Mārkaṇḍēya in his Prākṛtasarvasva, i, 4, discusses the various kinds of Apabhraṁśa. In the commentary he quotes an unknown author (see Pischel, Pr. Gr., § 3, note 1) who gives a list of no less than twenty-seven, but he says that really there are only three, Nāgara, Vrācaḍa, and Upanāgara. He does not consider the others as different dialects, because their variations from the Standard are very slight.

Such is the beginning of the somewhat remarkable inscription which came to the knowledge of French antiquarians last year, and which has just been edited by M. F. Thureau-Dangin with a very complete critical apparatus. It is inscribed on a tablet of baked clay 37·5 cm. high by 24·5 cm. wide. The text is in two columns on each side, for the most part closely written, but the ends of the columns on the obverse and the beginnings of those on the reverse are unfortunately rendered incomplete by fractures. Including the widely spaced colophon, however, the document contains 430 lines of writing, so that the amount of new material is considerable. Between the columns are the usual little holes which are supposed to be for the escape of steam whilst baking, but which were probably for the insertion of pegs to enable the heavy clay document to be laid down on its side without damaging the sharpness of the writing.

In the last October number of this Journal Mr. Kennedy gave us the concluding parts of his paper entitled “The Secret of Kanishka”. We may differ from him on some details. We may hesitate, for instance, to accept the suggestion that the origin of the era of B.C. 58 was the convocation of the Fourth Buddhist Council by the Kushan king Kanishka, rather than the actual beginning of his reign; which involves the view that, while he was king de facto for some time before that year, he became recognized as king de jure, and his regnal reckoning was fairly started, and was accepted as the official state reckoning, only when, in that year, having become converted to Buddhism, he caused the Council to be held. But there can be no doubt as to the general great value of what he has laid before us.

At Mr. Sewell's request the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society sent me an impression of this inscription which had been made over to the Society some years ago by Colonel Gerini. At the same time M. Finot placed at my disposal a photograph of the back of the impression, which is reproduced on the accompanying Plate.

During the later periods of the Ornmayade Caliphate, with their continual rebellions and turmoil, the centre of Arab literary activity had moved entirely to the North, and we get only very few notices of poets who lived and flourished in the central provinces of Eastern Arabia, which in earlier days had produced many celebrated names. Among the poets of this period in Central Arabia the most prominent names are those of al-Quḥaif and Yazīd b. aṭ-Ṭathrlīyya, the latter being perhaps more famous through the elegy upon his death by his sister Zainab, of which verses have found a place in many anthologies. Al-Quṭaif is not mentioned by Ibn Qutaiba, Poësis, but the Kitāb al-Aghānī devotes four pages to his biography, and its author states that only few poems of his are preserved. He receives a short mention in the Fulmlat ash-Shu'arā’ of al-Aṣma'ī, where he is said to have made poems upon women, but that his verses were neither good Arabic nor suitable for being quoted as evidence for correct speech. Among the twenty-four fragments which follow there are only four which may be called poems upon women, while the remainder deal with the troubles in Central Arabia after the murder of the Caliph al-Walīd b. Yazid. As regards the statement that the verses of al-Quḥaif cannot be quoted as evidence for correct speech, the fragments preserved are too few to enable us to judge for ourselves, though I have endeavoured in the notes to several verses to point out deviations from customary usage.

[This fragment, as well as a number of others, written in he Tokhari language and in Slanting Gupta characters, were forwarded to me from Simla by the Government of India, in April, 1907. In the forwarding letter it was stated that they had been “found at Jigdalik and Kaya, near Kuchar”, by a man of Kuchar, called Sahib Ali. From Sahib Ali's report it appears that Jigdalik lies one day's march from Baï, and that the manuscript fragments were dug out by him from what he calls “a house”, situated in “the hills” near Jigdalik. The term “house” is applied by the natives of Eastern Turkestan to what we call a stūpa, or shrine, see Sir Aurel Stein's Ancient Khotan, vol. i, p. 483. The name Jigdalik, as M. Pelliot informs me, is not uncommon in Chinese Turkestan, and signifies simply a place of oleasters. The Jigdalik fragments will be published in my projected series of volumes of Manuscripts from Eastern Turkestan; but as there will still be some delay in the issue of the first volume, I gladly accept the hospitality of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society to give an early specimen of Professor Sylvain Lévi's careful edition of them. A glossary of the fragment, as well as linguistic notes, by Professor Meillet, are now in my hands, and will be published with the fragment itself and its facsimile in the forthcoming first volume of my series.—R. H.]

The Jews have never practically lost sight of the Samaritans, unlike the Christians, who for at least a thousand years had entirely forgotten their existence, as no writer or pilgrim to the Holy Land speaks of them with the solitary exception of Mandeville. It was therefore a great surprise to the Western world when at the beginning of the seventeenth century the darkness began to be lifted, and through Scaliger, Huntingdon, and Della Valle for the first time authentic news about the Samaritans, their language, and their Bible began to reach Europe.

The stories about Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha and their contest are often narrated and alluded to in Sanskrit writings, and are intimately connected in ancient tradition with two kings of Ayodhyā, Trayyāruṇa and his son Satyavrata Triśaṅku. They are sometimes mixed up, especially in brahmanic descriptions, with extraordinary and marvellous incidents, but are narrated in the course of the genealogies of Ayodhyā and Kānyakubja in some of the Purāṇas in as simple and natural a manner as if they were plain ‘historical’ tradition. Such being their character in the Purāṇas, it is not unreasonable to examine them as such, review them according to ordinary feelings and conduct, and see whether, when so scrutinized, they may not yield a natural and probable explanation of a series of incidents that have attracted much attention, both ancient and modern. This has been my endeavour in this paper, and the results appear to reconstruct a most interesting chapter in ancient Indian traditional ‘history’.

The date of Kaniṣka is not a subject which I should have expected to be discussing in public. It is one of those long-standing problems in regard to which one at an early stage conceives an opinion or receives a bias, but which, either for lack of decisive evidence, or because the mind, after considering many conflicting views, is incapable of an act of faith, one leaves in the sphere of things unsettled. I myself should have been well content that the finishing stroke should be dealt by the spade, which even now is probing the ruins of Taxilā. Moreover, at the time when Mr. Kennedy first propounded to me his conclusions, I was fresh from the perusal of Professor Oldenberg's paper, which seemed to have said the last word in the discussion. If we have now invited a debate, and one at closer range than a trimestrial journal allows, the responsibility rests with Mr. Kennedy's extensive articles, their confident tone, and the interest which they have evoked.

In a scholarly paper contributed to Baessler-Archiv this year under the title “Frühgeschichtliche Orakelknochen aus China”, the author, Fräulein Anna Bernhardi, has discussed various questions arising from the great find of inscribed bones in Honan Province, and has illustrated her paper partly from the Wirtz Collection of these objects now in the Royal Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, partly from specimens in other cabinets. Considerable space is devoted to the consideration of the genealogies which have been found on certain of these relics, and peculiarities of writing markedly noticeable in these strange records of descent have caused Fräulein Bernhardi to ask whether they do not perhaps point to an early dissyllabism in the Chinese language, and also whether they do not show traces of a genitival form. And in order that the pros and cons of these hypotheses may be more adequately grounded, she appeals to the owners of the various collections now scattered over different parts of the world carefully to test the specimens they possess.

At the General Meeting of the 10th June, Dr. Thomas read his paper on “The Date of Kaniṣka” (p. 627 above), and the discussion was continued by—

Professor Rapson, who said:—I have read with great care Mr. Kennedy's articles on “The Secret of Kanishka”, but have come to the conclusion that the fundamental views on which the whole argument is based are in some cases demonstrably incorrect and in other cases altogether uncertain. In support of this statement I rely on the careful and detailed examination which we have just heard from Dr. Thomas. On the present occasion I propose to confine myself entirely to the evidence afforded by the coins.