Line 18 of the Moabite Stone is frequently quoted as the only early instance of the use of the divine name outside Israel. The sentence runs as follows: By comparison with 1.12 the lacuna was filled by , which Mr.Clermont-Ganneau long-ago rejected. In 1. 12 is singular, its meaning is obscure, and it is used with the verb or , which is also obscure. Here the verb is and would be plural. The two passages are therefore clearly not parallel and the reading is not convincing. Hence it has been proposed more recently to read “the instruments of J.”, a very weak phrase. As a matter of fact I believe that the passage in to be understood in quite a different way, and I suggest the reading “and I took from thence what should be for myself (i.e. my own share, as king)”. In order to see if the original would admit of such a reading, I made a careful examination of the stone in the Louvre in April, 1914, when Mr. René Dussaud most kindly put all the material at my disposal. At the end of 1. 17 nothing is left on the stone after . The squeeze supplies , after which there is a stroke | which may belong to an aleph (usually printed as certain), and with a little good will I thought I could see a trace of its head. The lines are not all of equal length. There would be room for , or, if the line is long, . At the beginning of 1.18 is clear. The verb“to be” does not occur elsewhere in the inscription, so that we do not know its form in the dialect of Moab. But in Isaiah 164(“the burden of Moab”)it has been suggested that is used in imitation of Moabite speech. If so, the verb was written with a .

I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the great Kumbh Mela at Allahabad in February, 1918. There I found that Śaṅkara's Daśnāmī sannyāsīs were more numerous than any other group of ascetics, and that next to them in numbers came the Rāmānandī Vairāgīs. This illustrates the fact that in the history of religion in North India Rāmānanda is one of the very greatest figures. Yet very little is known about him with certainty. Hitherto his date, life, sect, teaching, attitude to caste have all been uncertain. Is it possible to-day to throw any light upon his historical position?

We take his date first. The traditional dates are 1299–1410. The great age to which this makes him live is at least suspicious, so that the statement requires to be tested; and since his immediate predecessors and all his chief disciples are known, we may be able from their chronological position to realize when he lived.

Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṣṭrī is the name of a particular script used in Afghanistan, the Punjab, and portions of Central Asia from the fourth or fifth centuries before Christ to the third or fourth centuries of the Christian era. In the third or fourth centuries a.d. it gradually went out of use, the place being taken by one or more forms of the mediaeval Brāhmī. In the eighteenth century the earlier generation of epigraphists and archæologists used to call this script “Bactrian”, “Indo-Bactrian”, “Bactro-Pali”, “Ariano-Pali”, etc. Then it was identified with the Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṭṭhī lipi, on the evidence of the Fa-wan-shu-lin. The Chinese work describes the “ass-lip” (Kham-oṣṭha in Sanskrit) script, invented by one Kharoṣṭha, in which the writing ran from the right to left. This identification, proposed by George Bühler, has since met with general acceptance.

In the course of miscellaneous reading lately I came across a passage in the Introduction to Firishta's History of the Rise of the Muhammadan Power in India which I had marked long ago and then completely forgotten. If the main, statement in that passage (as italicized), to the effect that Ardashīr Pāpakān (Bābagān), the founder of the Sasanian dynasty of Persia (A.D. 226–41), invaded the Panjāb and retired on receiving homage and tribute, be accepted as true, the information thus acquired not only explains an extremely puzzling unique coin which I published in 1897, but also throws welcome light upon one of the darkest periods of Indian history, the third century after Christ.

Watters, when discussing various passages in Chinese literature referring to Kapilavastu, the early home of Gautama Buddha, or to other localities with similar names (JRAS. 1898, pp. 539, 540), observed that “for the names Kapila and Kapilavastu the Chinese seem to have obtained from their foreign teachers several explanations more or less exact”.