Khurāsān in the middle ages was far more extensive than is the province of this name in modern Persia. Mediæval Khurāsān extended on the north-east to the Oxus, and included all the districts round Herat which now belong to Afghanistān. On the other hand, the small province of Kūmis, on the northern boundary of the Great Desert, which at the present day is included within the limits of Persian Khurāsān, was of old a separate district, and formed in the time of Mustawfi a province apart.

Mayyāfārīqīn, like many a Moslem city, was not without its historian, but hitherto he has been a name only—Ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriqi—known to us by the quotations from his history in the biographies of Ibn Khallikān. Now, however, the British Museum has acquired a nearly complete copy of the Ta'rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn, Or. 5,803. Its date of composition is 572 a.h. The MS. is written in a good hand, and wascopied probably at Damascus, and in the seventh century of the Hijra. It contains 200 folios of about twenty-two closely written lines a side: the first eight folios, to 17 a.h., are wanting; a gap, covering the years 567–9, follows folio 194, and the years 571–2 are wanting at the end.

His full name and title ran as-Sulṭánu'l-A'dham Mu'izzu'd-Dunyá wa'd-Din Abu'l-Ḣárith Sinjar b. Maliksháh Burhánu Amiri'l-Múminín. His motto (tawqí') was . His prime ministers were Mu'ínu'd-Dín Mukhtaṣṣ of Káshán, Shihábu'd-Dín Abu'l-Maḥásin b. al-Faqíhu'1-ajall (nephew of the Nidhámu'l-Mulk), Sharafu'd-Dín Abú Ṭáhir Mámísá of Qum, Yaghán b. al-Káshgharí, Qiwámu'd-Dín Abu'l-Qásim, and Náṣiru'd-Dín Ṭáhir b. Fakhru'1-Mulk. His chamberlains were the Amír Ghuzughlú cf. Bundárí, p. 185, 1.16, which has , Ḥusayn al-Ḥájib, Nidhámu'd-Dín Maḥmud of Káshán, and Falaku'd-Dín ‘Alí Chatrí (cf. Bundárí, p. 225,1. 1).

Since writing the letter on this subject which appears in the January number of the J.R.A.S. I have examined the British Museum MS. Or. 3,248 more carefully, and have obtained a clue to its authorship. Dr. Rieu and Professor Denison Ross considered the work to be anonymous, and regarded the name at the end—Muḥammad ‘Alī, son of Nūra—as being probably that of the owner or copyist. I am inclined to think that it is the name of the author, and that the work is more recent and less valuable than has hitherto been supposed. No doubt the writer has used some old records, and it would appear from a marginal note that a manuscript called the Qissa Ṣafavi, and which seems to have been lost, was the basis of the work. It is also likely that he used the TārīkhShāhī of Abdullah Marwārid, but I think that Or. 3,248 cannot have been put together earlier than the first half of the seventeenth century. We know from Mr. Denison Ross's paper in the J.R.A.S. for April, 1896, that the work must have been composed, in whole or in part, after 946 A.H. (or 1539), as it records the death of Muḥammad Zamān Mīrzā, which occurred in that year during the flight after Humāyūn's defeat at Causā by Sher Shāh. But there are two marginal notes in the manuscript which have hitherto escaped notice, and which show, I think, that the work must have been written at a still later period, and also that the author did not expect or intend that he should remain anonymous. These notes are not perfectly intelligible, for the margins have been clipped in binding (before the MS. came into the Museum), and consequently some important words are missing, but their general purport can be understood.

Before the Lógos of Heraclitus, as is usual in the cases of all originators, the thing ‘originated’ was already present in its germ for his use in the half-formed surmises of his predecessors.

For it was none other than Hesiod who used a word and expressed an idea which, together with the hints of other schemes, led up to the early concept. The first Greek naturalists believed, indeed, in an original substance of the universe, out of which everything arose and in which everything consisted; they also attributed to it life and motion, and gave it different names. One thought it was ‘water.’ Another called it the infinite (sic), as undefined substance matter. At other times they thought it was ‘air.’

In the title of my paper the stress is to be laid upon the word ‘etymological.’ The vocabulary does not contain all the Māldivian words which I collected during the last five or six years, either from printed books, or from manuscripts hitherto unpublished, or from the lips of Māldivian natives. For it was by no means my intention to compile a Māldivian dictionary for practical use: this would be premature; it may perhaps be done at some future time. For the present my purpose is purely philological. The present object is to publish linguistic materials which may serve as a basis for a scientific phonology of the Māldivian language. My vocabulary is, therefore, both an introduction and a supplement to the third part of my “Māldivian Studies,” which deals with that subject. First, I have excluded, of course, from my vocabulary the numerous words borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, as they do not belong to the original stock of the Māldivian dialect. But I have omitted also generally those words which cannot be explained in a satisfactory way by the help of phonetic laws confirmed by other etymologies which are not open to doubt. There remains, nevertheless, a sufficient number of words to show clearly the character of the Māldivian language. It is merely a dialect, and not even a very ancient dialect, of Sinhalese. This result is, I think, also of historical interest; for it appears from it that the Māldive islands were occupied by Sinhalese people, but hardly at an earlier period than about eight or nine centuries ago.

South-East Persia, the history of which I propose to discuss very briefly, consists of the provinces of Kirmān and Persian Baluchistān, in which I have been travelling since 1893, and where I was commissioned to found a consulate in 1894. Before, however, approaching their history, it seems advisable to recapitulate the physical featuresof these desert provinces, which, aselsewhere, have mainly owed their history to their geographical conditions.