European science is indebted to Dr. M. A. Stein's industry for the remarkable document here published. It is one of the many valuable MSS. which fell to his lot through the partial acquisition in 1907 of an ancient library discovered, by a Chinese priest, in one of the Buddhist cave temples of the “Halls of the Thousand Buddhas” to the south-east of the Tun-huang oasis, as described by him in the Geographical Journal for September, 1909. Its excellent state of preservation, and the fact of its being written in the clear unequivocal letters of the Manichæan alphabet, renders this MS. a most valuable help to all interested in the study of the ancient Turkish speech in which it is edited.

Having dealt in JRAS., October, 1909, and July, 1910, with the Talaing text of the inscriptions of the Myazedi pagoda at Pagan (Burma), I propose to offer a few suggestions here upon the hitherto undeciphered fourth text of this polyglot record. This text, like each of the others, exists in two copies, on two separate pillars. On the one it measures about 39½ by 13 inches, on the other about 45½ by 11 to 12 inches. I shall call the former A, the latter B, when a distinction has to be made between them. The script is an old form of the Indian alphabet.

This edict is displayed on the western face of the great monolith pillar standing in front of the Jo-k'aṅ temple of Lhasa, the eastern face of which bears the joint treaty-edict between the Emperor Tê-Tsung and King K'ri Sroṅ-lde-btsan of 783 A.D., already published by me in the first article of this series. Like the latter edict it is in bilingual form, Tibetan and Chinese.

Chao ju-kwa, in his famous ethnographical work published during the first half of the thirteenth century (between 1205 and 1258 a.d.), mentions, among the one hundred and more countries of Western India (Hsi- T'ien = the Sind of Edrīsī and later Arab writers), that of Nan-ni-hwa-lo, of which he gives an interesting account. This has been made readily accessible to non-Sinologists through a translation by Professor Hirth which appeared in an earlier number of this Journal.

Since writing the article in the October number of the Journal for 1910 (pp. 1283 ff.), I have been further examining some of the manuscript treasures which Dr. Stein succeeded in recovering from the immured Temple Library near Tun-huang. In that article I gave extracts from two “bilingual” texts which I discovered among those treasures, and which promised to furnish us with the key to the southern of the two unknown languages of Eastern Turkestan. In the present article I propose to report another discovery, which seems to throw light on some phonetic peculiarities of that language.

The Kaliyuga era is a Hindū reckoning beginning at mean sunrise, 6.0 a.m., Laṇkā or Ujjain time, on Friday, 18 February, b.c. 3102. Its 5013th year will have begun just before the time when these pages come into the hands of readers of this Journal.

Le fascicule du mois de Janvier 1911 du JRAS. contient un memoire de M. A. Cowley intitule “Another Unknown Language from Eastern Turkestan”. dont il parait impossible de dire qu'il n'est pas “sensationnel”. nous apporte en effet une ecriture inconnue d'origine arameenne, une langue mysterieuse, des documents d'un type precieux et rare puisqu'il s'agit de lettres et non de textes publics religieux ou civils; il nous fournit enfin des textes dont il est possible de determiner l'age de facon approximative, dont la haute antiquite est a peu pres certaine et qui proviennent du limes chinois lui-meme, d'un point situe, il est vrai a l'ouest de Touenhouang mais a l'extreme limite de ce que Ton peut appeler le Turkestan. Pour tous ceux qui s'interessent a l'histoire de l'Asie, a la resurrection des langues, des peuples, et des civilisations qui ont vecu entre la Chine, la Perse, et l'lnde, que d'attraits nouveaux et de problemes irritants!