The original tablet contained about 527 lines; of these only 367 remain, excluding unintelligible fragments. Large gaps, involving fifteen lines and more, occur in Cols. I, II, III, and VIII; Cols. IV, V, VI, and VII (in the centre of the tablet) are less damaged, though everywhere minor breaks affect the text. In view of this it is very difficult to recover the sequence, and the following summary must be regarded as partially conjectural, though in the main reasonably certain.

The new Has Shamra text published by Virolleaud is, despite better preservation, considerably more difficult to interpret than its two immediate predecessors, and in this regard resembles rather the fragments of 1929.

Mr. RameŚa Basu has published a reading of this grant in the Journal of the Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣat, 1337 B.S., No. 4. From Mr. Basu's account, it appears that the plate was discovered at the village of Śaktipur in the Sadar subdivision of Murśidābād district. Mr. Basu has, unfortunately, failed to read correctly some vital geographical details regarding the land granted away by the plate, and thus could discover no clue as to its geographical situation. The genealogical portion of this new plate contains no new information whatever, as it is an exact replica of some other plates of the same king previously found. The real importance of the new plate lies in the supply of new geographical information.

The downfall of the Umaiyad and the rise of the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate, the central protagonist in which was the formidable Abū Muslim, is one of the most fascinating periods in Islamic History. Numismatic research is gradually revealing more and more vestiges of these troublous times. Recently in the JRAS. (July, 1932) Mr. Rhuvon Guest published a copper coin of Abū Muslim, now in the ‘Irāḳ Museum, which had been unearthed during irrigation work on the lesser Zāb, and which provided interesting corroborative evidence of the statements of the early Arab chroniclers. In a similar way I propose to draw attention to two copper coins in the British Museum, until now unpublished, which not only throw some light on the family relationship of Abū Muslim and his provincial politics, but moreover preserve for us a variety of coin legend which has hitherto been unrecorded and is perhaps unique in Muslim numismatics (Plate I).

Ms. Alliance Israélite Universelle, unnumbered; paper 8 × 5½ in.; Arabic in Hebrew characters, of a Syrian square type. Provisionally numbered viii–B–26. The script is fairly legible, though in places the page has faded and a guess has to be made at the right reading. As is usual in such MSS. the headings are in red, as, for instance, in MS. Arabe 2965 in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Minhāj al-Dukkān of Abu al-Muna ibn Abi Naṣr ibn Ḥaffāṭh, called al-Kōhēn ibn al-Attār al-Israīlī al-Hārūnī of Cairo, ca. 1260 (see Brockelmann, i, p. 492, No. 34), or an earlier author Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Bahrām al-Ḳalānisī (ibid., p. 489, No. 23), which I have consulted in MS. 2946 of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In the Genizah collection of the late Mr. Jack Mosseri (Med. No. 14) there is a fragment of a similar work, the original of which, unfortunately, I have been unable to see, but only a photograph.