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.

Le 28 juin 1245, à l'ouverture du Concile de Lyon, le pape Innocent IV groupa sous cinq chefs ses principaux soucis. Parmi ceux-ci figurent les ravages des Tatares qui, terram Christianorum intraverant et Ungariam occupaverant non parcentes sexui vel etati quin omnes interficerent.

Most Iranists are probably acquainted with some of my writings on Iranian chronology and systems of time-reckoning. One of the essential points in my outline of the history of the Iranian calendars is the theory I put forward about the date of the creation of a fixed religious year, co-existing and running parallel with the civil year, which was a vague one. This fixed year, called in Pahlavi literature Vihēǰakīk, was, however, theoretical and without any application in daily life. It was used only by the Zoroastrian clergy for the purpose of ascertaining the original position of the religious festivals and keeping them in or about their astronomical positions. By the ‘original position’ is meant the places these most important religious days occupied in the tropical year at the time of instituting the Vihēǰakīk year, which time may or may not have been the epoch of the initial adoption of the Mazdayasnian or ‘Young Avestan’ civil year in Iran. The date I proposed was 441 B.c., or at any rate some time in the first decade of the second half of the 5th century B.c.

The British Museum manuscript Or. 8613 (146 folios, probably 5th–11th century) has lost both its beginning and end. Its subject is the doctrine of the Mu'tazila and it is divided into sections each of which begins with the quotation from a book by Abū 'Alī Muḥammad b. Khallād (Fihrist 174); in one place he is called ṣāḥib al-kitāb. The authorities mostly quoted are the two shaikhs, Abū 'Ahī al-Jubbāī and his son Abū Hāshim, the chief judge 'Abd al-jabbār (†415/1024) and Abū Rashīd Sa'īd b. Muḥammad who died somewhat later. He is the latest authority quoted. It is hard to decide to which of the two men Abū 'Alī refers. The MS. has been collated within the last 200 years but no other copy seems to be recorded unless no. 589 in Landberg (MSS. belonging to Maison Brill), Ziyādāt, by Abū Ṭālib Yaḥyā b. Ḥusain to al-uṣūl of Ibn Khallād, is the same work; but if the description ‘giving much information about the Zaidis’ is right, it is another book. The character of the book will be shown by a summary of its contents followed by an abridged translation of one section.

In 1937 the present writer published some new South Arabian copper coins, brought back from the Wādī Maifa'at in the Ḥaḍramaut by Miss Freya Stark, on which the Ḥaḍramī moon-god, Sīn, figured for the first time. These pieces, of various sizes and weights, had all the same types and legends. Parts were obliterated or missing, but a composite drawing (fig. 1), based on a comparison of all specimens, shows on the obverse the beardless male head, wearing long ringlets of the moon-god, Sīn, whose name in the South Arabian script is on the right, with the letter (m) of uncertain significance, perhaps the initial of the mint, on the left behind the head. The reverse shows an eagle standing, to right, with open wings, the first occurrence of this representation of the moon-god on coins from this part of the world. To the left downwards is the name [reversed, as are all the legends on this first group, since these particular coins have all been cast from a series of moulds; the join in the mould, for example, is clearly visible on the right-hand side and at the bottom of the coin illustrated], i.e. ŠḲR, about which more will be stated later; to the right, downwards, , i.e. YŠH, a legend which has occasioned some speculation. Professor G. Ryckmans, in a private communication, drew my attention to the numerous examples of triple proper names amongst Sabæan rulers, e.g. Šahar Hilāl Yuhar'im, and suggested that the enigmatic letters on the coins might be the initials of one such. Unfortunately, as A. F. L. Beeston has recently pointed out, triple royal names are not attested at all in Ḥaḍramī. He suggested that the letters should be read upwards, HŠY, i.e. ‘minting (a verb with the causative prefix h) of Šmr Yhr'š’, the latter being the Sabæan king into whose realm the kingdom of the Ḥaḍramaut was assimilated towards the end of the 3rd century A.d. This would agree quite well with the date suggested in the above-mentioned Num. Chron. article (p. 279) from a study of prototypes as being ‘at the earliest the second century A.d.’.

In the course of a recently published article, I had occasion to demonstrate, rather briefly and using a comparatively simple poem, what seemed to me a distinct pattern of symbolic allusion in the verse of Ḥāfiẓ. I suggested that this type of pattern (especially in association with certain others, which have recently engaged the attention of scholars) largely invalidated the traditional view of Persian poetry as a random shower of brilliant, but ill-assorted and uncontrolled, ‘fireworks’.

The steppe which stretches between the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, from the Delta southward as far as the foothills of the Emine Dagh, and which since the middle of the 14th century has been called, after the Bulgarian prince Dobrotitsa, the Dobruja, is the homeland of a small Turkish-speaking people, the Gagauz. It is because of their religion that they appear as a distinct group among the Turks: they are Christians belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church. In the past the Gagauz may have constituted, among the various ethnic elements of the region, a group of considerable importance, especially in the southern and middle Dobruja, from Varna and Kaliakra towards Silistria on the Danube. Besides, small isolated groups of them are to be found also in the Balkans (where they are more commonly known by the name of Sorguch): in Eastern Thrace, round Hafsa, to the south-east of Adrianople, and in Macedonia, to the east and west of Salonica, round Zikhna (near Serres) and round Karaferia (Verria). In modern times the Gagauz of the Dobruja have shrunk to a feeble minority chiefly as a result of a prolonged and massive emigration into Bessarabia. To-day even this remnant is rapidly dwindling.