In August, September, and October, 1913, I was engaged on one of a series of journeys in Mongolia, which I hope, if I am given the opportunity to complete them, will enable me to collect sufficient data for a work about this little-known country and its people, a subject upon which English literature is perhaps even poorer than that of the other Western European nations, and certainly far poorer than that of Kussia. The particular journey in question started at Hailar, in Barga, and was pursued via the valley of the Kerulen River and Urga to the Mongolyor Goldfields on the Upper Iro and thence to Kiakhta, where modern means of travel again became available for the return to Peking. During this journey I saw a great variety of lamaseries and temples; I had as my constant and only companions two lamas, and for a week I lived continuously in a lamasery in the room of a lama. I was thus able to observe a large number of facts, some of which may be of interest to students of Lamaism, even if only as having been noted in a remote corner of the vast domain of the Yellow Faith, where, unlike Tibet, Englishspeaking people have seldom travelled.

Of the monuments of medieval missionary work very few can surpass in interest the letters written from China by John of Monte Corvino, Archbishop of Khan-balig, and Andrew of Perugia, Bishop of Zaitun; arid many persons will be grateful to the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society for printing a more accurate text of these letters than has hitherto been available. The letters, together with most of what is known of the history of the missions to the Far East, of which the writers were members, are found in a single MS. which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. The Librarians, whose extreme courtesy and kindness have made the following transcript possible, inform me that this MS. is now numbered “Latin 5006”, and that it dates from the first half of the fourteenth century. It contains 192 leaves, parchment, measuring Om. 20 × 0 m. 15. The credit of discovering the letters appears to belong to Luke Wadding, the voluminous historian of the Minor Friars, who was born at Waterford 16 October, 1588, and died 18 November, 1657, or to an unnamed friend of his.

Three years ago, in his Schweich Lectures on “The Early Poetry of Israel in its Physical and Social Origins”, Dr. George Adam Smith gave us a detailed examination of all the remains of ancient Hebrew poetry contained in the Old Testament which he thought might reasonably be assigned to the period before the eighth century b.c., that notable century which saw the rise of the great Prophets—Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah—who brought to the religion of Israel a new spirit, and set it upon the road of development which has been fraught with incalculable consequences to the history of mankind. Those who heard his lectures, or have read them in their since published form, will remember that in dealing with these ancient relics of literature Dr. Smith throughout examined them with an eye to the compositions of those cousins of Israel, the nomad tribes of Arabia. Comparing the two, at every step he found that the latter threw light on the former, and brought into strong relief the close kinship of these two great historic branches of the Semitic race. “Ancient Israel illustrated by Ancient Arabia” might, in fact, be taken as the alternative description of his lectures, the beauty and eloquence of which those who heard them are not likely soon to forget.

Personal Pronouns.—Georgian (with Lazian, etc.) makes no distinction of genders in personal pronouns (as in general Georgian makes no distinction of genders). Herein Georgian corresponds perfectly to Sumerian. The personal pronouns in Sumerian are also very like to Georgian, though the same cannot be said of other pronouns. The 1st person singular is regularly me-e in Sumerian, and in Georgian me = I = Lazian ma, man = Mingrelian ma = Svanian mi. The 2nd person is in Sumerian za-e = Georgian šen = Mingrelian si = Lazian si = Svanian si. As to the 3rd person, it is most interesting that Georgian and the other languages of the Georgian group have no special pronoun to designate directly the 3rd person; in Sumerian it is the same. Both Sumerian and Georgian borrow the pronoun for the 3rd person from demonstrative pronouns: Sumerian ni (rectus) and na, (obliquas) for persons, and bi and ba for inanimate objects; Georgian is, igi, Mingrelian , ena, θena, Lazian ham, Svanian ada, ala. But in Georgian the root of the pronoun of the 3rd person appears in the genitive, dative, and other cases, and this root being m we can compare it with Sumerian demonstrative bi and ba. Indeed, we have in Georgian , is igi = he she, it, but in genitive m-is, dative m-as, etc.; in Mingrelian , ena, θena = he, she, it, but in genitive m-u-ši, etc. In Lazian as independent personal pronoun 3rd person, the demonstrative ham, = this, is used, but the pronominal nominative is m-u-q, genitive m-u-ši, etc. It must be remembered, moreover, that in Lazian the demonstrative pronouns have the root of the personal pronoun 3rd person m, and that is why they replace the personal pronoun 3rd person.

This collection of ancient Tibetan documents, of which I have been engaged in preparing an inventory under an arrangement sanctioned by the India Office, contains close on two thousand pieces, none of them probably of a later date than the ninth century A.D., and is certain to shed a flood of new light on Tibetan archæology, history, grammar, culture, religion, and folklore. Most of the documents were found at two sites, viz. Mīrān and Mazārtāgh. Mīrān is situated a few miles south of the westernmost end of the present Lop-nōr marshes, while Mazār-tāgh is a low barren ridge rising in the middle of the Taklamakān desert, on the left bank of the Khotan River. In his Ruins of Desert Cathay, vol. i, pp. 350 seqq., 439 seqq., Sir Aurel Stein has described the remains of the ruined fort which yielded these Tibetan records at the former site. For an account of the excavations which brought to light Tibetan and other documents in abundance from the refuse-layers adjoining the small ruined station on the Mazār-tāgh hill, vol. ii, pp. 417 seqq., may be consulted.

Much has been done by scholars to elucidate the history of the earliest times in India, based principally on the Veda and the brahmanical literature, and the deductions of philology. Kṣatriya tradition, especially in the genealogical accounts, contains a great quantity of quasi-historical matter, but has been generally discarded as meriting little or no trust. It is, however, worthy of attention and examination, since it tells us what the ancient Aryans knew or believed about the earliest ‘events’ in India.

Uddyotakara is well known as a Brāhmaṇa logician and author of a sub-commentary on Gotama's Nyāya- sūtra called the Nyāya-vārttika, in which he mentions two treatises on Logic called respectively the Vādavidhi and Vādavidhāna-ṭīkā.

The object of the present note is to throw some light on certain grammatical forms which are met with in Tulasī Dāsa's Rāmacaritamānasa, and which either have not been paid sufficient attention hitherto or have remained unrecognized or have even been utterly misunderstood.

It is passing strange that this ancient and interesting author, whose exposition of the Mīmāṃsā sūtras is the oldest now extant, should be so much neglected by modern students of Sanskrit. Yet one would suppose that a writer who offered an interpretation of Vedic ritual, and who preceded Sāyaṇa by nearly twelve centuries, would never fail to receive attention from students of the most ancient literature of India. But there are others to whom a good knowledge of Mīmāṃsā is of importance. It is no exaggeration to say that, without that knowledge, it would be impossible rightly to comprehend the larger treatises on Vedānta—notably those of the very learned Appaya Dīkṣita, in which very lengthy disquisitions on Mīmāṃsā topics abound — or even Jayanta Bhaṭṭa's Nyāyamanjarī.

The following translation is made from a MS. of Vakhtang's Code of Laws, purchased from a dealer in Tiflis in January, 1911, which is now the property of the Bodleian Library. The MS. is in good condition and bound in wooden boards covered with stamped leather. It is on yellow glazed paper, watermarked 1746, paged from 1 to 851; and then there follows, unpaged, a Code compiled by Prince David, son and heir of the last King of Georgia, which was hitherto unknown and bears that prince's autograph with the date “November 26, 1800” and a colophon by Gabriel, priest of Anchiskhati Church, dated 1805. The size of the page is 12 by 8 inches, of the text 8½ by 5½ inches. There are eighteen lines to the page and eight folios to the quire. A note on p. 57 says it was written by Ose Decanozishvili by the King's command in 1750, but this entry seems to have been made later in lighter ink and may only refer to the index. A remarkable feature of the MS. is that certain words (apparently those about which the scribe felt some doubt) are marked or ; this seems to show a conscientious transcription of an old original. The MS. begins with an alphabetical list of contents (paged 1–57), the earlier part of which (before ) had apparently been lost before the pages were numbered. Then comes the usual tabular index of subjects (pp. 62–136), with references to all the sections of the code for comparative purposes, so that the laws of Vakhtang, George, the Athabegs, and the Catholicos may be compared with each other, and with Greek, Armenian, and Mosaic legislation, at a glance.

The conquest of the Persian and half of the Byzantine Empire by the Arabs, under the banner of Islam in the seventh century, was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world. On the one side were ranged the forces of two highly-organized military powers, Imperial New Rome and Imperial Persia, which for over three centuries had been engaged in constant conflict with each other. Although this necessarily tended to exhaust the material resources of the combatants, it would naturally be supposed that it must have given them military experience, and their leaders a training in generalship, adequate to enable them to face with confidence of victory enemies hitherto regarded with contempt as mere barbarians. On the other side we see hosts of men, reared in a country where the conditions of life have always been of the hardest and most precarious, divided by tribal feuds and secular hatreds, poorly armed, with no practice in warfare against disciplined foes, and with no allies to swell their legions. Yet from the beginning the progress of the Arabs was one of almost uninterrupted success.

The following pages contain a rather circumstantial account of certain negotiations between the Buwaihid, 'Aḍud al-Daula, and the Emperor Basil, the slayer of the Bulgarians, consequent on the presence of Basil's defeated rival, Bardas Scleros, in honourable captivity at Baghdad. His defeat at Pancalia in A.D. 979 very nearly coincided with 'Aḍud al-Daula's final conquest of ‘Irāḳ, which was followed by the expulsion from Mosul of the Hamdanid Abu Taghlib. Between him and Scleros existed the tie of self-interest cemented by one of affinity: they had assisted each other against their respective adversaries, and had both been defeated. Abu Taghlib's defeat was final; driven from Diyār Bakr by the troops of 'Aḍud al-Daula, he fled to Syria and perished by a treacherous Arab hand. But no impassable barrier as yet interposed between Scleros and the object of his ambition. He had escaped to Mayyāfāriḳīn, which had lately submitted to ‘Aḍud al-Daula, and had sent thence his brother Constantine as his envoy to Baghdad with an appeal for succour and an offer of allegiance. Contemporaneously arrived at Baghdad an envoy from Basil with instructions to procure, at whatever cost, the surrender of Scleros, who was obviously a valuable pawn in the monarchs’ political game. 'Aḍud al-Daula thereupon caused him and his followers to be promptly conveyed to Baghdad, and the game proceeded.

The temple and dam which form the subject of this paper have already been dealt with in the Indian Antiquary and in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the former paper, written by Colonel Kincaid, being the most complete.

Captain L. Molyneux-Seel has been good enough to send me a photograph of a Vannic inscription discovered by him built into the wall of a ruined Armenian chapel at Baghin, north of the Murad Su. Baghin is on the right bank of the Kighi Su, which falls into the Murad Su near Kharput, and it is about 50 miles north-east of the latter city and almost due north of Palu, where an inscription of Menuas has long been known to exist (No. XXXIII of my memoir). The new inscription is important, since it not only adds a new word, litiani, “a boundary-stone,” to the Vannic vocabulary, but it also fixes the western boundary-line of the Vannic kingdom in the reign of, Menuas.

In an article in the Indian Antiquary Mr. R. Shamasastry has made a new attempt to prove the existence in Vedic India in the period of the Saṃhitās and the Brāhmaṇas of a really elaborate calendar. He starts from the admitted existence of an intercalary month, which is referred to from the Ṛgveda onwards, and from the fact that in the Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda we find the Ekāṣṭakā, traditionally identified with the 8th day of the dark half of Māgha, treated as the commencement of the year. “Whether we will or no,” he concludes, “the fact cannot be denied that the idea of a thirteenth month, i.e. an intercalated month, could not have dawned upon the mind of the Vedic poets unless they had been quite familiar with the true lengths of several kinds of years.”

The fixing of the exact time of the earliest Indian king whose inscriptions havesurvived to our days depends very much on the dates of two contemporaries whom he mentions: Magā or Makā, and Alikasudara or Alikyashudala. The former has been identified long ago with Magas of Cyrene, and the second was either Alexander of Epirus, or, as Professor Beloch thinks, Alexander of Corinth. The fresh dates to which these three rulers are assigned in Beloch's Griechische Geschichte induce me to reconsider the much-discussed question of the period of Aśōka's reign.

There is no lack of numismatic evidence for the fact that the words Kūšān šāhān šāh and Kūšān šāh were used as personal attributes by certain princes reigning about the year A.D. 300. On the obverse of one of the coins in question Professor Marquart reads the legend: mazdēsn bagē Pērōzē (i) wažurg Kūšān šāh, “des mazdaverehrenden Gottes Pērōz, grossen Kōnigs der Kūšān.” M. Drouin translates the saine legend as follows: “le mazdéen, le divin Pérose, grand Kouchan, roi.”

Central asia has come as a boon to all of us; it is a land of universal brotherhood. For centuries it has been the meeting-point of all races: Hindus, Persians, Turks, Tibetans, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Manichaeans used to live there side by side in a happy spirit of harmony; and the same spirit of harmony now seems to inspire our Central Asian studies. Western and Eastern explorers — English, French, German, Russian, Japanese—entered into rivalry only in the most chivalrous mood. England can be proud of having led the way; the glory of the first and the most brilliant discoveries will for ever remain attached to the name of Sir Aurei Stein, a man of exceptional abilities, who has given proof of the highest gifts in the most different directions—as a philologist, as an archaeologist, as an explorer. I would compare him witli his patron saint, ablbīṁṭa-devatā, the Chinese pilgrim Hwan-tsang. Both traversed the same countries in their peregrinations; both had to endure the same hardships, had to prove the same energy; both brought home a treasure of notes, observations, and documents; both were cheered by the same hope of benefiting mankind, the Chinese monk with the word of Buddha, Stein with scientific and historical truth. Both proved equally right; catholicity belongs to science as well as to religion. No national pride interfered to raise difficulties in the working up of the mass of documents collected by Stein. Some of them have been entrusted to Thomsen, a Dane, the wonderful decipherer of the Orkhon Turkish runes; some to Von Le Coq, a German, himself another explorer of Central Asia; some to La Vallée Poussin, a Belgian, one of the authorities on Mahāyāna Buddhism. Pelliot, the French émule of Stein, who shared with him the treasures hoarded in the celebrated cave at Twan-hwang, was called upon for a catalogue of the Chinese MSS. Chavannes, the leading Sinologist of our day, had for his own part the task of publishing Chinese wooden tablets dating from the early centuries A.D. M. Senart and Father Boyer, both of high renown as decipherers of Kharoṣṭrī characters, were asked to accept a share as co-editors of the tablets traced in that sort of writing. Professor Gauthiot obtained the Sogdian fragments. I myself received the leaves written in the Tokharian language.

The Vākāṭaka Dynasty, of which the very name and existence had been utterly forgotten for many centuries, was brought to the knowledge of students of ancient Indian history by the publication in 1836 of a copper-plate grant from the Central Provinces. Since that date a few more inscriptions on stone or copper have been discovered at various times and places, and the little known about the dynasty is derived solely from those records. No extant coin can be assigned to the Vākāṭaka princes, who must have used as currency the monetary issues of other powers. We are ignorant of the derivation of the name Vākāṭaka, and are unable to say whether the kings were indigenous or of foreign descent. Nor do we know for certain the locality in which the dynasty took its rise. It is not mentioned in literature, although it seems to be the subject of an obscure allusion in the Purāṇas, which contain in the section dealing with the dynasties of Vidiśā, etc., the passage translated by Mr. Pargiter from his eclectic text, as follows:—

“Hear also the future kings of Vidiśā. Bhogin, son of the Naga king Seṣa, will be king, conqueror of his enemies' cities, a king who will exalt the Nāga family. Saducandra, and Candrāṁśa who will be a second Nakhavant, then Dhanadharman, and Vaṅgara is remembered as the fourth. Then Bhūtinanda will reign in the Vaidiśa kingdom.

This record has been treated by M. Senart in the Journal Asiatique (sér. IX, vol. vii), 1896, i, 5 ff. (where he has described its provenance and appearance and has mentioned earlier notices of it), and by Professor Lüders in this Journal, 1909, pp. 645 ff. My treatment of it is based ou my own reading of the two facsimile plates published with M. Senart's paper, and I have to thank Dr. Fleet for various criticisms and suggestions. Where pages are cited in connexion with M. Senart's or Professor Lüders' readings, they mean the pages of their respective articles; and when quoting their readings of particular words, I distinguish the readings by adding S or L, using these letters for the sake of brevity.