The exact position of Sāketa, a town somewhere to the north of the Ganges between Kanauj and Pāṭali-putra, now Patnā, for long has exercised the minds of the many who take an interest in the ancient civilization of India. It was a noted place from the days of Gautama Buddha down to about 400 a.d. Several places have been suggested, but no one is supported by very convincing proof, and when closely examined in the light of the discovery of the site of Kapilavastu more than one of the proposed identifications are manifestly wide of the mark.

‘Here be’ (or ‘here is’) this hearing (or ‘this listening to’) the sacrifice of Aūharmazd [that is to say, let him, Srōš (this listening personified), come on to this (our Sacrifice)], a sacrifice to the One wishful for our benefit (sic) (hardly ‘ of the One supplicated for our prosperity’), to the sacrifice of Aūharmazd, the Holy, who is desirous of our (prosperity) as at the first; [the meaning (is) (so I would here translate ‘mēnešnīg’);— the meaning is: ‘as I have now stood at the first thus within this sacrificial (precinct, so here be the hearing of the sacrifice now)], and at the last [so meaning, ‘ I would so complete its end’]. A person here attending is therefore this’ (meaning that every sincere attendant upon the sacrifice should assume the attitude herein above indicated).

Among the uncertain Arabic coins in the British Museum are two dirhams of the years 361 and 363 a.h., which are described by Professor Stanley Lane-Poole (J.R.A.S., 1876, p. 295) as bearing the name of the Caliph al-Muṭī'lillah and of the sovereign (?) The mint place on one of the coins is illegible; that on the coin of 361 a.h. was identified by Dr. O. Codrington as “Rūbār,” and his collection contains a similar but more perfect specimen ; there is also one at Paris, in the Cabinet des Médailles, struck at Rūbār ; and one was published by Tornberg in the Rev. Num. Belge, 5th series, ii, 243. He read the mint Rūbār, and the name of usru āh's ancestor as adding that there was a dinar of the same type and mint in the collection of Baron Chaudoir, and that Millies possessed a dirham which he surmised to belong to the Dailamite dynasty of Wahsūdān.

“Nāgarakretāgama” is the title of a Javanese poem composed by a native bard named Prapañca, in honour of his sovereign Hayam Wuruk (1350–1389), the greatest ruler of Mājapāhit. It has recently been edited with his customary scholarship by Dr. Brandes, and its contents were shortly afterwards analyzed by Dr. Kern. Its date, in so far as can be made out from internal evidence, must be put down to about 1380. At this period the Mājapāhit empire had reached the zenith of its power, and embraced, besides most of the archipelago, several, though little better than nominal, dependencies on the southern part of the Malay Peninsula. Furthermore, friendly and trading relations had been established with a number of States on the Indo-Chinese mainland. In the course of his pæan of praise for his great sovereign, the poet gives a long enumeration of all such countries. This is where the interest of the production chiefly lies, for though it be merely a question of a list of bare toponyms, yet the simple fact of some of them being mentioned at such a date gives rise to issues, as we shall see directly, of high importance for the elucidation of the historical geography, as well as of several obscure points in the early history of the countries concerned.

This collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts was handed over in 1875 by Mr. J. B. Baillie, of Leys, Inverness, to the University of Edinburgh for preservation in the Library. Colonel John Baillie (v. Dictionary of National Biography, s.v.), to whom the collection originally belonged, was a distinguished servant of the East India Company. In 1801 he was appointed professor of the Arabic and Persian languages and of Muhammadan Law in the College of Fort William, then newly founded by Viscount Wellesley. This collection of manuscripts, formed while he was in the East, shows the impress of the grammatical and legal studies which he pursued ; but it contains also some of the standard works of Arabic literature. No catalogue of the manuscripts has as yet been drawn up. The following list may serve to indicate to scholars what the collection contains. The works have not been arranged in any order of subject. The majority of the volumes have a number attached to the back, and I have simply taken them in the order of the numbers. The Persian works, of which there are quite a number, have been omitted in this list—they may perhaps be treated in a future article—and these will account for some of the omitted numbers. A good few of the numbers are, however, wanting altogether, but what this indicates, or when the numbers were attached to the volumes, I cannot say. (Cf. Note at end of article.)

As is well known, the authors of the earlier Persian anthologies do not give specimens of Omar Khayyam's poetry. In fact, they did not regard him as a poet, but as a ḥakīm, or philosopher, who occasionally wrote verses, and perhaps this view is more correct than the ordinary European one, and the estimate which Omar himself would have made. Poetry with him was the amusement of his leisure hours, and we might style his quatrains, in the words used by Palgrave about Bacon's stanzas, as “a fine example of a peculiar class of poetry—that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little.” Such intermittent springs of poetry are not much appreciated by Orientals, who like quantity as well as quality. In speaking of a poet, they are generally careful to tell us how many thousand couplets he wrote. They admire Firdusi perhaps more for his having written 50,000 couplets—exclusive of his Joseph and Zulaika—than for his really fine passages, though it must be admitted that they seldom read him through, and practically only know him in extracts. As Professor Cowell has remarked in his excellent notice of Omar, which well deserves reprinting, “Every other poet of Persia has written too much—even her noblest sons of genius weary with their prolixity.

I believe I shall be doing good service to students of Moslem literature if I venture to call their attention to a recently published book, which at first sight may seem quite foreign to their special subject. Dr. Caird's recent Gifford Lectures on the “ Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers” throw a flood of light on the genesis and growth of those Hellenic ideas which have so profoundly modified Christian and some parts of Moslem theology. The scholastic and the mystical theology of Christendom and Islam ran in courses parallel to one another, and the influence of the Hellenic factor is equally operative in both. Each may be regarded as the offspring of a cross between Hebraic and Hellenic ideas. It has, of course, long been recognised that Moslem scholastic theology (Al Kalām) has been built up, like its Christian counterpart, from Aristotelian concepts, and, moreover, that the Christian schoolmen drew much of their knowledge of Aristotle from Arabic authorities. The great commentary of Averroes, for instance, is mentioned by Dante, who censures his doctrine of the Universal Soul, afterwards condemned by the Lateran Council of 1512. Long ago, Jourdain made a careful study of the translations of Aristotle used by the schoolmen, and showed how many of them had come through Arabic. Schmölders proved that Moslem scholasticism is Aristotle with a Neo-Platonic colouring. The so-called “ Theology of Aristotle,” for instance, is merely a summary of the Enneads of Plotinus, “the Shaikh of the Greeks.”

It is a matter of great importance that Bhāmaha's work on Rhetoric has been discovered, and we are now able to judge of his position among Sanskrit authors. A careful and critical study of the work will amply repay the trouble of the reader ; but from a cursory reading I have been able to gather the following particulars of the author and his work, which I trust may be of general interest to the Sanskritists of the present day.

Since the note on these coins was published in the Society's Journal last year, p. 681, Mr. A. G. Ellis has been so good as to prepare the following list of the Sijistān or Nīmrūz Maliks from about a.h. 460 to 885, taken from the Iḥyā al-Mulūk, by Shāh Ḥusain b. Ghiyāth al-Dīn:—