Tamba is a small, mountainous, thickly-wooded province lying to the north-west of the late capital city of Japan. Long after the removal of the Mikado's ‘Kiyô’ or court from Nara, at the close of the eighth century, to the site of the ‘City of Perfect Peace,’ afterwards Kiyôto, Miyako, and lastly Saikiyô, the hills and forests of this wild region were probably infested by remnants of the aboriginal ‘yebisu,’ at whose expense the Japanese state had slowly extended its scanty territory. It was, probably, not always under the leadership of aboriginal chieftains that bands of these autochthones, commonly described by Japanese writers as horrid, hairy, cannibal monsters, harried the lower country. They were often, no doubt, cajoled into serving the purposes of revenge or plunder of Japanese rebels or outlaws, the wickedness of whose frequent defiance of the divine authority of the Mikado is dwelt upon with pious horror by the early annalists. Of some such ‘strong thief’ dexterously availing himself of aboriginal aid, we have perhaps a memory in the gruesome legend recounted in the following pages. The tale is a favourite one with the makers of makimono, and in a set of six of these illuminated rolls in my possession is told in a manner that well exemplifies the literary style affected in such recitals. Of Oriental literature dramatic power is not usually a characteristic, and we have here no exception to the rule.

The Sámbhur Lake, as the most important salt source in North-West India, must have always been a possession of value; it is, therefore, astonishing that there are few indications of a large population in ancient times having existed along its shores, notwithstanding that it is, in the rainy season, twenty miles in length, with a maximum width of seven miles and a half.

In 1784, just a century ago, the Asiatic Society was founded at Calcutta, and since then a great movement has been going on, leading to the discovery and study of Sanskrit and other Indian languages, and resulting in what is called Comparative Philology or the Science of Language.

The Arabic texts of the two following poems, of which I have ventured to offer translations to English readers, were published in 1854 in London, under the patronage of the Oriental Translation Fund. They formed part of the Hudsailite Poems contained in the manuscript of Leyden, which were edited and were to have been translated, with annotations, by a very distinguished German Orientalist, John Godfrey Lewis Kosegarten, late Professor of Theology and Oriental Literature in the University of Greifswald. The poems were composed by two sisters, named Amra and Janûb, Arab poetesses of the tribe of Hudsail. Overwhelmed with grief at the loss of their brother Amr, or Amru, whom they tenderly loved as a relative and stood in need of as a protector, they sought relief in song, and in composing elegiac tributes to his memory. Three of these have come down to us, two by Janûb and one by Amra. For translation I have selected the latter and one only of the two former, as the second poem by Janûb is less adapted than that which I have chosen for translation into English verse. Amr, or Amrun, the master of the dog, was the designation by which the brother of the poetesses was distinguished among the Arabs of his time. He was himself a poet, and would seem, from the tributes which his sisters paid to his memory, to have been possessed of those high qualities which, in the estimation of the Arabs, were typical of heroism and virtue.

While studying the Akkadian pronominal forms, I was brought to a closer examination of the Assyrian pronouns, and I arrived at the conclusion that Assyrian had retained forms lost or forgotten in all the other Semitic dialects. Though in Assyrian the various pronominal forms are used rather loosely, the writers however seem to have retained an unconscious feeling of their primitive value: I find that by means of postpositions, the independent use of which is lost, added to the possessive suffixes, real cases are formed to express the pronouns in regimen: -ia ‘my,’ iāši ‘to me,’ iāti ‘m e’ accusative, iau ‘of me’ or ‘mine.’ When I communicated this to Mr. Pinches, he, with his usual kindness, gave me to examine a most important unpublished tablet, giving the Akkadian (or rather the Sumerian or dialectical) pronouns, with an Assyrian translation. As it is often the case in syllabaries or grammatical lists, the forms given are generally the most primitive. I will examine these forms further on and I give the copy of this important tablet as reference.

Substantives are either masculine or feminine. Those relating to human beings and animals are according to sex; for others there is no rule.

Both numbers have two forms, the nominative and the oblique; the dative and ablative are expressed by postpositions added to the oblique form. In some words elision is used. The plural is formed by adding i, or changing the o into é.