A Student of Indian History is often surprised to find that what he has been accustomed to look upon from boyhood as sheet anchors of Indian Chronology prove, on closer scrutiny, to be very far from being so. The year 322–321 B.C. for the accession of Candragupta Mauryya is one of such dates.

In an article published in this Journal dated April, 1930, I discussed a tombstone which I considered as the most ancient Islamic monument. This was dated A.H. 31 (A.D. 652).

A Letter from a man called Ishkun-Dagan has been published by M. Thureau-Dangin in Revue d'Assyriologie, xxiii, pp. 23 ff. Another letter of this man has recently been presented to the Trustees of the British Museum by Dr. N. L. Corkill, formerly Civil Surgeon, Baghdad, who very kindly allowed me to study and copy it at Baghdad; it is now numbered 121205. The tablet was obtained in Nasiriyah, and though the statement of the fellaḥ to whom it once belonged that it was found at Sinkarah is of no value, it certainly came from a site in the Muntafik area, very possibly from illicit excavations which are known to have been conducted at Warka. The tablet was probably found at the same time and in the same place as the tablet now in the Louvre, so that they were found in the archive of the sender, not of the addressee, a curious circumstance for which many parallels could be cited. The writing is delicate, very accurate, and large. Owing to an accident when I was examining the tablet at Baghdad, after making my copy of the text which was then complete, the tablet was broken and some signs have now been injured in lines 21–4.

The two hymns here edited are respectively the first and p the last of the four stavasattributed to Nāgārjuna, and generally known and quoted under the comprehensive name Catuḥ-stava or Catu-stava; the other two stotras, missing in our manuscript, are the Lolātīta-stava and the Citta-vajrastava. As to their authorship, there is but little doubt; the style itself is the same as that of the kārikās of the Mūlamādhyamika-kārikās. Moreover, Candrakīrti in his Prasannapadā quotes from the Catuḥ-stava, attributing one of them, viz. the Lokātīta-stava to the Master, ācārya-pādāḥ (p. 413).

The Gudea cylinder A, col. iii, 12, contains a crux interpretationis which editors have failed to overcome. Thureau-Dangin's new copy, Les Cylindres de Gudéa, TC. viii, has NE-gi-BAR a-gal-la dū-a-me. That this is the true division of the signs is proved by iv Raw. 29**, 9 = my SBP. 268; á-ma-al dū-a-bi-e-ne = li'at kalama “wise (goddess) in all things”, and by v Raw. 44, B 14, N.Pr. d.Nannar-á-gal-dūa-bi = Sin-li'i-kullati. The passage occurs in an address of Gudea to Gatumdug. The passage was left untranslated by Thureau-Dangin, SAK. p. 93, but P. Maurus Witzel, Keilschriftliche Studien, Heft 3, p. 2, rendered the line, “Thou art she who causes wheat to thrive by the overflow of waters,” without any note on the text. It is obvious that agalla dū-a me means “thou art wise in all things”. For gal var. of gaĺ, see VAT. 10216 in Meissner's Beiträge zum Assyrischen Wörterbuch, p. 81, 40, note 56, and a for á in a-ma-al = le'u, Ebeling, KAR. 44, Rev. 18. á-gal = rabiš, CT. 21, 48, 6 = VS. i, 33; ii, 4; ug-e a-gal, powerful panther, Genouillac, La Trouvaille de Dréhem, No. 1, 3. NE-gi-BAR cannot possibly be a word for wheat, fruit, or some grain in this passage.

It is usually taken for granted that Marāṭhī literature begins with Mukund Rāj, Jñāneśvar and Nāmdev. These are likely to continue to hold their position as the real inaugurators of the intellectual awakening in Mahārāshṭrā which broke away from Sanscrit and made use of the vernaculars as the literary medium. The recent research which has revealed the fact that these outstanding personalities were not alone in this new departure, has yet to be fully investigated, and the value of the earlier literature which has emerged has to be determined. That the Mānbhāū sect with which this newly discovered literature is associated had a very long and curious history has been known for a good many years, and Sir Eamkrishna Bhandarkar and others had become interested in it, but it is to the late Mr. Vinayak Lakshman Bhave that we owe the discovery that this sect were the guardians from the twelfth century at least of what he calls “an unknown chamber in the palace of Marāṭhī literature”. Of the 500 hitherto unknown authors whose names, he tells us, he has catalogued, and whose works number five or six thousand it is not likely that many will take high literary rank. But to the followers of the Mānbhāū sect who wrote or translated these Gitās and Bhāgavatas so long ago, and who carried the Marāṭhī tongue and their books in old Marāṭhī to Peshawar and beyond, so that to-day in these far-off Maṭhs one can talk to their inmates in that language—to them Mahārāshṭrā owes a real debt. The members of this remarkable sect did more, it would appear, than anyone has hitherto dreamed of to shape the language for literary expression and to make it the channel to its followers of the ancient Sanscrit lore.

[It was well known to his friends that the late Professor A. A. Macdonell had long contemplated the making of a complete English translation of the Ṛgveda. Indeed, he would sometimes point out that a great deal of his work, the edition of the Bṛhaddevatā, the Vedic Mythology, the Vedic Grammar, and the Vedic Index, could be regarded as necessary preliminaries to that undertaking. This was the task he hoped to complete in some five years or so on retiring from the Boden Chair. Unhappily his strength failed him too soon for this to be possible.

In vol. xxix of the Abhandlungen der königlichen sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Professor F. H. Weissbach published a number of the inscriptions which appear above the figures supporting the throne of Darius the Great on his rock-hewn tomb at Naqsh-i-Rustam, nine or ten miles northwest of Persepolis. Three other tombs of the Achaemenian kings exist at Naqsh-i-Rustam, but they are unfortunately uninscribed. Three similar Achaemenian tombs are found at Persepolis itself, two in the mountain face immediately behind the palace platform and one, unfinished, a little way off towards the south. These tombs, being quite easy of access, have often been visited and described. They have always been believed to be lacking inscriptions. Two, the North Tomb and the Unfinished Tomb, have in fact no inscription, but the South Tomb has a well-preserved trilingual inscription which so far as the writer is aware has hitherto completely escaped notice. The inscription is found above the heads of the figures supporting the throne of the Great King, exactly as in the tomb-inscription of Darius the Great, but in a far better state of preservation.

Jules Rouanet, the well-known writer on the music of the Maghrib, lamented not long ago that none of the mediaeval treatises of the Western Arabian musical system had survived. This he said, was all the more regrettable because to-day not a solitary practitioner in the Maghrib had the slightest acquaintance with musical theory. The ṭubū' or modes were confused in the various parts of the country. The ṭab' known in Algiers as mazmūm is called dīl in Tlemcen, whilst the mazmūm of Tlemcen is the dīl or māya of Algiers.

The title maḫḫû has been entered in the lexicons as “prophet”, and the Persian-Greek μγος has been derived from it, a derivation now generally abandoned. In the first place maḫḫû = galu-gub-ba, is placed after kalû, psalmist, galamaḫḫu, chief psalmist, munambû = i-lu-di, wailer, lallaru, wailer, CT. 19, 41, K. 4328 A 14–20 = Meissner, Suppl. 21, Rm. 338 Rev. ii, 1–5 = VAT. 10216, iv, 1–5, Meissner, Beiträge 83, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Assyr. Studies, i, 1. VAT. 9558, ii, 32 ff. has three ideograms for maḫḫu (all broken away), and maḫḫûtu, Meissner, ibid., 86 n. 123.