One of the arduous problems of ancient geography is the location of the furthest points in Atropatene (Azarbayjāan) which were reached by Antonius in 36B.C., by the Byzantine allies of Khusrau II in A.D.591 and by the Emperor Heraclius in A.D. 624–7.

In the following pages an attempt will be made to resolve certain obscurities in the references made by Byzantine writers to the Turki nations of Central and Western Asia in that period—the sixth century—when the two civilizations first came into contact. It is hoped thereby to throw additional light on the situation of the various Turki tribes at that date.

Among the peoples of Mongolia at the advent of Chingiz Khān the Karaits () stand out for several reasons. First, We can trace them for more than three centuries, roughly A.D. 1000 to 1300. Second, in them we have the unusual phenomenon of a Far Eastern nation professing Christianity. Third, they have the interest of being connected with the story of Prester John, of Which the attraction has not altogether vanished. In what follows the attempt is made to give a connected account of these Karaits. From the nature of the sources it will be confined largely to the history of their ruling house.

Among the unexpected discoveries from the treasure of Central Asian manusćripts found in Tun-huang is a manuscript now belonging to the Fonds Pelliot in the Bibliothèque Nationale, numbered P 2892. This manuscript contains 184 lines of text in the cursive Brahmi script usual in Khotanese manuscripts. In lines 1–165 (mid-line) is written an excerpt in Khotanese from the medical text Siddhasāra corresponding to 5 v 4—14 v 4 of the Siddhāsara published in facsimile in Codices Khotanenses (1938), of which a transliterated text has been in print since December, 1941, in Khotanese Texts I. From the middle of line 165, after an elaborate mark of punctuation, there follow 19 lines of text in a Turkish dialect. It contains a vocabulary of ninety-seven Turkish words concerned with archery and parts of the body. Some of the words are glossed in Khotanese, and for some of these words the Turkish supplies the meaning. The date of the vocabulary may be the ninth or tenth century A.D. It would appear to be written down by a Khotanese scribe who wanted to learn Turkish.

A. A. Macdonell in his commentary on RV. IV. 50.5 (Vedic Reader for Students) remarks: “The exact meaning … does not clearly appear from its four occurrences; but it must have a sense closely allied to receptacle—in three passages it is spoken of as being rent or pierced, and twice is associated with Valá; and in the Naighaṇṭuka it is given as a synonym of megha cloud.” Grassmann (Wörterbuch) similarly translates as Behälter, Wolke. The four passages in which it occurs are I. 62.4, phaligam, Indra śakra, valaṃ raveṇa darayo, “Rend, O mighty Indra, the ph. cage with a crash”; I. 121.10, tam, adrivaḥ, phaligaṃ hetim asya, “At that ph., O thou of the thunderbolt, hurl thy missile”; IV. 50.5, sa … valaṃ ruroja phaligaṃ raveṇa, “He hath burst with a crash the ph. cage”; VIII. 32.35, ya udnaḥ phaligaṃ bhinan nyak sindhūṃr avāsṛjat, “Who split the ph. of the water and let the streams rush down.” Phaligam is here a valam, cave, prison or cage, but is not always used as such, otherwise there would be no need to complete its meaning by valam. It shares with the rock and the cloud the function of imprisoning the waters, but, unlike the twin aśman (cloud above and rock below), is not mentioned as a producer of fire. The cloud, like the rock, must be hard, so that the clash of the upper with the nether aśman may yield fire, and phaligam is probably hard also. It may be white, like the bright cloud or the snow-capped mountain, grey or even black, like the rain-charged cloud or the stark rock.

A peculiar and interesting use of the instrumental case of the word sattā, which seems to have escaped the attention of the Sanskrit dictionaries, occurs frequently in the legal and commentatorial literature in connection with the Brahmanical gotra-system. Briefly, the situation is as follows: a Brahman may not marry within his own gotra. But as the word gotra came in the course of linguistic development to be loosely applied to subdivisions of the original groups, and even to individual families, while the exogamous unit remained the larger group, the prohibition of marriage within the gotra became ambiguous, and required to be supplemented, or rather defined, by a consideration of the pravara, the list of ṛṣi-names recited on specific sacrificial occasions. In other words, the pravara is used as a test to decide to which of the large exogamous groups a man belongs. In the pravara-appendix to the Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra the rule reads: eka eva ṛṣir yāvat pravareṣv anuvartate, tāvat samānagotratvam anyatra bhṛgvaṅgirasāṃ gaṇāt. “If even one ṛṣi recurs in the pravaras, that constitutes sameness of gotra (for exogamous purposes), except in the case of a gaṇa of the Bhṛgus and Aṅgirases (where a majority of the ṛṣi-names must be identical in order to prevent intermarriage).” Thus, for example, a member of the Nidhruva “gotra”, with the pravara “Kāśyapa, Āvatsāra, Naidhruva”, and a member of the Śaṇḍila “gotra”, with the pravara “Kāśyapa, Āvatsāra, Śāṇḍila”, both clearly belong to the Kaśyapa gotra, and as such are forbidden to marry.

Rāma Rāo's Grammar, which was summarized in the first part of this article, gives conjugational forms of the auxiliaries hū- and rhā- only. It will be convenient to give here the conjugation of an ordinary consonantal stem.

Bishop caldwell, the founder of the comparative study of the Dravidian languages, was interested not only in the relationship of those languages among themselves, but also in the question of their connection with other families of languages outside India. His investigations in this direction led him to believe that the Dravidian languages are connected with what he called the “Scythian” family of languages. By the term “Scẏthian” Caldwell referred mainly to the Ural-Altaic languages, though occasionally using the word in a rather wider sense than that. Within the “Scythian” family he held that it was possible to define the position of Dravidian even more closely, by attaching it to the Finno-ugrian group in particular. The evidence which Caldwell offered in support of this theory consisted partly of grammatical features which he held to be common to the languages concerned, and partly of comparisons of vocabulary. The former are to be found scattered through the body of his work, and the latter are collected together in an appendix entitled “Glossarial Affinities”. In presenting this theory Caldwell was quite modest in his claims; he admitted the possibility of being misled by accidental assonances, and claimed rather to have pointed the way to the possibilities of future research than to have demonstrated the relationship with any finality.

Professor E. H. Johnston's sudden death in October, 1942, was a grievous blow to Oriental research. Sir Richard Burn, called in by the authorities of Balliol College to go through his papers, found amongst them a rough manuscript article and other material on the Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan, together with correspondence on the subject with Mr. G. H. Luce and other scholars who had supplied him with rubbings and photographs. As will be seen from the following letter to Mr. Luce, dated the 15th August, 1942, Professor Johnston was contemplating the preparation of this work for publication:

“I have not yet heard what is your opinion about publishing some of the Arakanese results now. Life is short and uncertain these days, and it will hardly be possible to get anything out in Epigraphia Birmanica for years to come. What I should like to do is to publish Ānandacandra's inscription, omittiṇg all I have said in the draft about the palæography and just mentioning the others, with a brief account of the coins and of the historical conclusions. For one thing it might attract the attention of linguists and lead to some ideas about the vernacular names; e.g. what language is Seviṅreṅ, assuming my reading to be correct? The fuller consideration of details could then be reserved till Epigraphia Birmanica is ready to come about.

Khami is one of the most important Sino-Tibetan languages because of the extensive data it presents regarding prefixes, preserved in so few groups of that linguistic family. The Khimi described here is a subdialect of the Southern dialect of the Khami language, Kukish group, Burmic division of Sino-Tibetan. Phonetically it differs from the more commonly recorded Southern dialect chiefly in the pronunciation of an original -a as -aw (as in English awe).