By the recent appearance in the “E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” of vol. xvii, the Kashf al-Maḥjúb of Dr. R. A. Nicholson, preceded, as it was, rather closely by the Treatise on Mysticism of Evelyn Underhill, the Eastern as well as the Western manifestations of the mystical spirit are portrayed. Dr. Nicholson is concerned exclusively with the former, which in Mysticism are but lightly touched on, its subject being that Mysticism which is dependent on a specific religious impulse, and is thereby distinguishable from Pantheism.

Arrajān.—This city was first founded by King Qubād, the father of Chosroes Anūshirwān. It was a great city, with many dependencies, but during the troublous times when the Assassins held sway in the land it fell to ruin. It has a warm climate, and the city lies adjacent to the Thakān Bridge, where it spans the great river called the Nahr Ṭāb, which flows down from the neighbourhood of Sumayram. Further, many other streams flow past near here, with much water, whereby the land in this neighbourhood is most productive, growing all kinds of fruit. Groves of date-palms and of pomegranates abound, especially of the kind called mīlasī, which is most excellent. There are also many aromatic plants. The districts round and about Arrajīn are very numerous, and a mosque for the Friday prayers stands in the city.

In the Journal for the year 1902 a summary was given of the description of Persia and Mesopotamia found in the Nuzhat-al-Qulūb, a geographical and cosmographical work written by Ḥamd-Allah Mustawfi in 740 (1340). In the course of next year I hope to publish (in the series of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Fund) the Persian text of the geographical chapters of this work, and this will be followed by a full translation, with notes to elucidate geographical questions. Ḥamd-Allah, who is our earliest systematic geographer writing in Persian, collected his materials from the works of the earlier Arab geographers, and from various Persian monographs which had been written each to describe a single province of the Moslem Empire; and it is found that the texts of some of these monographs, thereto adding somewhat of his own knowledge, after much curtailment and a rearrangement of the order in the articles, he has transcribed almost verbatim, to form the various chapters of the Nuzhat. A good instance of this method of writing a new book is the chapter describing the provinces of Fārs and Shabānkārah, which in truth is little but a shortened transcript of the Fāre Nāmah, a work written two centuries before the time of Ḥamd-Allah, and of which the British Museum possesses an excellent MS.

This district takes its name from Dārā [Darius] the Great, son of King Bahman ibn Isfandiyār.

Dārābjird.—This city was founded by Dārā, son of Bahman. It was built circular as though the line of circumference had been drawn with compasses. A strong fortress stood in the centre of the town, surrounded by a ditch kept full of water, and the fortress had four gates. But now the town lies all in ruins, and nought remains except the wall and the ditch. The climate here is that of the hot region, and there are date-palms. The streams of running water are of bad quality. A kind of bitumen [mūmīyā] is found [near Dārābjird] at a place up in the mountain, which bubbles up and falls drop by drop. Also there is a rock-salt found in these parts which is of seven colours where it comes to the surface of the ground.

Depuis qu'en avril 1911, a paru dans ce même journal une note sur la langue et l'écriture des anciens documents sogdiens retrouvés par M. M. A. Stein, dans une tour du vieux limes chinois, il nous a été possible d'étudier de plus près ces textes si curieux. M. M. A. Stein, d'accord avec M. Cowley, qui les avait le premier examinés, a bien voulu mettre à notre disposition les photographies des six “lettres” les mieux conservées. Celles-ci, malgré l'âge, et bien qu'elles soient toutes plus ou moins détériorées, constituent des documents précieux; ce ne sont pas le moins du monde des débris: toutes présentent, malgré leurs lacunes, des morceaux d'un seul tenant, dont la longueur est variable, il est vrai, mais qui fournissent des phrases suivies, des formes nominales et verbales variées, bref de véritables petits textes.

Among the recent acquisitions of the India Office Library is a volume of the Tārīḫ Baghdād of the Ḫaṭīb containing biographies of men with the names of 'Umar, 'Uthmān, and 'Alī. The MS. is acephalous, the end is missing, and many leaves have been lost, so that an edition of the whole text is out of the question. Paper and writing point to the beginning of the seventh century of the Hiğrah. This volume of the extensive biographical dictionary of the Ḫaṭīb does not appear to exist in other European libraries, the greater portion of the work having been lost. Salmon published in 1904 the geographical introduction of the book with a French translation; in his introduction he gives an account of the known MSS. and a biography of the author. With regard to the MSS. enumerated by Salmon, it must be noted that Amar (JA., vol. xi, 237, 1908) has shown that the MSS. Bibl. Nat. 2130 and 2131 are not the original work of the Ḫaṭīb, but parts of an amplification of his work by Ibn an-Nağğār (d. 643 a.h.). The fact that No. 2131 is called the twenty-eighth volume, and contains biographies of men named 'Alī following later, according to the alphabetical arrangement of the Ḫaṭīb, than those contained in the India Office MS., seems to prove that the latter is a portion of the twenty-seventh volume.

The short sketch of the Sulaimania dialect of Kurdish here presented is part of the result of a study during residence of several months in and about that town.

The subjoined catalogue describes a collection comprising 368 separate texts mainly in Sanskrit, which were collected by Dr. M. A. Stein and acquired at his expense chiefly at Śrīnagar during his visits to Kashmir between 1888 and 1905. Apart from texts needed by Dr. Stein for his labours, during 1888–99, on his critical edition and annotated translation of Kalhana's Rājataraṅgiṇī, numerous MSS. were purchased by him either to assist the work of fellow-scholars in Europe or on account of their philological or palæographical interest.

MS. sur papier; slanting brāhmī; 12 folios. Voir JRAS. 1911, p. 762.

On remarquera la fréquente confusion de la sonore et de la sourde gena = kena, dv = tv (xxx, 34), spantati = spandati (xxxi, 2), aṅguśena = aṅkuśena; yoniśas tvijam = yoniṣo dvijam (xxxi, 5), ja = ca (ii, 5), nipādinaḥ = nipādinaḥ (xxxi, 1), edaṃ = etān, tāvati = dhāvati (xxxi, 33), etc.

I have elsewhere (see SBE. xxxi) thus designated this chapter. Yet, as in the case of the “eschatology” and of the “moral idea”, I by no means intend here to imply that either of those concepts or this “Dualism” had never been mooted elsewhere in any obscure form at any period previous to the composition of this Yasna XXX. The most of such ideas as these issue inevitably from the human consciousness in many places in the course of ages; here, however, they are definitively grasped and pointed in synoptic statement, whereas elsewhere they were, if at all, loosely surmised, and to be gathered only through inference. I call attention to this chief doctrine of the piece with especial care on account of its epochmaking importance as offering the initiative in the above sense to all analogous subsequent suggestion.

Le fragment de dhāraṇī publié ici provient de Touenhouang, d'où il a été rapporté par M. M. A. Stein à son second voyage d'exploration en Asie centrale. Il est écrit sur un morceau de rouleau, en double, d'abord en brāhmī, puis en écriture sogdienne. Le texte en brāhmī a été lu, transcrit, et annoté par M. de la Vallée Poussin, la transcription sogdienne a été étudiée par M. Gauthiot. On a disposé en tête de l'article les notes qui ont paru nécessaires; à la suite on a donné le texte entier en transcription littérale; en dernier lieu figure la reproduction intégrate de l'original.

Many changes have taken place in the delta since the middle ages, and the former geographical conditions require to be understood in order that the mediaeval history of Egypt may be followed. Besides, the mediaeval geography is of obvious importance as a means of arriving at the state of Egypt in ancient times. An adequate historical map of the mediaeval period is much wanted, and this paper is intended as a contribution towards a map of this kind.

We have considered Kanishka, so far, only as an Indian king, whose existence is revealed to us through the incidental mention of him in inscriptions and the accounts of the Yue-che (Tokhāri) given by the Chinese. And we have found that his permanent achievements were twofold. A barbarian prince, he became a convert to an alien faith, and set an example which was followed by his tribe; he also instituted an era which, although essentially Buddhist, was accepted by the Brāhmans and the Jains, and has endured to the present day. So far we might regard him merely as a prototype of many a barbarian chief of the West in the early centuries of the Middle Ages. We have now to consider him as an important figure on a much larger stage, a connecting link in the history of the earliest commerce between China and Europe. I have already brought forward direct evidence to prove that he flourished in the latter half of the first century B.C. I shall now show by two independent lines of research that he cannot be assigned to any other period. The basis of our study is the coinage of Kanishka and his successors, more particularly of Huvishka. This coinage is quite striking in its novelty.

The oldest instances of the use of the word yavana, yona, in India were discussed by the late Professor Weber in his paper on the Greeks in India. He maintained that the Indians adopted this denomination of the Greeks from the Persians. He also remarked that the name was then later on transferred to the Indo-Scythian successors of the Greeks in North-Western India, and, further, to the Parthians, Persians, and Arabs. There can he no doubt that the word was in later times commonly used to denote the Musalmāns, and sometimes also, in a more general way, as synonymous with mleccha. On the other hand its original meaning was certainly ‘a Greek’. That is the case in the Aśoka inscriptions, in the Besnagar column inscription, and in some of the Nasik and Karle epigraphs. In the Nasik inscription of the nineteenth year of Siri-Pulumāyi Vāsiṭhīputa (EI, 8. 60) we find the yavanas mentioned together with sakas and palhavas, and it is just possible that the word here denotes some Indo-Scythian tribe and not exactly the Greeks. In the Junāgaḍh inscription of Rudradāman of the year 72, i.e. probably of a.d. 150, we hear of a yavana ‘king’ (rājan) Tuṣāspha, who was governor of Kāthiāvāḍ under the emperor Aśoka. The name Tuḍāspha cannot be Greek, but must be Iranian. Still he is called a yavana. This shows that in the second century a.d., the name yavana was not restricted to the Greeks.

General A. Houtumschindler has been kind enough to send me a photograph of a new Vannic inscription discovered by Count Kanitz, an attaché of the German Legation at Teheran, in October, 1910, at a place called Mākū. The stone, however, had been brought from some ruins 10 miles south-west of Mākū. The photograph was given to General Houtumschindler by the discoverer. The inscription, it will be seen, belongs to Ruśas II. In continuance of my previous notation its number will be XCII.

The Roman character may be used for Oriental languages in two ways: first, to represent in writing the sounds of a spoken language; and secondly, to represent the characters of a written language by another set of characters. The first process is usually called phonetic writing, the second transliteration. The second process includes the first. As this may not be clear at first sight I will endeavour to explain what transliteration is.

29·8×23·7 cm.

Fols. 246, marked in Gujarati.

19 lines to a page.

Rubrics in Guj. in an upturned script.

Catchwords at the bottom of the pages on the righthand side.

No colophon, but on fol. 246 the year 804 A.Y. (=1435 A.D.) is inserted by a later hand. A short postscript in Guj. on the last page states that this Vendidād with Yasna and Visperad is 300 or 350 years old.

The inscribed bone-fragment illustrated in the accompanying plates forms part of my collection, and was discovered among the large find of similar objects unearthed in 1899 in the province of Honan, North China. It is one of the larger pieces, measuring in its greatest length 10 inches by 7¼ at its broadest. The bone is part of the shoulder-blade of some domesticated animal apparently, and among the peculiarities it presents is the fact that at its extreme upper edge it has been pierced by a neatly bored round hole to admit a bone pin 3 inches long, shown detached in the plates. The shaft of this pin is inscribed on one side with six characters, while the fiat and rather elaborate head has archaic decoration on both sides. The purpose of the pin is not easy to determine, but I suggest that it may have been to fasten together the present bone and a second fragment similarly pierced, forming “page” 2 of this osseous document, which may have contained a further instalment of the text. If so, this second page is not now forthcoming.

The interest which attaches to Kanishka is manifold. Primarily it is Buddhist. Kanishka convoked the fourth great Buddhist Council, the Council held in Kashmir, which gave consistency and official sanction to the doctrines of Northern Buddhism and led to its adoption by the Yue-che, who in their turn became ardent propagators of the faith, diffusing its light among the nomads of Central Asia and introducing it to the knowledge of the cultured Chinese. The Buddhists in the north-western corner of the Panjāb preserved the memory of their royal patron; they adorned his memory with miracle and legend; they placed him by the side of Aśoka, the first great foster-father of their religion; and vague reminiscences of Kanishka lingered in this region to the time of the learned Alberūnī and of Kalhaṇa, author of the metrical Chronicles of Kashmir.

The record of archæological discoveries made during the year 1910—11 must of necessity fall short of the brilliant accounts which Mr. Marshall has been in the habit of publishing in the pages of this Journal with regard to the work of previous years. Mr. Marshall himself was absent on long leave during the whole period, and while I was officiating for him I had to devote myself almost entirely to questions connected with the preservation of ancient monuments and museum administration, and to the duties of office routine.