The object of the present article is to re-state two obscure problems and to show that their likely solution can be found only in tṛeating them jointly. The two points are: the name of the ancient capital of the Ās (Alāns, now Ossets), as attested in the tenth century, and the identification of the town *MKS conquered by the Mongols in the course of the campaign of 636/1239.

As the sources on the latter event are more numerous I shall deal with it first. On the Muslim side we have two accounts of Batu's campaign, that of Juvaynī who completed his work in 658/1260, and that of Rashīd al-dīn, who wrote about 710/1310.

This article takes as its point of departure the conclusions drawn in Professor Arberry's paper “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”. It is hopefully intended both to add to those conclusions in their own sphere of poetical criticism and to suggest something of the relevance of the problem as a whole in the broad structure of Persian thought. (It seems scarcely necessary to add that the extent to which that will imply Islamic thought and Eastern thought generally is, in every sense of the word, incalculable.)

Vol. XIV, p. 242. Two misprints appeared on this page after page proofs had been corrected, as follows:—

1. 9, arête for aretē (i.e. rightful function);

1. 15, ḳulûl for ḥulûl.

In the course of a recent study (a thesis on Abū-l-‘Alā’ as a poet), I have come upon certain words in Luzūm mā la- Yalzam which, to the best of my knowledge, do not occur in Ibn Durayd's Jamharah, Al-Asās, al-Ṣiḥāḥ, al-Qāmūs, al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ, Täj al-'Arūs, Lisān al-'Arab, al-Jāsūs ‘ala-l-Qāmūs, Lane's Lexicon, or al-Munjid. It might be interesting, from the point of view of Arabic philology, to examine some of these rare words here, if only because they occur in the work of such a distinguished authority as Abū-l-‘Alā’. I have consulted the texts in which these words occur in the Cairo edition of the Luzūm, the Bombay edition, and the British Museum MS., Or. 3160.

TheAṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, like many other Oriental books, is a collective work which has been subjected to additions and alterations in the course of the centuries, to suit the tastes of new generations. In this respect it does not differ from the Mahāvastu, the Lalitavistara, the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka, the Suvarṇaprabhãsa, etc., which have all been slowly built up over a long period. If the historical investigation of the doctrinal development within the Mahāyāna is to make any progress, we must learn to distinguish between the different layers in these texts. Some work has been done already on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, the Samādhirāja, the Suvarṇaprabhāsa, and the Kāraṇḍavyūha. Without hoping to exhaust the subject, I intend to point out in this article the most obvious accretions to the basic original text of the Aṣṭa°. This, in its turn, must have grown gradually, but in the present state of our knowledge we cannot, I think, trace out its growth. In any case, such analytical studies of ancient writings are tedious to compose and unattractive to read, and when carried too far they threaten to shatter and pulverize the very text which they set out to examine, as we have seen in the case of Homer and the New Testament.

1. Sk. k-.

Initial k- remains:

karanu, karite, karavaya, karavā, kaṭu, koṭu, koṭ, ko(ṭa)vaya, kaḷa-, Kaḷahu, kaḷavun, kaḷamanā, karana-, karaṇa-, karavika, kereyani, kärū, karu (error for kärū), kärävū, kärvū, kärvū, karä, kära, kärä, kaṭäyutu; Kuḍakaṇa-; karanaka; kahāvaṇa; kāru-; Kama(la)-; Kasaba-, Kasub-; kavuḍu; kapa-; Kiliňg-; kusalayan; kämi-; kämiyanaṭ, kämiyan; (kukuḷ)-; käbäli; Kit-; kit; kushi; kavari-; kasun-; kam-; kālayehi; kulen; kuluṇ-; koṭhā, koṭā; keṭū; kī; kiyā; kapanu.

This article is primarily intended as a “follow-up” of two previous ones on the historical records of Portuguese India, thus serving to remind historians of the importance of these documents. The articles to which I refer are “A preliminary report on the historical records at Goa”, by Surendra Nath Sen (88 pp., Calcutta, 1925, reprinted in his Studies in Indian History (1930)), and “Portuguese India and its historical records”, by the late J. LeRoy Christian (Hispanic-American Historical Review, vol. xxv, pp. 140–151, February, 1945). These two articles are all that I have been able to find in English about the Goa archives, and they are complemented by the recently published “Roteiro do Cartório Geral do Estado da India”, by Panduranga Pissurlencar, reprinted from No. 309 of the Boletim Geral das Colónias (Lisboa, 1951). This fourteen-page summary catalogue of the Goa archives by their scholarly director advantageously replaces the ostensibly fuller “Index alfabetico, chronologico e remissive”, published serially by Tovar de Albuquerque in the Oriente Portuguez (first series, 1910–1918), which is so riddled with mistakes, and compiled with such lack of system, as to be worse than useless as a guide to the material in the archives. In so far as possible, I have avoided repeating what is already recorded in the previous articles of Nath Sen and LeRoy Christian, confining myself to amplifying or correcting their statements where necessary. I have also limited myself to describing the codices which I studied during my stay at Goa in September–October, 1951. As will be seen from a comparison of the codices described hereunder with those listed in Dr. Pissurlencar's Roteiro, I was only able to study a relatively small proportion of the whole; nor was a thorough examination of all of those which I did see possible in the month at my disposal. Since virtually everything dated prior to 1600 which still exists in the archives has already been published by Cunha Rivara and others, I confined my own investigations to the period 1600–1740, the later date being taken as marking the end of effective Portuguese power in India with the loss of the “provincia do Norte” to the Marāthās after the disastrous if hard-fought Bassein campaign of 1737–1739. My own interests being chiefly concerned with the Far East, I naturally concentrated on Macao and Timor; but I trust that I have noted sufficient material dealing with East Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, Ceylon, and Malacca, to show the variety and richness of this little-used archive. It may be added that much of the material relating to India proper has been printed in the two series of the Archivo Portuguez Oriental, in the two series of O Oriente Portuguez, and in the Boletim do Institute Vasco da Gama, as explained in the final note to this article.

TheChronological Tables of Officials of ike Present Dynasty (Kuo-ch'ao Lieh-ch'ing Nien-piao), by Lei Li, is an important source for the study of the Ming administrative system. The work is rare and little known. Fortunately, the copy in the Peking National Library was among the books sent by the Chinese government during the anti-Japanese war to the United States for safe-keeping, where it was microfilmed with the rest of the collection of rare books (manuscripts and printed works antedating the beginning of the Manchu dynasty) by the Library of Congress. It is in this form now accessible to students.

No written literature of an Indonesian people has been so brilliantly and completely described as that of the Achehnese in the north of Sumatra. This description was the work of Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje. Before it appeared in 1894 as one of the seven chapters of his work De Atjèhers, all that was known to the outside world about this literature consisted of a few specimina, printed (under Snouck Hurgronje's supervision) in K. F. H. van Langen's manual of the Achehnese language (The Hague, 1889). After some preparatory work in Holland and a stay of only seven months in Kutaraja (in wartime, cut off from intercourse with the country by the then prevailing system of a concentrated line surrounding the capital), Snouck Hurgronje was able to reveal the existence of a rich epic, romantic, and relïgious Achehnese literature, to give summaries of all its works of any importance and to deal elaborately with its chief masterpieces, to investigate the prosody of the poetry in which nearly all these texts are written as well as the origin of the foreign elements found in many tales and treatises. In the second edition of his work, which was published in English (The Achehnese) in 1906, only a few additions had to be made. The catalogue of the manuscripts, collected by Snouck Hurgronje himself and by some pupils and friends inspired by his example, will show some more, but they do not alter the general picture drawn in the first edition.

The two texts which are analysed in the present paper were gathered during a period of fourteen months' lingu stic work in Fiji in 1948 and 1949. As a result of recent developments in linguistics, notably the perceptiblechange of emphasis from comparativeto descriptive work,1 more especially in the study of preliterate languages, the modern field-worker applies himself to gather a large number of texts.He takes down certain utterances and he establishes his text by means of well-defined techniques. Having as alinguist handled the material, both oral and written, to his provisional satisfaction, he can then state his findings in a grammar, under the headings of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. When the grammatical system has been stated it would seem that it is.

Au début de ses 'Išārāt, Avicenne a défini l'objet de la logique en ces termes: “Le but de la logique, c'est qu'il y ait chez l'homme un instrument servant de règle, dont l'observation l'empêche d'errer dans sa pensée. J'entends là par pensée ce qui accompagne la préparation de l'homme à passer de choses présentes dans son esprit, —sous forme de concept ou de jugement, comportant un assentiment fondé sur la science ou l'opinion ou sur le postulat et l'admission,—à des choses qui n'y sont pas présentes.”

As Professor B. Lewis remarks, the mention of the Bĕnê Iṭaliya constitutes a serious hitch to his demonstration that the chapter of the “Prayer” where they occur reflects events of the tenth century: the Fatimids' appearance in Egypt and Palestine and the subsequent struggles between them, the Carmathians, the Turk Alptekin, the Byzantines, and the Ṭayy Bedouin. Since the “Italians” are the only obstacle to an otherwise flawless argumentation Professor Lewis is fully justified in trying to explain them away. He suspects that Iṭaliya is due to a misguided “correction” of Ṭayya, which in Syriac and Rabbinic Hebrew denotes the Ṭayy, and by extension the Arabs in general, but was probably no longer familiar to the copyist.

Thanks to the kindness of Dr. Andreas Tietze I have at my disposal the illustrated catalogue recently issued by the Istanbul antique dealer Nurettin Yatman (“Eski Istanbul”, Meşrutiyet cadd. 185, Beyoǧlu). It shows among others, in a reproduction just readable by a practised and self-sacrificing eye, an Ottoman document (wrongly ascribed to the fifteenth century) with a richly decorated, wonderfully executed ṭurā(apparently in various colours) of Murad III (1574–1595). An “imperial cypher” of such splendour may, indeed, be expected in an “imperial letter” (nāme-i Tumāyūn) to a foreign sovereign, for such is this document of March 1580, addressed to the Doge of Venice. On the other hand, the eleven lines of the text are written in ordinary dīvānī without calligraphic pretensions; this may be due to the fact that the letter was, as we shall see, to be presented not by a messenger of the sultan but by an agent of the person in whose favour it was issued.

Professor Duyvendak, in his lectures on China's discovery of Africa, delivered at the University of London, ends with the last of the voyages of Chêng Ho, 1431–33. This, until modern times, is doubtless the final official contact of the Chinese with Africa itself. The Ming history, however, records one more mission, this time from Miṣr (Egypt) to China, as has already been noticed by both Bretschneider and Pelliot. Since the records of this embassy, as preserved in the Ming shih lu, are of some interest I present a translation of them below.