It is a matter of considerable regret that no copy of the Aśokan inscriptions has been found at Pātaliputra. Such a version, inscribed at the capital of Aśoka's empire, might have been expected to be in the language of the capital itself, and therefore by implication in the official language of the court and secretariat. There can be no doubt that many of the difficulties which face us in the task of interpreting the Aśokan inscriptions arise because of errors in the translation from the Pkt. of the original into the Pkts. of the various regions. Possession of the Pātaliputra version would enable us to read the inscriptions free from such translation errors.

Āẕarbāyjān has not hitherto yielded any contribution to Sasanian Pahlavi epigraphy, but now we have a specimen. A Pahlavi inscription, dated in the 27th year of Shāpūr II, has been found outside the little town of Mishkīn, in the centre of Mughān. The history of its discovery and publication is as follows.

1. Dr. Kambakhsh Fard discovers the inscription in the summer of 1966 during a Persian archaeological expedition to Āẕarbāyjān; photographs are taken and sent to Tehran.

In an appendix to the article ‘Chinese and Indo-Europeans’ it was shown that, contrary to the view put forward but never demonstrated by the eighteenth-century scholar Ts'ui Shih, and adopted by the eminent sinologists Paul Pelliot and G. Haloun, chapter 123 of the Shih-chi on ‘Ta-yüan’ could not have been reconstituted from parallel passages in the Han shu but must have been the source for the latter—as one would naturally assume if doubts had never been raised. In summing up the evidence I noted that the most important discrepancies between Shih-chi, 123, and the Han shu concerned the Wu-sun and Sakas and I argued that one must assume that the Han shu had grafted separate, additional, material on to the account in the Shih-chi. I did not, however, go into the matter in detail. This is the burden of the present article.

When first examining, now quite some time ago, the Tibetan version of the Karmavibhaṅga in the MS Kanjur of the British Museum, I was struck immediately by the preservation therein of the ‘introductory tale’, which apparently has not survived in the printed Kanjurs. On closer inspection the MS version showed two other prominent features which, taken together with the first, may justify the present note and, it is hoped, may make it acceptable to the great Indo-Iranian scholar in whose honour it has been written.

The Arabs in Central Asia occupied in the past, as is well known, considerable territory, especially in the lower parts of the basins of the Zarafshān and Qashqa-daryā rivers, and also in Khojend and the south-eastern regions of Tajikistan.

In the course of centuries the majority of the Central Asian Arabs have lost their language and only small groups of them continue to speak Arabic up to the present time in the villages of Jōgarḹ, Čardaḹ (Ġijduwān district) and ‘Arab-Xōna (Wobkend district) of the Bukhārā region and in the village of Jeinau in the Qashqa-daryā region.

Throughout the history of Indo-Aryan the tendency towards a particular sound-change might continue to be active over a long period of time, being manifested first in words of frequent use or lesser import or where other surrounding phonetic conditions favoured the change and subsequently appearing in particular areas throughout the general vocabulary.

The Candimā-sutta or ‘discourse on the moon’ in the Samyuttanikāya of the Pali canon based on the Indian myth according to which eclipses of the moon as well as of the sun are caused by a demon named Rāhu ‘the Seizer’, who is supposed to try to lay hold of one or the other of the two planets at certain times. The Sutta reports that on such an occasion the god dwelling in the moon takes his refuge in the Buddha who successfully shows his power and pity by directing Rāhu emphatically to set the moon at once at liberty.