For the past fifty years, there has been a debate over whether the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya introduced a short-lived gold coinage in Syria. After reappraising the literary evidence, this study argues that an enigmatic phrase in a papyrus from this period constitutes evidence for state enforcement of the circulation of a new kind of gold coinage issued under Muʿāwiya. A die-study of the extant specimens of a peculiar imitation of Byzantine gold which has had its crosses effaced, and has been attributed to Muʿāwiya on the basis of the testimony of literary sources, confirms them to be the result of a large-scale, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, initiative. This demonstrates that, in addition to the east, there also existed a separate drive towards an expansion of the money supply in Syria-Egypt during the latter half of Muʿāwiya's caliphate, a development which testifies to a relatively substantial programme of state-building by the caliph.

This is a review article on Alwin Kloekhorst, Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. $199. ISBN 978 90 04 16092 7). The article addresses issues arising from Kloekhorst's depiction of Hittite cuneiform spelling conventions in the context of the wider cuneiform world (Mesopotamia and Northern Syria). In particular the representation of a glottal stop in Hittite and relevant cuneiform writing is addressed. The second part of the article addresses further individual graphic and lexical issues arising throughout the etymological dictionary.

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.

In a recent article, I argued that the study of early Arabic grammar of the second and third centuries A.H. should be based on the sources of that era, and not on the work of the later grammarians, as these often do not report the real stand of a particular grammarian on a particular issue, and more often misunderstand certain early grammatical concepts, or use their own terminology rather than the older one to elucidate them. The problem becomes more acute when we find that many modern scholars can still only see early Arabic grammar through the eyes of the later grammarians, beginning with the fourth-century figures and probably ending with Suyṭ. Learning about early grammar from later sources is inescapable, given the scarcity of existing second- and third-century sources, but this is nevertheless permissible only if we do not impose the method, and especially the terminology, of the later authors on early grammar.

Bābū Śyām Sundae Dās, President of the Nāgarī Pracārinī Sabhā, has recently written a book entitled Bhāsā Vigyān (Benares, Sāhitya-Ratn-Mālā, 1920, pp. 6 + v + 388 + xxii). In this work he has collected a large amount of material for his students in the Central Hindu University.

I here give a translation, abridged in places, of certain pages relating to Kharī Bolī in his interesting account of Hindī.

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.