectures on the “ Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers” throw a flood of light on the genesis and growth of those Hellenic ideas which have so profoundly modified Christian and some parts of Moslem theology. The scholastic and the mystical theology of Christendom and Islam ran in courses parallel to one another, and the influence of the Hellenic factor is equally operative in both. Each may be regarded as the offspring of a cross between Hebraic and Hellenic ideas. It has, of course, long been recognised that Moslem scholastic theology (Al Kalām) has been built up, like its Christian counterpart, from Aristotelian concepts, and, moreover, that the Christian schoolmen drew much of their knowledge of Aristotle from Arabic authorities. The great commentary of Averroes, for instance, is mentioned by Dante, who censures his doctrine of the Universal Soul, afterwards condemned by the Lateran Council of 1512. Long ago, Jourdain made a careful study of the translations of Aristotle used by the schoolmen, and showed how many of them had come through Arabic. Schmölders proved that Moslem scholasticism is Aristotle with a Neo-Platonic colouring. The so-called “ Theology of Aristotle,” for instance, is merely a summary of the Enneads of Plotinus, “the Shaikh of the Greeks.”

The square bronze coins of Eucratides which bear on the reverse the image and superscription of the tutelary divinity of a city, instead of some type accompanied by the usual kingly name and titles, are well known and have often been published. The Kharoṣṭhī inscription has been read hitherto as “Karisiye nagara-devata”; but this is undoubtedly incorrect. Since the publication of Professor Gardner's Catalogue, tlie British Museum has acquired specimens of this coinage, by means of which the reading of every letter of the inscription can be determined with certainty. Of these additions, the best preserved is the coin now described.

It is a matter of great importance that Bhāmaha's work on Rhetoric has been discovered, and we are now able to judge of his position among Sanskrit authors. A careful and critical study of the work will amply repay the trouble of the reader ; but from a cursory reading I have been able to gather the following particulars of the author and his work, which I trust may be of general interest to the Sanskritists of the present day.

Though many tablets from Tel-loh have been published, both by the Trustees of the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, and others, but little has been written about their contents, the principal work upon the subject being Radau's most noteworthy Early Babylonian History, in which many of the tablets of the Very Rev. E. A. Hoffman's collection are dealt with—a collection apparently rich in rare dates. It has therefore seemed to me that it would be of interest to contribute a few notes upon a section of these documents, as far as I have been able to study them. The collection upon which I have been more especially engaged is that of Lord Amherst of Hackney, to whom I am indebted for kind permission to publish transcriptions and translations of two of these texts, for which I express my sincerest thanks.

Since the note on these coins was published in the Society's Journal last year, p. 681, Mr. A. G. Ellis has been so good as to prepare the following list of the Sijistān or Nīmrūz Maliks from about a.h. 460 to 885, taken from the Iḥyā al-Mulūk, by Shāh Ḥusain b. Ghiyāth al-Dīn:—