My esteemed friend Mr. Henry G. Scott, Director of the local Royal Department of Mines and Geology, who had just returned from a tour of inspection of the mining districts in the Malay Peninsula, sent to me for examination two small gold coins which he had obtained in the course of his tour. They were found, together with a considerable number of similar coins, by some people who had occasion to dig a hole in the grounds of a Siamese Wat (Buddhist monastery) in the province of Jaring, near Patani. This was more than a year ago. Jaring is a Malay state, but has a large Siamese population which is comparatively modern.

This document is described by Dr. Hoernlé in a Report on the British Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, reprinted from the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. lxx, pt. i, extra No. 1, p. 27. On the discovery of these documents Dr. Hoernlé's Note on the British Collection of Central Asian Antiquities, Oxford, 1899, should be consulted. The Persian leaf is now in the British Museum. There is with it another of about the same period, but almost illegible. They formed crumbled up lumps of waste paper, and required very careful unfolding and smoothing out.

Many years ago, in a paper read before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, attention was drawn by me to the resemblance borne by the ‘cup-marks’ found in India to the archaic sculpturings of Europe, described by the late Sir James Simpson and other writers on the subject, and certain theories were advanced regarding the possible significance of these markings.

In the name of God the Merciful and Compassionate, and may God bless our lord Muḥammad and his family and his companions, and give them peace.

It has long been a puzzle to me that no coins of the two great emperors Vikramāditya and Harsha Vardhana should have survived, when we have, in comparatively large numbers, coins of most minor kings before and after them. I believe, however, that coins of these two emperors do exist, though they have not been recognized hitherto. My attention was drawn to them recently, while writing a sketch of the ancient history of India.

With reference to my article on MS. No. 29 of the Maxwell Collection in the Journal for July, 1902, my friend Mr. S. H. Ray, whose wide acquaintancewith a number of out-of-theway languages is well known, sends me the following note, which I think will be of interest to the readers of the Journal:—

“The languages of Mr. Blagden's specimens are, besides the Malay, (1) (Măkuah or M˘akuat), (2) or (Tulehu or Ambon Tulehu), (3) or (Mandura).

In the issue of this Journal for July, 1903 (pp. 467–493), Professor D. S. Margoliouth propounds a theory in explanation of the words Muslim and Ḥanīf, used in the Ḳur'ān, which is thus stated:—

“The suggestion, then, which I should offer for the explanation of these terms is that some twenty years before Mohammed's mission some sort of natural monotheism was preached by Musaylimah, whose followers being called Muslims [after the preacher's name] and Ḥanīfs [from the tribe of Ḥanīfah to which he belonged], these words were supposed to signify monotheist, and as such were adopted by Mohammed, who, owing to the comparative obscurity of Musaylimah, had at least at first no knowledge of their origin, and afterwards felt bound to assert positively that they were both in use in Abraham's time.”

I present here a short tract from Mdo, vol. cxxxiii, foil. 330–2, entitled Īśvarakartṛtranirākṛtir Viṣṇorekakartṛtvanirākaraṋam, or “Refutation of the idea of God as Creator (sic): Refutation of the idea of Viṣṇu as sole Creator (sic).” It is ascribed to Nāgārjuna, who is named as the author of about one hundred works noted by me in the Tanjur. The fact that it appears in one of the last volumes of the Mdo, and that both the Sanskrit and the native versions are given, seem to indicate that the work was a comparatively late accession to the Tibetan collection. I give both versions in order to fix the text. The work is, as will be seen, of a simple type, adapted, as it states, to the learner (suśiṣyapratibodhārtham), and in character quite different from the famous nyāya treatise of Udayana, the Kusumāñjali, which seeks to establish the contrary.

The Tanjur contains, beside the Meghadūta, two short poems attributed to Kālidāsa, both mentioned by Huth in his analysis of Mdo, vols. cxvii–cxxiv (Sitziungsberichte d. k. preuss. Akademie d. Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1895, xv, p. 17). One is entitled Maṅgalāṣṭaka, and is found in Rgyud, vol. lxxxvi, fol. 225. The other, a hymn to Sarasvatī (Rgyud, vol. lxxxii, foll. 199–200), I here transcribe with a tentative translation, which may perhaps enable scholars to estimate the probability of the supposed authorship, and to identify the work with the Sanskrit original if discovered. None of the numerous printed collections of Sanskrit stotras appear to contain anything corresponding to it, nor is it identical with any of the manuscript stotras to Sarasvatī which I have been able to examine. Perhaps some scholar may be able to discover verses cited from it.

In speaking of Miṣr, it is in the first place necessary to define exactly what it is meant to include, as the name has been used at different periods with different meanings. Miṣr here denotes the southern half of the Arab capital of Egypt, as opposed to the northern one. For its application to this part of Cairo we have the authority of El Maqrîzî, but it must be borne in mind that this author does not always adhere to his own definition, and frequently uses Miṣr in a limited sense also. In order to avoid confusion the town to which the name Miṣr in this restricted sense is given will here be distinguished as Fusṭâṭ.