Alchemy, on the rare occasions when it has been made the subject of reasonable inquiry, has usually been studied as part of what one may call the pre-history of science. But if, to use a favourite phrase, we are to see in alchemy merely “the cradle of chemistry”, are we not likely, whatever its initial charm, to lose patience with an infancy protracted through some fifteen centuries?

It is certain in any case that another aspect of alchemy—its interest as a branch of cultural history—has hitherto been strangely neglected. Mr. Walter Scott, for example, omits alchemistic writings from his great edition of the Hermetica on the odd ground that they are merely “masses of rubbish”. But if texts are to be dismissed as rubbish because they contain beliefs that we cannot share, I see no reason why the religious and philosophical parts of the Hermetica (and with them many books which to-day enjoy a far wider popularity) should continue to claim attention.

Dans la plus ancienne cosmologie védique, l'univers est partagé en deux zones: le monde d'en haut lumineux, ou monde des dieux (devaloka); le monde d'en bas sombre, ou monde des mânes (pitloka).1 Cette conception dualistique, qui remonte sans doute a la période indo-iranienne, s'est developpee dans l'lran et y a pris un aspect théologique et moral: Ohrmazd, qui personnifie la lumière et le bien, s'oppose à Ahriman qui symbolise les tèébres et le mal.

Dans l'lnde, l'ancienne cosmologie a bientôt ètè remplacèe par une division de l'univers en trois mondes: ciel, atmosphère, terre; et, comme l'a nettement ètabli Emile Senart, la thèorie des guna est en relation avec cette sèrie de trois mondes. Le problème que je me propose d'examiner est le suivant: quelles croyances, quelles conceptions ont dèterminè une nouvelle segmentation de l'univers et prèsidè à, l'èlaboration de la thèorie des guna ?

This monument is found somewhat farther to the East than the two foregoing ones, about 48° N. and a little more than 107° W. of Greenwich, near a place said to have the name of Bain Chokto, between the Nalaikha post-station and the right bank of the upper waters of the Tola. The inscription is graven on two pillars that are still standing upright; on the first and larger of these the inscription starts on one of the narrow sides, the one turned to the West, and is continued round towards South, East, and North. On the other one, the inscription, which is a direct continuation of that on the larger stone, likewise begins on the West side, but here this is one of the broad sides. The latter stone is more weathered than the first, and the inscription from the very beginning not being here so carefully incised as on the other. On both stones the inscriptions are written in vertical lines as in the Orkhon inscriptions; but with this difference that while the lines in the latter read from right to left here they read from left to right.

In the last fifteen hundred years the Japanese have borrowed thousands of Chinese words and idioms, which have eventually brought the Japanese language into a state of utter confusion. Such borrowing, it would seem, had its beginning some centuries before its remarkable development in the fifth century A.D., which may be called the period of demarcation dividing the Chinese loan-words into two classes, the early loans and the later, each having certain phonetic characteristics.

The early loan-words, which, unlike the vast majority of their later confreres, seem to have been thoroughly naturalized already in the seventh century A.D., attracted the attention of the English sinologist, E. H. Parker, in the 'eighties, but the investigation has since then been discarded almost entirely because of the insufficiency of knowledge possessed of the ancient phonetic values of the Chinese characters.

However, thanks to the untiring labour of Karlgren, Maspero, Simon, and other sinologists, we are now in a more favourable position for an inquiry into the early relationship between the two languages, and the problem has since been taken up afresh by Karlgren himself, who, in his most interesting little book Philology and Ancient China, suggests twenty-two Japanese words as probable early loans from Chinese.1 Of these I need only quote a few that have direct bearing upon the present subject.

I Give below a portion of the Pahlavi Žāmāsp-Nāmak with notes. The text is easily accessible in J. J. Modi's Jâmâspi, Pahlavi Pâzend and Persian Texts, 1903, Bombay, and, for a part only, in West's edition in Avesta, Pahlavi, and Ancient Persian Studies, 1904. It has, therefore, seemed unnecessary to reprint the Pahlavi. West used a MS., entitled DP., of the late Shams ul Ulama Dastur Dr. Peshotanji Behramji Sanjana (West, loc. cit.), for the other MSS. see Modi's introduction, loc. cit. I have noted the chief discrepancies only (Modi's MSS. are quoted as “ MSS.”, or separately as MU.,DE.).

The two letters with which this article is concerned were written in the name of Sultan Abu Hayat of Ternate. when he was about 7 years old, and are of peculiar interest as being, perhaps, the oldest Malay letters extant. The first, which is catalogued under the reference Gavetas 15–16–38 in the Lisbon archives known as Torre do Tombo, appears to have been written between 27th April and 8th November, 1521. The second, preserved in the same archive under the reference Gavetas 15-15-7, was probably written early in the following year. These conclusions are based on what is known from other sources about the history of the Moluccas in this period, combined with the internal evidence of the letters themselves. Unfortunately their style betrays the fact that they were not writtenby a Malay, but by some scribe (or, as seems more likely, two scribes)probably indigenous to Ternate and certainly very imperfectly acquainted with the Malay language.

Persia is as a whole less liable than Europe, but more than most Asiatic countries, to catastrophic earthquakes, but the references thereto in printed literature are few and peculiarly difficult to discover as few, if any, indexes to books on Persia so much as mention the word.

Watson (p. 190) remarks that earthquakes are “ very frequent in most parts of Persia ”. Allemagne (i. 3) classes them, with plagues and famines, as Acts of God to which the country is specially liable.

Khurasan.—Hamdallah Mustawfi refers to a cypress at the village of Kishmar near Turshiz (100 miles south of Nishapur): “ such was its power that earthquakes which frequently devastated all the surrounding districts never did any harm in Kishmar.’ This was in A.H. 247 (A.D. 861).

Nassiri Khusrau (A.D. 1340) states that Nishapur was completely destroyed by an earthquake in the reign of Abaqa Khan (A.D. 1267). Wajid ud Din Zangi Fariwandi rebuilt it in A.H. 669 (A.D. 1270). A similar catastrophe overwhelmed the town in A.H. 808 (A.D. 1405), when most of the inhabitants were buried in the ruins.

The present article is an analysis of the monumental work of the Belgian archæologist and savant, M. Franz Cumont, which embodies the results of excavations made by him on the site of the ancient Macedonian colony of Doura-Eropos. As it was impossible to give a mere resumé of this work without leaving out some of the important points and erudite suggestions which are scattered in the text and valuable foot-notes, I thought it best to give as clear and as complete an idea as possible of this once important and flourishing Macedonian colony situated in the heart of the Syrian desert. Further, speaking from the purely Iranian standpoint, the excavations atDoura-Eropos have furnished new documents pertaining to the Parthian civilization, which had penetrated into Parapotamia with its Parthian conquest, and which had left its traces not only in the costume of priest and soldiers, but also in fine arts—in sculptures and paintings, in ceramics and jewellery, as can be amply proved by the results of the excavations of 1928 and 1929.

The perplexing enigma of the cosmos and the creation has been from time immemorial a source of fascination for the human mind, and all the peoples of the globe, both those who have passed away and those still in existence, have striven to solve this riddle, either forming themselves into special groups for this purpose, or by mere individual effort. Of these solutions some were distinguished by a greater viability, a greater strength, and a greater ascendency, and are still exercising their sway; whilst others were short-lived and transient, were accepted by few people and, having soon disappeared, constitute now merely dead and cold fragments of human thought. Some of these solutions appealed more to the intellect, others were more felt by the heart.

In one of the recently published volumes of the Broadway Travellers Series (Don Juan of Persia; a Shi'ah Catholic, 1560—1604, translated and edited with an introduction by G. Le Strange) is an interesting account of Georgia and of some of the events of the Turko- Persian War which endured between the years 1578 and 1587. The Persian account throws much light on the state of Georgia at the end of the sixteenth century, and it serves as a valuable supplement to von Hammer Purgstall's history of the war, based mainly on Turkish sources, and published as books 38 and 40 of his Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman (in Vol. viii of the French edition).

Neither the historian of Turkey nor the editor of Don Juan appear to have made use of the material from Georgian sources which is available for this period, namely the provincial histories of Kartli, Samtzkhé, Kakheti and Imereti collated by Prince Wakhusht of Kartli during the eighteenth century, and published by Brosset in his Histoire de la Géorgie, 2ième partie, 1iere livraison, Spb. 1856.

W. Schmidt has established, as is well known, a new family of human speech, termed by him the “ Austric ” family. It was constituted by joining an “ Austronesian ” and an “ Austroasiatic ” group of languages; the latter term was coined by Schmidt when he found that the Mon-Khmer and some other languages of the East are kindred to the Muṇḍa languages of India.

Schmidt's treatise on the matter was declared by some scholars to be “ masterly ”, whereas others, so Przyluski, advised reserve. As a matter of fact, the existence of an “ Austric” family of languages—the most widely diffused on earth—is actually uncontested.

That the morphology and the grammar of the Muṇḍa and the Mon-Khmer languages are quite different, is admitted by W. Schmidt himself. Thus he based the relationship upon some similarities in phonetics, on the use of infixes in both languages, and on the results he obtained by comparing words.

This remarkable writer, the founder of Ḥaidarābād, and probably the first literary poet in the language, was the fourth king of the Qutb Shāhī dynasty which ruled in Golkuṇḍa, one of the five states into which the Deccan was divided after the break up of the Bahmanī kingdom. In the last number of the Bulletin I gave reasons for believing that he was an earlier writer than Vajhī, who in 1609 wrote the masnavī known as Qutb Mushtarī, in which he related a story having this very monarch for hero. Only five years after Qulī Qutb Shāh's death his works were collected by his nephew and successor. They have never been published, but the beautiful original MS. compiled under the orders of his nephew in 1616 is still in Ḥaidarābād. It consists of 1,800 pages and has perhaps 100,000 lines.

Though he lived so long ago his name is one of the greatest in Urdu. He shows wonderful human interest, for he writes of everyday matters, Hindu and Muḥammadan festivals, the customs of the country, life in his palace, the celebration of his birthday, and of natural objects such as fruit, vegetables, and flowers. The only poets who can be compared with him are Saudā, and Nazir, both of whom he excels in description of nature, while in his sympathetic account of Hindu life he is superior to all other Muḥammadan poets.

It is natural that records of the beginnings of Urdu should be almost entirely confined to literature or quasi literature. Yet there are two classes of books which contain references to conversation; firstly, early lives of holy men (especially in the Deccan and Gujrat), whose followers wrote accounts of their sayings and doings, occasionally quoting actual words; secondly, histories such as those by Firishta and Abu'l FaẒl, in which we may find Urdu sentences spoken by emperors or kings. Urdu must often have been employed as the language of conversation in exalted circles even though the official language continued to be Persian.