In November of 1952 I received a note from a medical doctor who some two years earlier had returned to Britain from Ch'üanchou, in the province of Fukien. A Chinese acquaintance had given him photographs of carved stones, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian, collected by him in recent years, with the hope that someone in the West might publish them. At first glance I recognized fifteen undoubtedly Christian crosses, five with figures of angels on either side, and seven with considerable inscriptions. With the photographs came a copy of a Chinese monograph published by the collector, Wu Wen-liang, An Introduction to the Ancient Stone Carving of Ch'uan-chou. I had enlargements of the Christian set of photographs made, as published in plates II to XVII, 2 sent a set to Professor A. C. Moule, and sought his help. That help has been generously given, in translating part of Wu's monograph, in corresponding with other scholars who might decipher the inscriptions, and in assessing the significance of these new finds. It seems more suitable to recognize general indebtedness here than to refer to him by footnote at the end of every paragraph.

As is usual with bronze inscriptions the terms of these two offer no decisive clue to the historical setting. Year, place, queen, chieftain, and court-official are named in a way which no doubt was adequate at the time of drafting when to name the reigning king would have been redundant. Without his name any attempt made now to correlate the terms and scanty history is only guesswork. On style we must base our judgment: style of the vessels' design and of the script. Parallels are found among bronzes of the First Phase near its end. Failure to match also the phraseology is not surprising seeing how few pre-conquest inscriptions there are which extend beyond brief formulas. Moreover, the presence of the spurshaped figure of unknown significance at the end of the tsun inscription (b) is almost conclusive. It occurs often on pre-conquest bronzes. Investigation led Karlgren to decide it “was obsolete at the time when the Chou dynasty started”, doubtless meaning the conquest (6,21–3). In short, the possibility that here are products of the Chou before they defeated the Shang-Yin cannot be denied. Though no such bronze has yet been recognized, surely they existed. Not only the Chou but other principalities may come to be identified as bronze-makers during the Shang-Yin period. To assign the Huan Yu and Tsun to the reign of T'ai Wang (perhaps ca. 1150 b.c.) is admittedly a rash guess, but to my mind no more rash than the guesses quoted above and less questionable. It may be objected that his title of “king” was only a posthumous one according to tradition. On the other hand, bronze inscriptions reveal that many styled themselves “kings” unknown to history, and Tan-fu may have been among them. Another likely objection is the presence of nien for “year”, since everyone knows that ssă was the term used commonly under the Shang-Yin and sometimes after the conquest. Again a negative generalization would be risky in the absence of evidence of earliest Chou practice. Of course the assumption that “the King” was a Chou king can be defended only on grounds of plausibility. Finally “Huan” may not be the right pronunciation of the Registrar's name; perhaps it was “Yüan” or “Ch'iung”.

In the summer of 1953, while visiting Kabul, I learnt from Dr. Ahmed Ali Khan Kohzad, Director of the Kabul Museum, that a report had reached him of the existence at Uruzgan of an inscription in unidentified script. Uruzgan is a small town and district headquarters situated about 175 miles to the north-west of Kandahar, on the Tirin River, and about midway between the upper waters of the Rivers Helmand and Arghandab, in Central Afghanistan. We discussed the report several times, and with Dr. Kohzad's encouragement I decided to visit Uruzgan and investigate the matter.

It has been a frequent experience in Khotanese texts to find that two words spelled identically are widely different in meaning. The many different words comprised, for example, in bara- were quoted in Asia Major, n.s. 2. 40. It has been the same with vara. Beside the vara, varata “there” and vara “to”, varālsto “towards”, it has been possible to trace two other words written in the same way.

The late Dr. H. A. Winkler explored parts of the Eastern Desert of Egypt in 1936 and 1937. In his Rock Drawings of Southern Upper Egypt (vol. i, 1938), at his Site 24b, he reported a natural cave shelter in Wādi Menīḥ, in the west rock face (thus ensuring all-day shade). The cave is in the Berenice road, at lat. 25° 37′ N. The cave shelter contains numerous inscriptions of all periods, from primitive rock drawings to hieroglyphic, Graeco-Roman, Nabataean, Christian Greek, and early Arabic. These are all copied in facsimile in Winkler's MS. field notes, reference to which in this study is by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.

In the chapter on Apabhraṃśa in Hemacandra's Prākrit Grammar (Siddhahema, iv, 330 if.) are found some instances of a curious phraseological turn to express the ablative of motion, which is unknown from OIA, viz.:—

iv, 355

jahāhontau āgado “from where he came”; tahāhontau āgado “from there he came”; kahāhontau āgado “from where did he come ?”;

iv, 379

mahu hontau gado, majjhu hontau gado “he went from me”;

iv, 372

tau hontau āgado, tujjha hontau āgado, tudhra hontau āgado “he came from you”;

iv, 380

amhahã hontau gado “he went from us”;

iv, 373

tumhahã hontau āgado “he came from you”.

The recognition that the setting of the story related in the Syriac Hymn of the Soul is Iranian is primarily based on the statement in the poem that its chief character, the Prince who “from the far Hyrcanian mountains” was sent down to Egypt to fetch the unique Pearl, was the son of the king of Parthia. Less obvious Iranian reminiscences are also to be found in the Hymn, some of which have lately been discussed by G. Widengren in Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte, iv (1952), Heft 2,1 sqq., where, however, one misses a reference to the relationship of srbwg with the Sogdian word for “tower”, v. W. B. Henning, JRAS. 1944, 139 sq. It is proposed in the present note to explain the Iranian origin of a hitherto obscure title in the Hymn, which from the context appears to designate one of the highest officials of the Arsacid court. This is the title of the Prince's elder brother in verse 48, where the MS. has p'rybn “our p.”.

The stone fragments here published were recovered from the ruins of Shabwa, in the Hadramaut, in 1938 by Major the Honourable R. A. B. Hamilton (now Lord Belhaven and Stenton) and presented to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1952. The finder has described his work at Shabwa in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, published in the Geographical Journal, and in his book The Kingdom of Melchior.

Though the Pahārī schools of Rājput painting are fairly well known since A. K. Coomaraswamy's monumental Rajput Painting (1916), the schools of Rājasthān, the principal Rājput area, have long remained a terra incognita and even to-day pose numerous unsolved problems.

Possessive adjectives are not strictly essential parts of speech; their place can often be taken by the genitive of the personal pronouns. This has led to a certain lack of continuity in their development, which has, however, often been exaggerated. Apart from very isolated survivals like maīa, the Sanskrit possessives had already died out in Prakrit. The Modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars have entirely new formations, the most widespread of which is that in -r-. In the singular one can distinguish three main groups of possessive adjectives in r-:—

(1) Western Hindi, as characteristic of the first group has mērō, tērō for the possessive. (Oblique forms of the pronoun are mō, muj, mohi, muhi, and tō, tuj, tohi, tuhi.)

(2) Gujarati and most of the Rajasthani dialects except Mewati belong to a second group whose main characteristic is the vowel -a-: Gujarati mārō, tārō (oblique base ma, ta).

(3) Eastern Hindi and the Magadhan languages on the whole have -o- as the vowel of the possessive, thus Avadhi mōr, tōr (oblique mō, tō).

It is a well-known fact that descendants of the Visigothic kings lived on in Spain under Muslim rule for several centuries. An important early historian of Muslim Spain, Ibn al-Qüṭīyah (died 367/977), owes his name—“son of the Gothic woman”—to descent from the princess Sara, granddaughter of King Witiza, and in his Iftitāḥ gives an account of the destinies of several members of the family. The following pages will, I hope, serve to throw light on one of these and at the same time to clear up a bibliographical problem which has never been properly solved.

When revising my translation of the Mandæan scroll The Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa which has just been published by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Studi e Testi, No. 176, I was struck by certain resemblances in the narrative to the story of the journey of the Parthian prince in search of the Pearl as related in the Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas. This poem is sometimes called the Hymn of the Apostle Thomas and by Professor F. G. Burkitt (the Quest, vol. v, July, 1914) the Hymn of the Soul. In his Zwei Gnostische Hymnen (Giessen, 1904) which contains both the Syriac text and the translation into German, Erwin Preuschen calls it Das Lied von der Erlösung.

During my stay in Tibet from 1946 to 1950 I undertook to edit the late Sir Charles Bell's material on the inscriptions at Lhasa and Bsam Yas. This work led me to try to trace as many ancient Tibetan inscriptions as possible, and my inquiries took me to the rdo riṇs at Mtshur Phu, Saṅs Rgyas Dgon-pa, Hphyoṅ Rgyas, and Žva-ẖi Lha Khan, as well as to many likely but unproductive sites such as ẖu Žaṅ and Lha-Khaṅ Rdzoṅ. I also heard vague rumours of an old inscription somewhere near Rtse Bla Sgaṅ, on the Gtsan-po (Brahmaputra). As it would have needed more than six weeks' absence from my duties at Lhasa, I was not able to visit the place myself but I eventually enlisted the help of the young but very learned Bkaẖ Rgyud-pa Lama, Bdud ẖjoms Rinpoche, whose monastery is in that area and who was engaged on building a new lha-khan at an ancient site called Zans Mdog Dpal Ri. He had seen the inscription which, he said, was carved on a pillar or rock face beside the track along the north bank of the Gtsan-po, in an area known as De-Mo Sa. It was said to be sheltered by shallow stone walls supporting tiled eaves and to be almost completely buried in sand. The few lines which were visible were reported to refer to Khri Sroṅ Lde Brtsan and to contain the words “Kon Jo”, from which local tradition assumed that it referred to the Chinese princess who was (incorrectly) said to be the mother of Khri Sroṅ Lde Brtsan.

Words gain suddenly in importance when used to sustain otherwise fragile historical theories. Since historians of Central Asia are all too often apt to ignore the most elementary rules of linguistics, an erroneous treatment of a word has more than once been made the basis for a not less erroneous historical hypothesis which, in its turn, is taken for granted by other historians, reluctant if not unable to ascertain the validity of the initial statement. To give some substance to this assertion, and also to check the spread, before it is too late, of a new false etymology, I should like to study a hitherto harmless word that has suddenly assumed undue importance through some of F. Altheim's works.

JRAS. Parts 1 and 2, 1954. Page 62, line 24. For BHSM read BSHM.