Colonel James Tod has stated in his Annals of Rājasthāna that in V.S. 526 (A.D. 470) Rāṭhōra Nayapāla acquired the kingdom of Kanauj after killing king Ajayapāla. This assertion does not seem to be correct, for, though the Rāshṭrakūṭas had had their sway over Kanauj ere this, yet about this particular period king Skandagupta or his son Kumāragupta of the Imperial Gupta dynasty ruled over Kanauj. After this the Maukharīs occupied it, and their power was set aside, for some time, by the Baisas, who took possession of Kanauj. But after the death of Harsha the Maukharīs again made it their capital. About V.S. 798 (A.D. 741) king Lalitāditya (Muktāpīḍa) of Kāshmīr had invaded Kanauj, then, too, it was the capital of Yashōvarman, the Maukhari ruler. Further it appears from the copper grant of V.S. 1084 (A.D. 1027) of Pratihāra king Trilōchanapāla and from the inscription of V.S. 1093 (A.D. 1036) of Yashahpāla that the Pratihāras ruled over Kanauj about that time.

In 205 B.C., while Hannibal was still standing on Italian soil, the Great Goddess from Pessinus in Phrygia, a town then situated in the land of the Celtic Galatians, was brought to Rome in the shape of a black stone. The Sibylline books are said to have advised this transplantation of Kybele to the banks of the Tiber. These Sibylline books were copies of oracles given by the Sibyl of Cumæ in Campania, where she acted as priestess of Apollo. Now it has been shown that the Sibyl, who is mentioned by Herakleitos, is originally probably identical with the Sipylene, i.e. the Goddess from Mount Sipylos. This is one of the designations of the Great Phrygian Goddess called in Rome Mater deum Magna Idaea, the Great Mother of the Gods from Mount Ida. The origin of the Sibyl is placed in Phrygia by Herakleides of Pontos, and Pausanias mentions Erythrai, near Smyrna, situated not far from the Sipylos range, as well as Marpessos on Mount Ida as birthplaces of the Sibyl. The Sibyl of Cumæ therefore counselled the introduction into Rome of the worship of a goddess with whom she must have been connected since ancient times; Apollo himself comes from Asia Minor.

While excavating at the side of the foundations of the Temple of Ishtar in some Parthian houses on Kouyunjik in 1930–1, we found a quantity of black-painted pottery, to all appearances of an early date, of the same kind as appeared in 1927 and 1929, when Mr. Hutchinson was in charge of the pottery. This painted ware, while reminiscent of the well-known ware from Susa and Babylonia, has a distinct type of its own, and we are still in doubt about its exact date, but it is presumably of the Third Millennium. Its presence in Parthian levels led us to assume that some Parthian archaeologist had collected it.

K. 4874 is the right half of a square tablet, originally about 5 inches wide and 4½ inches long. Translation by Sayce, but the text has not been published. Owing to its fragmentary condition, the document has value almost exclusively for Sumerian and Semitic philology. It must belong to a series, for part of the Sumerian catch-line is preserved. The only similar tablet, known to me, is the Assyrian copy of a Babylonian bilingual account of the return of the statue of Marduk from Elam to Babylon, K. 3444, with duplicate, K. 3317, published in IV Kaw. 20, No. 1. K. 4874 is not entirely bilingual. Of the 62 lines on this tablet, Obv. 11–12, 17, 22, 25–26–27, 36, have no Sumerian equivalents, unless it be supposed that these lines contained Sumerian translations on the left side of the tablet. Obverse 23 proves that it is a royal inscription and semi-historical.

Among the tablets found by the French excavators at Ras Shamra, south of Antioch, written in the alphabetic cuneiform script and published by M. Virolleaud (Syria, x, 1929), there is one (No. 4) which has been omitted by Père Dhorme in his brilliant article on the transliteration and translation of the texts in the Revue Biblique, xiv, 1 (Jan., 1931). The reason for the omission is that the language of the text is not Phœnician, but an unknown form of speech. The text itself is a fairly long one, and is divided into short paragraphs, the separate words being also divided from one another as in the Phœnician texts.

The button-shaped seal communicated in this paper was kindly shown to me by Professor A. B. Cook, of Cambridge, who purchased it from a London dealer. The object was seen by the Cambridge professor among a lot of “Assyrian cone seals, etc.”, but the dealer had no recollection of its provenance. Babylonian press seals of the small coneshaped variety are constantly appearing in the hands of dealers in antiquities, and seals of the Indus Valley type, actually found in Mesopotamia, have been acquired through dealers in Paris. There is no evidence that any of the seals found in the hands of dealers have come from India, and the additional circumstance that the London dealer had it among Babylonian seals leads one to believe that this object was found in lower Mesopotamia. The photograph is made from a cast. There is the usual pierced boss on the reverse. The inscription reads:—

Reading right to left, the first sign seems to be intended for the ordinary sign , which does occur in some texts as the first sign. See No. 266 of my Sign List, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, p. 451. The second sign is apparently a variant of No. 113, but I have never seen any variant like it. No. 113 does follow 266 on two seals. To No. 113 I assigned the value ta. The third sign is No. 154, with accent A ('). The fourth sign is the common fish sign, No. 175.

It is at a relatively late date that the writing of history begins in the Arabic literature. The Arabs of the earliest period of Islām seem to lack all historical sense, and their theologians proved entirely hostile to historical studies. The impetus towards such investigations was not given until the second half of the second century A.H., when, under the ‘Abbāsides, the Arabs came into close touch with the Sāsānides, whose political ideas and civilization were accepted by the caliphs of Baghdād. Persian customs, Persian knowledge pervaded the empire and brought forth one of the most remarkable phenomena of history: the subjugation of the conqueror by the conquered, possessed of higher intellectual gifts.

THE following notes, which are the result of a fresh study of the Aramaic documents from Egypt in Cowley's admirable edition, are here published in the hope that they may do something towards resolving some of the difficulties Which still await a solution in these important texts.

The formula “Ch'ên is of the Dragon kind”, , ch'ên shu lung, applies to one of the , or Twelve Affinities, according to which each of the Cycle of Twelve Branches has an affinity to one of Twelve Animals. When this Cycle of Twelve Beasts was first known to the Chinese may be uncertain, but pure chance can hardly be responsible for the association in the list of ch'ên with lung, which must, at least, be the expression of a long tradition of affinity. That “Ch'ên is of the Dragon kind”, then, is the text on which this paper is based, and the implications of which are further developed.

The following are the texts of the four Maghribī MSS. the translations of which appeared in April, 1931. Further, a few mistakes crept into my last article. On page 354, line 14, the last letter under should obviously have been Ḥ and not J, whilst the doubtful word given in the footnote 2 ought to have been . Finally, I regret that a line was omitted from verse 23, on page 364.

The number of subjects now labelled as Oriental and the increasing development of knowledge concerning each, of these subjects, make it materially impossible for an individual to derive more than a fraction of the advantages offered by a Congress such as that recently held at Leyden. There were no fewer than nine sections (in fact, there should have been ten, a special section for Islamic Art having been eliminated) and over 200 papers were read during the five days that the Congress lasted, some of the sections sitting nearly five hours a day. It was inevitable that keenly interested delegates should again and again have to choose between equally attractive papers, especially where the third section (Central and Near Asia) and the eighth (Islam) were concerned.

Of the five opportunities given me these thirty-nine years for such a talk on such an occasion as this, the present one may well be the last. I have on these occasions considered, in the Buddhist field, Women, the Will, Natural Causation, and the Man as Real. I would now say a few words on that which is, historically speaking, the most central subject of all—the subject which is, by general assent, within and without that religion, the New Word with which it was introduced, the first Mantra recorded as of the Founder of it, the so-called Benares ‘sermon’. For we may talk much about legends of him on the one hand, or about the many ways in which his teaching expanded at later periods, in so-called philosophy and in this and that word-value, obscuring the man-value, but the one thing of chief historical importance is and remains the Mantras he first uttered as teacher, and their significance in the religious history of the there and then. To this I would add, in the pertinent phrase of a recent synoptical narrative, “the meaning which these will have had in the mind of their original author.”

The Fāṭiāmid Khilāfat, which had sprung into existence as the result of the widespread Ismā'ili propaganda at the end of the third century a.h., was at first consolidated on the soil of Northern Africa in the year 297 A.H. During the reign of al Mu'izz billāh, the centre of influence of the Fāṭimid Empire was transferred to Egypt, a change that was responsible for the foundation of Cairo. But the Fāṭimid conception of the state would not be contented merely with sovereignty over Egypt and the surrounding countries. The Fāṭimid movement strove to engulf the whole of the Islamic world and to unite the various small Islamic principalities in one 'Alid kingdom.