The variety of spoken Arabic some aspects of which are discussed in this article is the dialect of 'Anaiza, a fairly large town of the Qaṣm province of Nejd.

Most of the work on this dialect I have done with Mr. Muḥammad al-Shmikh of 'Anaiza ('Unaizah).

The problem of the transcription of Pahlavi, inherently difficult enough, has for so long been complicated by factors of personal taste and interest that it will probably see many more jubilees. Amid the welter of differing transcriptions to be found, however, one persistent thread is to be observed, namely that of archaism. Bartholomae's endeavour to reproduce the earliest Arsacid pronunciation of Pahlavi, that of the third century B.C., has more or less been followed by such leading scholars as Salemann, Pagliaro, Bailey, and Nyberg, and has had perhaps its most consistent exposition in the Pahlavi index of the last-named's recent Manual.

Interest in the Zoroastran religion is widespread among scholars, and knowledge of Zoroastrian practice has been diligently acquired. The main source of information has, however, been the Indian branch of the community; and a number of evidently ancient customs observed in the Persian homeland have passed almost, and sometimes indeed entirely, unnoticed in the West.

Among the British Indian merchants engaged in trade with Persia in the first half of the nineteenth century was Hjj Nr al-Dn Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Dn Muhammad, a native of Masulipatam. He was a rich and highly respected merchant, holding at one time a position of influence at Shrz, where he had settled at the beginning of the century and married. He was a Sh' and reputed to be pious and well versed in the tenets of Sh'ism. He had intercourse with Husayn 'Al Mrz Farmn Farm (the son of Fath 'Al Shh and governor of Frs from 1214179980 to 12501834), Fath 'Al Shh, and Muhammad Shh; he also enjoyed the favour of the latter's prime minister Hjj Mrz Aqs, who referred to him in 1843 as his esteemed friend,2 but eventually forfeited this because of the partiality which Muhammad Shh showed him for many years.3 In due course Hjj Nr al-Dn acquired possession of two estates in Frs. His title to them was subsequently questioned and the dispute led to a long and complicated case with the Persian government.

The present notice is merely an annex to V. V. Barthold's article on Ḥfiẓ-i Abr which has stood the test of 70 years.

Ḥfiẓ-i Abr, a Khorsnian by birth, was a distinguished historian of Timrid times. He belonged to the class of those learned men whom rulers liked to attach to their courts. He studied in Hamadn, and worked under the patronage of Tmr, Shhrukh, and Prince Baysunqur. He died in Zanjn in 83414301.

In the central and eastern inscriptions of Aoka (Kls, Dhauli, and Jaugaḍa, Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions) a long vowel of Sanskrit whenfollowed by a double consonant or a consonant-group is shortened (e.g. tt att) as generally in Pali and Prakrit. But the long vowel is retained in the Girnr inscription and in some of the Pillar Edicts and Minor Rock Inscriptions. In the Girnr forms the consonant following the long vowel still representeda geminate; whether or not it still did so in the other inscriptions atthat date cannot be ascertained. Although the distinction of length is not shownin Kharoṣṭh writing, the long vowel before geminates was certainly maintainedin the language of the Shhbzgaṛh and Mnsehr versions, for the longvowel in this position is still preserved in the North-Western languages: Sindh, Lahnd, Western Panjb, Kshmr (not so demonstrably in other Dardic languages) and some West Pahari dialects.

This article is a review of V. S. Vorob'ev-Desjatovskij and M. I. Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja's Skazanie o Bxadre (novye listy sakskoj rukopisi E).1 This recent publication of what is in large part a facsimile volume of Old Khotanese is greatly to be welcomed. We now have at last facsimiles of all the 192 folios (actually 191, see below) in Leningrad that constitute the major part of a Buddhist miscellany written in the oldest type of Khotanese. 173 of the Leningrad folios were seen by E. Leumann and described in detail in 1912.2 18 of these folios (33640, 34254), together with two (334, 335) from the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, were edited and translated by E. Leumann in 1919.3 These formed all the extant part of what on Leumann's calculation was ch. 23 of the surviving portion of the MS, which he had christened E after the signature he allotted to the first folios he saw, 269 and 335 from Calcutta. All the folios known to Leumann were edited and translated by him in 19336 in Das nordarische {sakische) Lehrgedicht des Buddhismus. This included all the 173 Leningrad folios, of which he had taken photographs.Only a few of these were published in facsimile (256v, 257r, 258v, 259r, 303v, 304r, the right halves of 257v, 258r, and the left halves of 259v, 260r) by his son M. Leumann in a private publication, Sakische Handschriftproben, Zrich, 1934. These photographs are excellent, but the folios chosen were particularly favourable for reproduction, and nothing is lost except an insignificant amount of clarity in the facsimiles of the same folios in the present volume.

Though the linguistic interest for Indo-Iranian predominates in the study of the texts from Gostana-dea (Khotan), the contents offer also considerable materials for closer understanding of pre-Muslim Chinese Turkistan in Central Asia.

L'Ekottarāgama, ou ‘Corpus des enseignements gradués’, est un recueil de textes bouddhiques, parallèle á 1'Anguttaranikāya du Canon pali. II n'est connuen sa totalité que par une unique traduction chinoise: le Tseng-i a-han ching.

Le moine tokharien Dharmanandin qui connaissait par coeur le Madhyama et l'Ekottarāgama arriva è Ch'angan en 384 p.-C. et, sur l'invitation du magistrat local Chao Cheng, entreprit de publier ces deux ceuvres indiennes en chinois. La traduction de l'Ekottara commenca le 7 mai 384 et se termina en novembrede la même année ou au printemps de l'année suivante. Dharmanandin ‘récita oralement le texte indigène’, c'est-è-dire l'original indien; les śramaṇes chinois Hui-sung, Chu Fo-nien, et d'autres ‘reçurent au pinceau’.

The Tibetan particle re occurs at the end of sentences, where it is either preceded by a or followed by skan (sometimes spelled kan). When preceded by a it has coalesced with it to a final particle which has so far only been observed after verb forms ending in a consonant (including da-drag) which is then repeated before the a (da-re, sa-re, ta-re, etc.).

In the literature which has grown up around the Burmese tradition of the 37 nats two omissions have been generally conspicuous. Much has been placed on record regarding the cults of individual members of this pantheon; yet what constitutes the corporate cult of the 37 remains obscure. In casting around for a unifying principle, writers on the subject have made much of the secular status of the persons who became nats and the manner of their deaths. It has escaped comment that most of the details recorded belong not so much tomythology as to hagiography, and concern the earthly careers of those who were deified rather than their nature and powers as gods.1

Awld Jbir, the sons of Jbir, were eminent religious teachers in the Nilotic Sudan during the later part of the sixteenth century. Apart from their own importance, they and their kinsmen by blood and marriage formed a complex group of religious families. Information concerning numerous members of this clan is provided by the collection of biographies of Sudanese holy men known as the Ṭabaqtof Wad Ḍayfallh, which is the main source used in the present article. Two uncritical editions were published in Cairo in 1930.1

The MS of this poem came to me among the same collection of miscellaneous Hausa and Arabic MSS kindly loaned to me by Alhaji Nasiru, which contained B of the Song of Bagauda. As in the case of this latter, all that could be told me was that the manuscript had come from a malam in Kano City. The poem was attributed to 'Abdullh b. Muḥammad by several local savants learned in astrology whom I consulted. The initial invocation al-'abd al-faqr il raḥmat rabbihi is of course characteristic of 'Abdullh, and Bivar has pointed to the significance of these invocations.

A good deal of effort and ingenuity has been devoted to the problem of establishing the historical identity of Palṭiel, an enigmatic figure in the eleventhcentury chronicle of Ahima'as. In this work, the author relates what purports to be the history of his family over the previous two centuries and gives pride of place to one Palṭiel ben Shefaṭyah, an astrologer who rose to high office under the Fṭimid Caliph al-Mu'izz in Tunisia and Egypt. The family, according to Ahima'aṣ, had lived in Oria, in southern Italy, for generations. Then came the Fṭimid raids on the Italian mainland. With al-Mu'izz as their commander, 'they devastated the entire province of Calabria, and reached Oria, on the borders of Apulia; they besieged it, defeated all its forces; so that the city was