There's never two without a third, they say. So I might have guessed, after being twice unsuspectingly drawn into this Omar business, that presently I should be bothered again. But I didn't guess; and so it was a surprise, and I suppose as a pretender to scholarship I ought to say a pleasant surprise, when last fall (my transatlanticism is not without justification) I received a letter from Professor Arthur Upham Pope asking me if I would like to have a look at yet another ancient codex of Omar that had turned up, this time in New York. I fell; and these notes are the first fruits of that transdigression. I don't know yet who owns the thing; it flew the Atlantic twice to my knowledge; where its present resting place may be I cannot imagine.

Before the discovery of the ancient inscriptions of southern Arabia by Arnaud, Halévy, Glaser, and several other explorers, knowledge of the pre-Islamic peoples of Yemen and Ḥaḍramawt was incomplete and imprecise, and was derived from the Old Testament, the annals of Assyrian kings, and from the classical and Arab historians and geographers.

The object of the present article is to re-state two obscure problems and to show that their likely solution can be found only in tṛeating them jointly. The two points are: the name of the ancient capital of the Ās (Alāns, now Ossets), as attested in the tenth century, and the identification of the town *MKS conquered by the Mongols in the course of the campaign of 636/1239.

As the sources on the latter event are more numerous I shall deal with it first. On the Muslim side we have two accounts of Batu's campaign, that of Juvaynī who completed his work in 658/1260, and that of Rashīd al-dīn, who wrote about 710/1310.

This article takes as its point of departure the conclusions drawn in Professor Arberry's paper “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”. It is hopefully intended both to add to those conclusions in their own sphere of poetical criticism and to suggest something of the relevance of the problem as a whole in the broad structure of Persian thought. (It seems scarcely necessary to add that the extent to which that will imply Islamic thought and Eastern thought generally is, in every sense of the word, incalculable.)

1. From the period of the rule of the Kuṣāṇa family of the Saka kings cor three inscriptions from Mathurā. Of the first two neither is completely preserved, but in both a word bakanapati is unmistakably present. The first inscription is of the time of the mahārāja rājātirāja devaputra Huviṣka. The second inscription written on a pedestal seems to contain the name Vima, and this by both K. P. Jayaswal and Mme van Lohuizen de Leeuw is considered to mean Vima Kadphises, though Sten Konow expressed his doubts.

(a) Material for the present article was obtained before and during a recent period of study-leave in Cyrenaica. My particular informant, who also accompanied me during the tour, was Mr. Idris ‘Abdallah, from Gyrene, a member of the Ḥāsa tribe. The dialect illustrated may be termed the Bedouin dialect of the Jebel.

Examples are given throughout in Arabic script and follow the method used by my informant for writing his dialect. Thus presented, they are immediately intelligible to a literate Cyrenaican, who is accustomed to written colloquialisms, for example in letters, petitions, agreements, and vernacular (usually Bedouin) poems appearing in the local Press. The phonetic transcription is intended to suggest a pronunciation for the examples.

A convention existed among Manichæan copyists whereby most Parthian poetry was written as prose, the verses being separated only by some device of punctuation. The method saved a considerable amount of paper. Yet there are texts set out as poetry, in separate lines with a space between verses. The two great hymn-cycles, Huwīdagmān and Angad Rōšnan, are invariably presented in this way. These exist in the fragments of thirty-odd MSS. of very varied character; it is evident, therefore, that in their case the manner of presentation did not depend on individual taste or means, but was regarded as proper to the texts themselves.

Vol. XIV, p. 242. Two misprints appeared on this page after page proofs had been corrected, as follows:—

1. 9, arête for aretē (i.e. rightful function);

1. 15, ḳulûl for ḥulûl.

Dans une communication au Xe Congrès des Orientalistes, Margoliouth a caractérisé comme il convient la correspondance de Ḍiyâ ad-dîn ibn al-Athîr, et donné la substance d'un certain nombre des lettres officielles rédigées par cet auteur et se référant à des faits historiques notables des années 615 à 630 de l'Hégire environ. Mais Margoliouth ne connaissait qu'un manuscrit de la correspondance de Ḍiyâ ad-dîn, celui de la Bodléienne Pococke 322, qui, ainsi qu'il l'avait remarqué, ne contient de lettres que de la dernière période de la vie de l'auteur. Or il en existe d'autres. Sans parler de celui de Top-Kapu 2630, que je n'ai pu connaître, ni du court fragment de Berlin Ahlwardt 8629, un beau manuscrit, de peu postérieur au temps de l'auteur, a été acquis par la School of Oriental Studies de Londres, qui, si la plupart des lettres qu'il contient coïncident, dans un ordre différent, avec une partie de celles du ms. d'Oxford, en renferme cependant quelques autres. Surtout, il m'a été donné de voir à la Bibliothèque Nationale un recueil, écrit au XI/XVe siècle, de 215 lettres de Diyâ ad-dîn, émanant toutes, semble-t-il, des périodes de sa vie antérieures à 610 environ. Si nous remarquons qu'à peu près tous les extraits de lettres de lui-même donnés par Ḍiyâ ad-dîn dans son traité didactique sur l'art de la rédaction al-Mathalu's-sâ'iru fîadabi'l-kâtibi wa'sh-shâ'iri (éd. Bulaq 1282/1865) se retrouvent dans le recueil susdit, nous pouvons donc admettre qu'il nous donne, pour la partie de la vie de Ḍiyâ ad-dîn approximativement antérieure à celle couverte par les deux manuscrits d'Angleterre, l'état à peu près complet de la correspondance de cet auteur, ou du moins de ce qu'il en avait conservé. Malheureusement, le manuscrit en question appartient à un propriétaire privé iraqien, et il a été laissé à la Bibliothèque Nationale trop peu de temps pour qu'il m'ait été possible de lire beaucoup plus que l'intitulé des lettres. Néanmoins, comme il est difficile de savoir dans quelle mesure ce manuscrit sera jamais à la disposition des chercheurs, je pense ne pas faire œuvre inutile en indiquant, dans ces limites, l'essentiel de son contenu.

In the course of a recent study (a thesis on Abū-l-‘Alā’ as a poet), I have come upon certain words in Luzūm mā la- Yalzam which, to the best of my knowledge, do not occur in Ibn Durayd's Jamharah, Al-Asās, al-Ṣiḥāḥ, al-Qāmūs, al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ, Täj al-'Arūs, Lisān al-'Arab, al-Jāsūs ‘ala-l-Qāmūs, Lane's Lexicon, or al-Munjid. It might be interesting, from the point of view of Arabic philology, to examine some of these rare words here, if only because they occur in the work of such a distinguished authority as Abū-l-‘Alā’. I have consulted the texts in which these words occur in the Cairo edition of the Luzūm, the Bombay edition, and the British Museum MS., Or. 3160.

The text and translation is given below of two documents concerning the grant of an allowance in the form of a soyūrghāl. The first document, dated Ṣafar 1067 A.h. (Nov.-Dec., 1656 A.d.), concerns the redistribution of a grant dated Ramaẓān 1047 A.h. (Jan.-Feb., A.d. 1638) among the heirs of the original grantee, Mīr Ni'matullāh ‘Abd al-Wahhābī, a sayyid. The second document, dated Sha'ban 1115 (Jan.-Feb., A.d. 1704), deals with the settlement of disputes among the heirs of the original grantee concerning their respective shares. These documents illustrate the complicated problems which arose with the fragmentation of grants by inheritance.

§ 1. There is in all languages a considerable difference between literary and colloquial usage. Sometimes this difference is so great that one can almost speak of two distinct languages. But even when the contrast is less striking it remains true that a large part of the vocabulary and a number of grammatical forms are to be encountered only in books and do not come spontaneously to the lips in natural speech; just as, on the other hand, there are words and expressions to be heard on every side in ordinary conversation that would be unthinkable in formal writing. All this is as true of Persian as of any other language; but whereas in the West the colloquial idiom has long since achieved literary recognition in the drama and in fiction, this is by no means the case in Persia, where recent experiments in the recording of the spoken language have met with strong opposition from the upholders of the classical tradition. The first shot hi this new ‘Battle of the Books’ was fired more than 30 years ago by Sayyed Mohammad ‘Ali amālzāde with the publication of his celebrated collection of short stories known as Yekī būd yekī na-būd, in which he introduced into Persian literature a host of words and phrases in common use by all classes throughout Persia but unrecorded in dictionaries and carefully avoided by men of letters. ǰamālzāde was content to enrich the vocabulary of the literary language: it was left to men like the late Sādeq Hedāyat and his disciple Sādeq Čūbak to take a second and much more controversial step and to make the creatures of their imagination employ, as nearly as possibly, the actual pronunciation and grammar of the spoken language.

This paper is intended to summarize the results of our observations on the phonetics of the Georgian language, gathered in some fifteen sessions of listening with our informant, Mr. A. Gugushvili. Mr. Gugushvili, who has been on the Panel of Additional Lecturers as a part-time teacher of Georgian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was born in Kutais and describes his speech as normal educated West Georgian. He has lived in this country for the past twenty-four years as a member of the Georgian community in London, and has been engaged in the study of Georgian history and literature.

TheAṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, like many other Oriental books, is a collective work which has been subjected to additions and alterations in the course of the centuries, to suit the tastes of new generations. In this respect it does not differ from the Mahāvastu, the Lalitavistara, the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka, the Suvarṇaprabhãsa, etc., which have all been slowly built up over a long period. If the historical investigation of the doctrinal development within the Mahāyāna is to make any progress, we must learn to distinguish between the different layers in these texts. Some work has been done already on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, the Samādhirāja, the Suvarṇaprabhāsa, and the Kāraṇḍavyūha. Without hoping to exhaust the subject, I intend to point out in this article the most obvious accretions to the basic original text of the Aṣṭa°. This, in its turn, must have grown gradually, but in the present state of our knowledge we cannot, I think, trace out its growth. In any case, such analytical studies of ancient writings are tedious to compose and unattractive to read, and when carried too far they threaten to shatter and pulverize the very text which they set out to examine, as we have seen in the case of Homer and the New Testament.

Considerable expectation has been raised by the announcement from Turkey that the Dīwān or collected poems of the famous 12th-century author Ibn Bājjah (Avempace) has been discovered. Nowadays when Ibn Bājjah's name is mentioned we think of him as a prominent figure of what may be called the Spanish school of Arabic philosophy. But in his own time and later Ibn Bājjah's reputation as musician and poet, cultivator inter alia of the new poetical style of muwashshaḥāt, was, it appears, scarcely less high than his philosophic fame. The biographers have preserved for us a score or two of his verses, some of which have been englished by A. R. Nykl. In general however, we are short of material to form a judgment on what was evidently a very characteristic part of Ibn Bājjah's activity. His complete Dīwān has till now apparently never been heard of, but the news that it had been brought to light was not on that account less welcome.

The Avromān parchments, two (I and II) in Greek and one (III) in Parthian, were brought to England in 1913 by Dr. Sa'īd Khan Kurdistāni and were acquired soon afterwards by the British Museum. Professor E. H. Minns, of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in his article ‘Parchments of the Parthian Period from Avroman in Kurdistan’, published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1915, has translated and discussed at length the two Greek texts. The latest and most authoritative of several articles on the Parthian manuscript is that of Dr. H. S. Nyberg entitled ‘The Pahlavi Documents from Avroman’, in Le Monde Oriental of 1923. The summary of information relevant to the present paper given in the following three paragraphs is based on these articles.

1. Sk. k-.

Initial k- remains:

karanu, karite, karavaya, karavā, kaṭu, koṭu, koṭ, ko(ṭa)vaya, kaḷa-, Kaḷahu, kaḷavun, kaḷamanā, karana-, karaṇa-, karavika, kereyani, kärū, karu (error for kärū), kärävū, kärvū, kärvū, karä, kära, kärä, kaṭäyutu; Kuḍakaṇa-; karanaka; kahāvaṇa; kāru-; Kama(la)-; Kasaba-, Kasub-; kavuḍu; kapa-; Kiliňg-; kusalayan; kämi-; kämiyanaṭ, kämiyan; (kukuḷ)-; käbäli; Kit-; kit; kushi; kavari-; kasun-; kam-; kālayehi; kulen; kuluṇ-; koṭhā, koṭā; keṭū; kī; kiyā; kapanu.

At the beginning of the Nirukta Yāska mentions the four parts of speech (noun, verb, upasarga, and nipāta), and gives definitions of the first two: verbs are chiefly concerned with being-and-becoming (bhävapradhānam ākhyātam), while nouns are chiefly concerned with existants (sattvapradhānāni nāmāni). After a brief discussion, with examples, he proceeds to give an argument against the possibility of classifying the parts of speech. This somewhat cryptic passage, which has been the subject of a considerable amount of discussion, is as follows:—

indriyanitya vacanam audumbarāyaŋa. tatra catuşvam nopapadyate, 'yugapad-utpannānā vā śabdānām itaretaropadeśa śāstrakrto yogaś ca. vyāptimattvāt tu śabdasyānīyastvāc ca śabdena sajnā-karaŋa vyavāhārārtha loke. teşä manuşyavad devatā-bhidhānam. puruşavidyānityatvāt karmasampattir mantro vede.

When Soslan went to the land of the giant Uomar, son of Tara, he pretended to be his own hireling: Tari furt Uomari zænxæmæ ranæxstæræy ye'xuærsti ræuoni, Pam. ii 60. The Dictionary translates Dig. ræuonæ as ‘cause, pretext, appearance’, and quotes our passage to illustrate the third meaning: ‘in the appearance of his hireling.’ There is, however, another passage, in which ræuonæ clearly means ‘disguise’. Uaskergi had placed watchmen at the gorge of Zadælesk, to prevent Cænxigol, the spirit of salt, from leaving the heights. The villain Sirdon advises Cænxigol: mæn gadcay ræuændtæy leu næ rayervæzay uædta, dæ ramardzænæncæ ‘if you do not escape by means of my bitch's ræuændtæ (plur. of ræuonæ) they will kill you’; thereupon Cænxigol Sirdoni gadcay cari bacudæy ma uotemæy qalaurtæbæl rayevhudæy, “Sirdoni gadca æy!” zæhgæy ‘Cænxigol entered the hide of Sirdon's bitch and thus passed by the watchmen, who said: “it is Sirdon's bitch”’ (Miller, Ocemuhckue Эmю∂ы i 102). Miller translated mæn gadcay ræuændtæy as ‘by the ruse of my bitch’; evidently the meaning is ‘by disguising yourself as my bitch’. The plural ræuændtæ is also used, according to B., my Digor friend, when the word means ‘pretext’.

It has been recognized long ago that Ptolemy's topography of Cis-Gangetic India was based on trade-routes. Nearly a century ago Vivien de Saint Martin spoke of “the almost exclusive employment of itineraries of merchants and caravans indicating on each route the series of daily stations”. We may compare the lists of stations inserted in books on India of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the earliest examples we find in Joannes de Laet's little volume De Imperio Magni Mogolis (Leiden, 1631), p. 57. The author evidently derived his lists from the itineraries of the English merchants Richard Steel and John Crowther. The French jeweller and traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier has included full lists of stations along the principal trade-routes in his Indian Travels (ch. iv–xii). In the first place he deals with the two routes from Surat to Agra, all-important to European traders, the one by the Tāptī valley and Mālwā, the other by way of Aḥmadābād and Rājpūtānā. If we keep in mind that Ptolemy must have used similar lists, it will go far to explain the disconcerting fact that so many among the localities in his tables are not known from indigenous sources, either literary or epigraphical, whereas famous towns have been omitted. His tables are fundamentally lists of stages, and this must be our guiding principle in unravelling the riddle of Ptolemy's topography. The present note is an attempt to demonstrate this in some detail.