It was before the Eoyal Asiatic Society that seventy years ago (on 8th July, 1854, to be precise) Mr. J. E. Taylor, H.B.M.'s Consul at Basrah in Turkey-in-Asia, read his paper on his excavations for the British Museum at Ur. Nearly a year later, on 5th May, 1855, after a further season's work in the land of the Muntefik, Mr. Taylor read his paper on Eridu and other sites in the neighbourhood. The first paper, “Notes on the Ruins of Mugeyer, by J. E. Taylor, Esq.,” will be found printed on p. 260 ff. of Vol. XV of the Journal, published in 1855; the second paper, “Notes on Abu Shahrein and Tel el Lahm,” on p. 404 ff. of the same volume. Both articles were illustrated by the quaint woodcuts of the time, in which first the draughtsman and then the engraver combined successively to deform the (originally probably rather poor) sketches or notes of the actual observer into something that can have borne but a faint resemblance to the original. One notices this in Taylor's sketch of the ziggurrat of Ur on p. 262, which is of the severely diagrammatic kind, as befits a learned publication. For the florid and romantic style of the period one may turn to the picture of the same ziggurrat opposite p. 129 of Loftus's “Travels and Researches in Chaldeæa and Susiana”, published three years later (reproduced in Plate XII, Fig. 1).

In an article on the representation of tones in Oriental languages (JRAS., 1920, pp. 475 ft), I pointed out that the so-called Vedic accents were the same as the tones found in certain Indo-Chinese languages, the only difference being one of name. In this connexion I stated that the visargacorresponded to the Indo-Chinese glottal check—the “ entering tone ” of Southern Mandarin and other Chinese dialects.

Professor Konow in his work on the Indian Drama (Grundrissder Indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde, ii, 2 D, 1920) gives an account of the Sanskrit bhāna as follows:

“ A popular origin belongs to the bhāna also. The subject matter is due to the author's invention; the vrtti is predominantly the bhāratī, the kaisikī, at any rate, being excluded, and of the ‘junctions ’ (sandhi) only the first (mukha) and the last (nirvahana) appear. The leading interests (rasa) are the heroic (vīra) and the erotic (śrngāra), which are evoked by the description of heroisms and fortune in love. The whole is enacted by a single actor, who appears as a rake (vita), and indeed as the rake-in-chief of the city. He describes partly his own experiences, partly those of others, employing ākāsabhāsitas, voices in the air (ākāse), that is, he pretends to see and hear others act and speak and asks ‘what do you say ?', himself then repeating the imagined answer. He accompanies this with the appropriate gestures. It is clear that the bhāna is a development from the pantomime or mimetic dance, and so it is intelligible that the Iāsyāngais employed.”

In his philosophical speculations regarding the original scheme of the universe, Mānī portrayed with poetic imagination the primordial struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness that formed the dualistic basis of his system of religion. When the primeval attack upon the Realm of Light was made by the King of Darkness, the Sovereign of Light “evoked”, or emanated, three successive evocations in the form of divine personifications, designed to serve first in combating the onslaught of Evil, and then in weakening the pernicious effects of its force.