The pots which form the subject of this note are among the Indian collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were presented to the museum in 1921 by Lt.-Col. F. C. S. Lamborne-Palmer, C.B.E., and a note in the accessions register recalls that they were discovered during the digging of the foundations of a house in the early years of the century, at Owin (Ayun) in the Chitrāl valley, now in West Pakistan. What was striking from the outset about at least one of the three vessels was its resemblance to a form of jug occurring in early contexts in Iran. But when my attention was first directed to the collection, in the early 1950's, enough was not known of the prehistory of the North-West Frontier to allow any further evaluation. During the past decade several new and interesting discoveries have been made, and one may now draw more confident inferences regarding the collection. There are three pots only.

Le terme mazdayasna-, familier à ceux qui ont quelque pratique de l'Avesta ou une connaissance même somraaire des croyances mazdéennes, tient une place importante dans le vocabulaire religieux de l'Iran, depuis les temps anciens jusqu'à la fin de l'époque sassanide. Il désigne ceux que nous appelons ‘Mazdéens’, les fidèles de Mazdāh, par opposition aux fidèles des daivas, qui portent la qualification de daēvayasna-.

The view has more than once been mooted amongst archaeologists, though dissenting voices have frequently made themselves heard, that the art of the ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ School of Gandhāra is contemporary with the zenith of the Kuṣāṇa dynasty under the rulers Kaniṣka, Huviṣka, and perhaps Vāsudeva. A further analysis is naturally required to convert this proposition into terms of absolute chronology. Yet the basic thesis is one that would find justification in an argument developed by Ibn Khaldūn in his masterpiece of historical theory, the Muqaddima:

‘The monuments of a dynasty are its buildings and large (edifices). They are proportionate to the original power of the dynasty. They can materialize only when there are many workers, and united action and co-operation. When a dynasty is large and far-flung, with many provinces and subjects, workers are very plentiful, and can be brought together from all sides and regions. Thus even the largest monument can materialize’.

The fact that Zoroaster was a priest, a zaotar, is likely to have been of considerable influence in nurturing and shaping his spiritual life; and in more than one study of Zoroastrianism it has been given due prominence, without, however, its implications being fully explored. There seems room, therefore, for a further attempt to assess, as far as the evidence allows, the relevance of Zoroaster's priesthood for the evolution of his doctrines.

Some years ago, I published in this Bulletin an article, one of the main purposes of which was to propose a hypothesis concerning the dating of the Kharoṣṭhī documents discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at the ancient sites in Chinese Turkistan, the so-called ‘Niya’ site (Cabta), and Lou-Ian (Kroraina). At almost the same time, Professor Enoki Kazuo independently published an article which, while covering a much wider historical period, nevertheless dealt also with a certain number of topics included in my own article; and it was gratifying to find that on most of these points we had reached similar conclusions. More recently, Dr. Michael Loewe published an article which was largely a critique of certain points in my own, for which purpose he drew upon the evidence of the Chinese histories. I bow to Dr. Loewe's superior knowledge of these sources and of the Chinese language; and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to assess or criticize his article as a whole. Nevertheless, I venture to continue to disagree with him on a number of points, on which I maintain my original views, or have modified them but slightly.

According to Vārttika 5 on Pāṇini, 4.2.36—aver dugdhe soḍhadūsamarīsacaḥ—the ‘suffixes’ soḍha-, dūsa-, and marīsa- are added to the stem avi- ‘sheep’ in the sense of ‘milk’. These elements cannot be suffixes in the ordinary sense of the term, but rather words appearing as the second members of the respective compounds. The reason that they were treated as suffixes by the grammarian was no doubt the fact that the words were not used independently, but only as members of these compounds. Originally, however, they must have existed as independent words.

The Stoics, according to Seneca and others, divided the whole of creation into two main principles: cause and matter. In a previous article I discussed some words meaning ‘matter’ in Armenian. The time seems ripe to deal with the other half of the universe, though perhaps not exhaustively. A linguistic analysis of the concept “cause” in Armenian involves a consideration of two roots, namely, IE *ai (IH *hei, *a4ei), and Iranian *5kar. Since these, especially the latter, are good examples, in the field of etymology, of the “polycephalous rhizomes” which perplexed an early Armenian translator of Gregory of Nyssa, they lead also to a consideration of words which seem to have very little to do with “cause”.

The story of the merchant Nanda is told in Khotanese on a roll now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, P(elliot) 2834. The first five lines are a document, transliterated by our honorand in KT, III, 77. Thereafter comes the Nanda story. The story is incomplete, although the roll is blank at the end and the text finishes in mid-line at 1. 58 with a double daṇḍa. Even the final sentence is incomplete. The reason for this unfortunate circumstance is unknown.

The onomasticon of the Elamite Fortification tablets from Persepolis, so generously placed at the disposal of Professor Benveniste and myself by Professor Hallock, keeps yielding precious pearls. Benveniste published in 1966 those which he had recognized. In the following year I sent to the printer a list of additional identifications, giving notice of more to follow. The present tribute to one of the giants of Iranian studies, whose massive work, countless discoveries, immense erudition, and many tokens of personal friendship have been a constant source of inspiration to me for decades, brings a selection of further identifications, as well as some revision of earlier views. The need to select was dictated by space-limit. An article containing what had here to be omitted, is being timed so as to appear in TPS shortly after the present one.

Just as there are said to be ‘painters' painters’ and ‘poets' poets’, so too there may be said to be ‘linguists' languages’, and amongst these must without any question be included the languages of the Caucasus. These languages, with their elaborate and unusual phonetic, phonological, and morphological structures, possess a special fascination for professional linguists, from both the practical and the theoretical point of view.

La tradition bouddhique s'est montrée justement sévère à l'endroit de Devadatta, le cousin du buddha Śākyamuni qui, entré dans l'ordre des bhikṣu, essaya de supplanter le Maître à la tête de la Communauté où il se rendit coupable de trois fautes graves: il provoqua un schisme, précipita un rocher du haut d'une montagne pour écraser le Buddha et infligea une blessure mortelle à une religieuse. Finalement, la terre s'entr'ouvrit sous ses pas et il fut précipité vivant dans le grand enfer.

VJ 741 ff. rty ZK pr”mn w'n'kw r'y'y' PZY šy ZK ššky ZKw šyšky rt β'y'p'y ‘and the Brahman wept so much that his tears *rolled quickly one upon the other’. So runs Benveniste's translation, while his note suggests more closely the meaning ‘succeed, follow’ or ‘be added’for the verb *'βy' p- (or *βry'p-) ‘not otherwise known’, with a tentative reference to pty'p- ‘reach’. A very similar verb was to be found in ST, n, c 3, 12, however: cywyd pyd'r m't 'zw by'pd'rm 't γrbm. qt bγy xcy wyspw sfrynny ‘for the reason that I have *learnt (erfahren) and know, that God is the creator of all (things)’. by'pd'rm is plainly a preterite formed from the present stem by'p- (v. GMS, § 877, n. 1), since the corresponding past stem would have to be in X -ft, M, B -βt; cf. X ftyp-d'r-.

The corpus of Bactrian, of which KI forms the most important part, is too restricted to enable us to form even a remotely complete picture of its phonemic system and development. This would be the case even if every word had been finally or at any rate plausibly interpreted. As long as we restrict ourselves to the SK inscriptions, the language seems to represent, in the main, one single dialect. But if we include in the term Bactrian everything written in Ir. language and Greek script, from the coins of Kadphises I down to the IT of A.D. 866, it seems reasonable to assume that dialect variants, of chronological or local nature, are to be found. In this paper I shall be dealing mainly with the KI, with only occasional references to other sources. For the interpretation I shall base myself on the work of Henning, Benveniste, and Gershevitch, together with the contributions made by Harmatta and Humbach; and it will be assumed that the reader is conversant with, above all, Henning's interpretation of a substantial part of the text of the inscription.

It is a matter of considerable regret that no copy of the Aśokan inscriptions has been found at Pātaliputra. Such a version, inscribed at the capital of Aśoka's empire, might have been expected to be in the language of the capital itself, and therefore by implication in the official language of the court and secretariat. There can be no doubt that many of the difficulties which face us in the task of interpreting the Aśokan inscriptions arise because of errors in the translation from the Pkt. of the original into the Pkts. of the various regions. Possession of the Pātaliputra version would enable us to read the inscriptions free from such translation errors.

Āẕarbāyjān has not hitherto yielded any contribution to Sasanian Pahlavi epigraphy, but now we have a specimen. A Pahlavi inscription, dated in the 27th year of Shāpūr II, has been found outside the little town of Mishkīn, in the centre of Mughān. The history of its discovery and publication is as follows.

1. Dr. Kambakhsh Fard discovers the inscription in the summer of 1966 during a Persian archaeological expedition to Āẕarbāyjān; photographs are taken and sent to Tehran.

In an appendix to the article ‘Chinese and Indo-Europeans’ it was shown that, contrary to the view put forward but never demonstrated by the eighteenth-century scholar Ts'ui Shih, and adopted by the eminent sinologists Paul Pelliot and G. Haloun, chapter 123 of the Shih-chi on ‘Ta-yüan’ could not have been reconstituted from parallel passages in the Han shu but must have been the source for the latter—as one would naturally assume if doubts had never been raised. In summing up the evidence I noted that the most important discrepancies between Shih-chi, 123, and the Han shu concerned the Wu-sun and Sakas and I argued that one must assume that the Han shu had grafted separate, additional, material on to the account in the Shih-chi. I did not, however, go into the matter in detail. This is the burden of the present article.

When first examining, now quite some time ago, the Tibetan version of the Karmavibhaṅga in the MS Kanjur of the British Museum, I was struck immediately by the preservation therein of the ‘introductory tale’, which apparently has not survived in the printed Kanjurs. On closer inspection the MS version showed two other prominent features which, taken together with the first, may justify the present note and, it is hoped, may make it acceptable to the great Indo-Iranian scholar in whose honour it has been written.

The Arabs in Central Asia occupied in the past, as is well known, considerable territory, especially in the lower parts of the basins of the Zarafshān and Qashqa-daryā rivers, and also in Khojend and the south-eastern regions of Tajikistan.

In the course of centuries the majority of the Central Asian Arabs have lost their language and only small groups of them continue to speak Arabic up to the present time in the villages of Jōgarḹ, Čardaḹ (Ġijduwān district) and ‘Arab-Xōna (Wobkend district) of the Bukhārā region and in the village of Jeinau in the Qashqa-daryā region.

Throughout the history of Indo-Aryan the tendency towards a particular sound-change might continue to be active over a long period of time, being manifested first in words of frequent use or lesser import or where other surrounding phonetic conditions favoured the change and subsequently appearing in particular areas throughout the general vocabulary.

The Candimā-sutta or ‘discourse on the moon’ in the Samyuttanikāya of the Pali canon based on the Indian myth according to which eclipses of the moon as well as of the sun are caused by a demon named Rāhu ‘the Seizer’, who is supposed to try to lay hold of one or the other of the two planets at certain times. The Sutta reports that on such an occasion the god dwelling in the moon takes his refuge in the Buddha who successfully shows his power and pity by directing Rāhu emphatically to set the moon at once at liberty.