This paper explains how the nations and tribes of India were arrayed in the great war of the Pāṇḍavas against the Kauravas, and the annexed map illustrates the position by exhibiting the names of the countries and peoples in different colours, those supporting the Pāṇḍavas being printed in blue ink, and the Kauravas and their allies in red, while those which were neutral and all collateral details are printed in black ink. It has been prepared at Dr. Grierson's suggestion in order to ascertain whether the division has any ethnographical significance with reference to his researches into the languages of India.

The great mass of Hindūs of the present day follow, and for nearly five centuries have followed, the religious doctrine of salvation by bhakti, or loving faith. This, although nominally based on the Vēdas and Upaniṣads, is strongly opposed both to the advaita Vedantist doctrine of salvation by knowledge and to the Mīmāṃsā doctrine of salvation by works. Its very idea of salvation, a life of never-ending bliss near the Holy One, is radically different from that offered by these two schools.

Now that the complete text of the Śāṅkhāyana Āraṇyaka will shortly be available, it may be of interest to give a brief account of that comparatively little-known work, and in particular of the part hitherto unpublished, on the basis of the excellent and old manuscript of the text in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

During the disturbed period in the first half of the twelfth century, when the break up of the monarchy was followed in quick succession by the establishment of the kingdom first in and afterwards in the plains of Northern India, by the invasion of the Shāh of , and finally by the overwhelming and devastating irruption of the under Chingiz the route into India by the Kuṛam Valley and Banū played a very important part, and its possession was eagerly sought after. Thus, when Mu‘izzu’d-dīn Muḥammad bīn Sām had laid the foundations of an Indian Empire, he placed his most faithful Turk servant Tāju'd-dīn Yalduz in charge of the province of Kuṛamān and Shaṅkurān, i.e. the Kuṛam Valley and Shalozān, as we are informed in the Nāṣirī, and halted there every year on his expeditions into India. After his death the successor to the sovereignty, Maḥmūd son of Muḥammad bin Sām (generally known as Maḥmūd bin Muḥammad) confirmed Yalduz in his dignities, and made him of .

Huge miscellaneous collections of anecdotes, compiled on no very apparent method, were much to Moslem taste. One of these is the of Ibn Ḥamdūn, a large anthological work divided into fifty Bāb, the headings of which foreshadow imperfectly their contents. The author's life is given by Ibn (de SI. Eng., iii, 90) and by Brockelmann (Gesch. Arab. Lit., i, 280). There is also a notice of him in the Wafi bil-Wafayāt of al-Ṣafadi (Paris, Ar. 5860, 236a), where he is described as a man of culture and of good birth, and as the composer of the on “Adab, Nawādir and a work of large dimensions, extending to twelve volumes, and very well known. Further, that the author was intimate with the Caliph Mustanjid and often conversed with him; that he owed to him his appointment to the Dīwān al-Zimām, his first official post having been that of ‘Āriḍ to the troops, under Muqtafi; and that he was amiable in character and socially pleasant. Certain stories, however, in his work being deemed by the Caliph to be reflections on his government, he was arrested in his office and imprisoned until his death in 572 A.H. In the same MS., at fol. 236b, is a notice of his brother, also named Muḥammad, but with the ‘laqab’ of Abu Naṣr (that of the former being Abu-1-Ma‘āli); that he served as clerk in the Dīwān from the year 513 A.H. until his death in 545 A.H.; and that he composed a volume of “Rasā'il” and a history.

The text of the Rummindēī inscription, styled at first “the Aśōka edict of Paḍariā,” appears to have been first published by Professor Bühler, in the Anzeiger for the 7th January, 1897, of the Philosophical and Historical Section of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Vienna. A translation of it was given by M. Barth in the Journal des Savants, 1897. 73. The record was fully edited by Professor Bühler, with an excellent facsimile, in the Epigraphia Indica, 5. 1 ff.