In 1668 Francis Bernier was on his way back to Europe after a residence of eight years at the Court of the Great Mughal. At Surat he met M. Carron, who had been sent by Colbert, the great Finance Minister of Louis XIV, to lay the foundations of trade between France and India on behalf of the French East India Company (la Compagnie des Indes Orientales) which had been founded in 1664. It was at Carron's request that Bernier wrote the Memoir which is here published in an English translation.

Father Ronzevalle has now published the text of the important stela from Sudschîn, 14 miles south-east of Aleppo, Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph, xv, 235–260 (1931). On face Aa Bar-ga'yā, king of K-T-K, and Mati‘el, king of Arpad, engage in a treaty before certain gods, most of whom are Babylonian with the exception of the Aramaic Sun-god and ('Elyōn) “the most high”, a title of the same Aramaic deity, the 'Elioun of Sanchounyathōn. In line 10 occur the deities N-K-E and K-D-'-H which may be Aramaic transcriptions of Babylonian, eventually Sumerian deities. Dussaud, Comptes Rendus, 1931, 315, identified these gods with the two titles of Tammuz, Nagar, and KA-DI, which occur together regularly in the Tammuz hymns. The readings of and which Dussaud took from Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, ii, 168, as Nagar and Kadi, were read Lamga and Kasa in my edition. Lamga is only a phonetic variant of Nagar > Lagar > Lamga(r), and there is no reason why the classical form Nagar should not be preferred to the dialectic Lamga. Also Zimmern, Sumerisch-Babylonische Tamuzlieder, Berichten der Phil. Hist.Klasse der Königl. Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften lix, 212, preferred the classical form Nagar, and so does Witzel, RA. 10, 173; 16; 176, 7, etc. Zimmern does not commit himself on the reading Ka-di, which I read Ka-sá, but transcribes KA-DI. Witzel like Meissner reads Ka-di.

Besides the Osmanli Turks dispersed in North and South Bulgaria and the Pomaks or Bulgar Mohammedans of the Ehodope Mountains, there are the less known Yuruks, an interesting shepherd race. Traces of them are found in the Rhodope Mountains, where for centuries they were neighbours of the Karakachans or Aromunian nomad shepherds. The place-names Village-of-Yuruks and Tomb-of-Yuruks occur frequently here.

LE service que M. Reichelt a rendu aux études sogdiennes par sa publication des textes du British Museum ne peut être pleinement apprécié que de ceux qui, pour avoir assumé une t'ache analogue, en connaissent les difficultés. Mais ceux-là savent aussi que tous les obstacles ne cèdent pas à un premier déchiffrement, même sagace. La nouveauté des documents, le nombre considérable de mots inédits, surtout de termes abstraits, et, quand il s'agit de traductions, l'absence des originaux, laissent souvent le chercheur démuni.

IN the year 1405 (a.d. 1098, a.h. 472), fifty-one years after the Turks had conquered these lands, when Alexius was emperor in Constantinople, the Turk Yághí-Siyán (Aksin) had been made governor of Antioch by Abu 'l Fatḥ, the Egyptian Afḍal was in Jerusalem, which he had taken from the Turks Suqmán and his brothers, the sons of Ortuk, two years before, and all the sea-coast was subject to the Egyptians, Theodore Kurbalát the son of Hátim was in Edessa, which he had saved from the Turks, expecting to hand it over to the emperor. At this time many kings and chiefs of the Franks with a big army and workmen of all sorts, thousands and tens of thousands without end, got ready. There were four kings, leaders of armies, Bohemund, Godfrey (Gufra, Gundafra), Saint Gilles, and Tancred (Tangri) with many bishops and monks. They set their faces to go by land through Greek territory, and to cross by the Hellespont, where is Constantinople, and the two seas are joined by a narrow strait. They sent ambassadors to Alexius to prepare and go out with them, to get ready what was needful, and to arrange throughout his land stores of food and fodder for the use of the army. Alexius promised to help them in all they needed.

THE blet illustrated in Plate I was bought at Kûfa and the seller declared that it had been discovered in the neighbourhood, a statement that can doubtless be accepted as true, for there would have been no inducement to bring such an object from a distance for sale at a place so stagnant as Kûfa is now. As affording at least a fairly early example of Kûfic writing coming from the birthplace of the script, it appears worth recording in the absence of other specimens, notwithstanding that it is not marked with a date. Mr. Gerald Reitlinger, who acquired the tablet in 1931 when he was at Kûfa for his exploration of Ḥîra, has been so good as to supply the photograph for publication.

THE archaic Chinese bronze, which is the subject of this article, is in the collection of Captain the Hon. E. G. Spencer-Churchill. It belongs to the class called chüeh, which, among the ritual wine vessels, has the smallest capacity. A Chinese tradition assigns the origin of the peculiar shape to the form of a bird's head, and some support for this view is derived from supposed pictograms which are accepted as having been used to write chüeh in archaic script. On the other hand, certain pottery vessels, found recently at Hsiao-t'un , in Honan, the site of a late Yin capital, suggest a more plausible explanation. The place is famous as one where the inscribed bones first came to light about 1899, and often afterwards it has been claimed as the source of many ancient objects offered for sale.