Line 18 of the Moabite Stone is frequently quoted as the only early instance of the use of the divine name outside Israel. The sentence runs as follows: By comparison with 1.12 the lacuna was filled by , which Mr.Clermont-Ganneau long-ago rejected. In 1. 12 is singular, its meaning is obscure, and it is used with the verb or , which is also obscure. Here the verb is and would be plural. The two passages are therefore clearly not parallel and the reading is not convincing. Hence it has been proposed more recently to read “the instruments of J.”, a very weak phrase. As a matter of fact I believe that the passage in to be understood in quite a different way, and I suggest the reading “and I took from thence what should be for myself (i.e. my own share, as king)”. In order to see if the original would admit of such a reading, I made a careful examination of the stone in the Louvre in April, 1914, when Mr. René Dussaud most kindly put all the material at my disposal. At the end of 1. 17 nothing is left on the stone after . The squeeze supplies , after which there is a stroke | which may belong to an aleph (usually printed as certain), and with a little good will I thought I could see a trace of its head. The lines are not all of equal length. There would be room for , or, if the line is long, . At the beginning of 1.18 is clear. The verb“to be” does not occur elsewhere in the inscription, so that we do not know its form in the dialect of Moab. But in Isaiah 164(“the burden of Moab”)it has been suggested that is used in imitation of Moabite speech. If so, the verb was written with a .

The famous Chinese traveller Yuan Chwang travelled throughout India during the second quarter of the seventh century a.d.: he proceeded eastwards as far as Samataṭa, and when he was turning back he mentioned six countries which he had heard of but could not visit. Their names are given in serial order: “(1) Shihli-Ch'atalo to the north-east (from Samataṭa) among the hills near the sea; (2) south-east from this, on a bay of the sea, Kamolangka; (3) Tolopoti to the east of the preceding; (4) east from Tolopoti was Ishangnapulo; (5) to the east of this was Mohachanp'o; and (6) to the south-east of this was the Yenmonachou country.”

In a former paper I dealt with the rulers of Lāhijān and Fūman in Gīlān, and now give an account of the remaining local dynasties and petty rulers of that province. The sources from which I have gathered my information have already been mentioned.

In a paper published in the January issue of this Journal, under the title “ To the East of Samataṭa ”, Professor Padmanath Bhattacharya Vidyavinod has proposed a new interpretation of a well-known passage in Hiuantsang, concerning the countries situated in the east of Samataṭa (Eastern Bengal). These six kingdoms were not visited by the pilgrim, but known to him by hearsay. Here are their names, together with the identifications generally admitted: —

1. Shih-li-ch'a-ta-lo = Śrikṣetra (Prome);

2. Ka-mo-lang-ka (Tenasserim ?);

3. To-lo-po-ti = Dvāravatī (Lower Siam);

4. I-shang-na-pu-lo = Īśānapura (Cambodia);

5. Mo-ha-chan-p'o = Mahā-Campā (Annam);

6. Yen-mo-na-chou = Yavadvīpa (Java) [?].

I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the great Kumbh Mela at Allahabad in February, 1918. There I found that Śaṅkara's Daśnāmī sannyāsīs were more numerous than any other group of ascetics, and that next to them in numbers came the Rāmānandī Vairāgīs. This illustrates the fact that in the history of religion in North India Rāmānanda is one of the very greatest figures. Yet very little is known about him with certainty. Hitherto his date, life, sect, teaching, attitude to caste have all been uncertain. Is it possible to-day to throw any light upon his historical position?

We take his date first. The traditional dates are 1299–1410. The great age to which this makes him live is at least suspicious, so that the statement requires to be tested; and since his immediate predecessors and all his chief disciples are known, we may be able from their chronological position to realize when he lived.

In offering the following notes I would especially ask for consideration on the part of students of Sinitic languages. I in no way pretend to be familiar with these forms of speech, and I must explain that, while I shall be grateful for criticisms on their part, my remarks are not directly addressed to them, but rather to those students of philology who have not made a special study of Chinese, but who, for purposes of comparison, are compelled to acknowledge a bowing acquaintance with all, or nearly all, the tonic languages of Asia.

In the Journal of Egyptian Archœology for January, 1916, a conjoint article was published by Dr. Gardiner, Dr. Cowley, and myself on the origin of the Semitic alphabet, starting from Dr. Gardiner's decipherment of the name of the Semitic goddess, Ba‘alath, in certain non-Egyptian inscriptions or “ scribings ” discovered by Professor Petrie in Sinai. The characters are Egyptian, but are not used with Egyptian values; they are usually written in vertical columns, and like the Meroitic hieroglyphs are read from the back and not from the front. Unfortunately the inscriptions are not numerous; they are badly written and in many cases effaced. However, we succeeded in determining the phonetic values of the majority of the letters—for letters they are—and in adding one or two more words (םענ לע, בר, תנת) to Dr. Gardiner's תלעב. One of the inscriptions which is on the base of a sphinx is “ bilingual ”, that is to say, there is an Egyptian text as well as what I will call a Semitic text.

Though of no great importance in itself, one of the tablets of the Harding Smith collection, numbered W.H.S. 122, is nevertheless worthy of notice, owing to the frequent mention made of a personage, to whom gifts were apparently made, named Man-ištisu. As this name only differs from that of the now well-known king of Ki, Man-ištusu, by the substitution of i for u in the third syllable, the identity of the two spellings seems certain, and it is possible that they are forms of the name of one and the same ruler. His capital, Kiš, is now represented by the mounds of Oheimer, about 20 miles east of the ruins of Babylon. Peters describes the site as consisting of a reddish hill, with many elevations to the west and north.

Among the more interesting tablets of the Berens collection of Babylonian tablets is one of more than usual interest, in that it gives directions as to the offerings to be made to the principal deities of the land.

In cataloguing the Oriental MSS. of the John Rylands Library, I came across an unknown and semi-official defence of Islam. The MS, containing it is in some places in a bad state of preservation, but apart from about ten words which have completely faḍed away, the text has been read and translated, and it is hoped that the book, accompanied by a critical apparatus, will shortly be published by the Governors of the Library at the Manchester University Press.

The dialect of the Arabic language which is spoken at the present day in Syria and Palestine has preserved many forms which bear a close relationship with the ancient languages which were formerly current in those countries. The origin of these peculiarities, which deviate from the canons of classical Arabic and which for the most part do not occur in Egyptian Arabic, is chiefly to be sought in Syriac, though many forms show the influence of Hebrew and Samaritan. Many of these resemblances, of course, are of an intangible kind, depending merely on the pronunciation of the vowels; in several cases, however, there is a definite change in the consonants, in which a return to some earlier dialect is seen.

Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṣṭrī is the name of a particular script used in Afghanistan, the Punjab, and portions of Central Asia from the fourth or fifth centuries before Christ to the third or fourth centuries of the Christian era. In the third or fourth centuries a.d. it gradually went out of use, the place being taken by one or more forms of the mediaeval Brāhmī. In the eighteenth century the earlier generation of epigraphists and archæologists used to call this script “Bactrian”, “Indo-Bactrian”, “Bactro-Pali”, “Ariano-Pali”, etc. Then it was identified with the Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṭṭhī lipi, on the evidence of the Fa-wan-shu-lin. The Chinese work describes the “ass-lip” (Kham-oṣṭha in Sanskrit) script, invented by one Kharoṣṭha, in which the writing ran from the right to left. This identification, proposed by George Bühler, has since met with general acceptance.

In the course of miscellaneous reading lately I came across a passage in the Introduction to Firishta's History of the Rise of the Muhammadan Power in India which I had marked long ago and then completely forgotten. If the main, statement in that passage (as italicized), to the effect that Ardashīr Pāpakān (Bābagān), the founder of the Sasanian dynasty of Persia (A.D. 226–41), invaded the Panjāb and retired on receiving homage and tribute, be accepted as true, the information thus acquired not only explains an extremely puzzling unique coin which I published in 1897, but also throws welcome light upon one of the darkest periods of Indian history, the third century after Christ.

The great Semitic digest of laws made by Hammurabi and inscribed at his orders on the magnificent diorite stele of Susa was probably promulgated soon after the 34th year of the reign of that famous king, or about 2088. His reign extended to 2081. The period of its composition and promulgation is therefore limited to the brief space of eight years at the end of his reign. This date is at any rate certain for the great stele deciphered by Père Scheil (1902). Fragments of the same code written on clay tablets of the period of Hammurabi were found at Susa, at Ellasar or Warka, and at Nippur. From Nippur two large tablets have been recovered, one of which has the colophon, “Fourth tablet of ‘ When the far-famed Anu ’.” Since the Code as written on the Paris Stele begins “ When the far-famed Anu ”, it is evident that the editions written on tablets are based upon the monumental copy and that they are later than it. For it is highly improbable that the original tablet edition began with a long historical prologue. The Nippur tablet has a colophon which says that it is the al-gub-ba of the king Hammurabi.

Sir john marshall's interpretation of ayasa in the Taxila silver scroll inscription of the year 136 as “ of Azes ” has been the subject of adverse criticism by some of the most eminent antiquarians since the publication of the record in 1914. The latest is by Professor Sten Konow in the Epigraphia Indica, xiv, p. 286. Professor Konow revives two of the objections to Sir John's explanation : (1) “ the word (ayasa) could hardly be the name of a king, because no royal title is used ” (2) “ if ayasa were really the name of a king, it would place the inscription in the reign of this king, who would then most likely have to be identified with the Khushana mentioned in 1. 3. ” I hope to show in this note that these objections are not as insuperable as they are supposed to be.

We have seen how the Panjab and the Valley of the Middle Ganges were organized before the sixth century b.c. We have still to answer the question, wherein did this organization consist? It consisted in three things: it established a differentiation in physical type; it created caste; and it brought about a novel intellectual and religious outlook upon life. Of the physical types we need say nothing more; and the intellectual and religious evolution was -in part a concomitant, in part a consequence of the social evolution. Our primary concern, therefore, is to inquire into the origin and development of caste, and as caste was the creation of the Aryo-Dravidians of the middle land, Madhyadēśa, it is among them that we must seek its origin.

The Babylonians divided the night into three watches, to which they gave the names maṣṣartu bararîtu, evening watch, maṣṣartu ḳablîtu, midnight watch, maṣṣarti šat urri, morning watch. Bararîtu and kablîtu are adjectives in this construction. The full forms occur rarely as in Ebeling, Religiöse Keilschrifttexte aus Assur, No. 58, Rev. 7 ; No. 91, Rev. 21–2. Ordinarily maṣṣartu is omiṭted in the Semitic texts and bararîtu, ḳablîtu are treated as nouns. So in the syllabars, where the Sumerian equivalents contain the word ennun = maṣṣartu, the noun for “ watch ” is invariably omitted.

After a delay of many years certain of the cuneiform texts discovered by the German excavating expedition to Boghaz Keui in 1907 have been published during the War (30 wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesettschaft: Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi, parts i and ii—the third part has not yet reached foreign scholars; Hinrichs, Leipzig, 1916). It has therefore become possible to attack the problem of decipherment with a fair show of success, and also to estimate the value of such attempts at it as have already been made. Just before the War Professor Delitzsch published a number of lexical fragments, in which the Hittite words are given with their Assyrian and Sumerian equivalents, and it is from these that every scientific attempt at decipherment must start. The cuneiform originals which were transliterated by Professor Delitzsch are to be found in part i of the Keilschrifttexte.

Watters, when discussing various passages in Chinese literature referring to Kapilavastu, the early home of Gautama Buddha, or to other localities with similar names (JRAS. 1898, pp. 539, 540), observed that “for the names Kapila and Kapilavastu the Chinese seem to have obtained from their foreign teachers several explanations more or less exact”.

The personages described by the term Shahbandar, with such variations in orthography as Savendar, Sabinder, Xabendar, and the like, appear so frequently in the literature of the Eastern seas that it is desirable to arrive at a definite idea of the position which they occupied, and the functions which they discharged. The task is not, however, easy, for the ordinary Persian and Portuguese dictionaries are not very enlightening on this particular topic, while the discussion of the term in Hobson-Jobson is by no means exhaustive.