The Pahlavi text which has been recently re-edited and translated by J. M. Unvala, entitled Drakht i Asurik, has not to my knowledge received any attention from Assyriologists. In spite of the difficulties entailed in dealing with a province of which I am wholly ignorant, I have been tempted to put some suggestions on paper in the hope that the meaning of this little-known text may be viewed in a fresh relation.

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.

The gerund here studied is a grammatical form of great interest on account of its phonological variations and the wide range of its syntactical relationships. It occurs in the single form, gide, in a strengthened form, giderek, and in a pair form, gide gide. We find it as an independent gerund and in verbal combinations which vary from mere association to complete fusion, such as gidememek and gideyor (gidiyor). It also has a tendency to become specialized in use as a post-gerund, and numerous particles have originated in this way. It has had a long history, being one of the basic grammatical forms of Turkish, a common feature of the Turkish family of languages from the time of the early inscriptions of northern Asia. In Ottoman Turkish its importance (except in the -erek and pair forms) has gradually declined during the last 500 years, and it is now used only to a very limited extent; but in Old Ottoman it was fairly widely employed, and the texts which have survived provide ample material for study. It is, however, a complicated study. In the work which has been done it would seem that investigators have usually relied on insufficient data, or have applied methods unsuitable for this case. For example, the method of general comparison between Ottoman on the one hand and various speech forms such as Uighur, Chaghatai, and modern Anatolian dialects on the other, cannot give satisfactory results. There are too many unknown factors, too many imponderables. Such a procedure inevitably leads to the comparison of mere isolated examples which do not really prove anything. I have therefore confined myself to Old Ottoman, and my method has been to take whole texts and collect and classify all the examples of this gerund which they contain. This is laborious, but it produces results which cannot be obtained in any other way.

The discovery of the Anatolian family of languages early in the present century' confronted Indo-Europeanists with a verbal system of considerably less complexity than that which had been assumed, largely on the basis of Greek and Indo-Iranian evidence, to have existed in the latest common period of the parent language. This raised questions which are still keenly debated today. Did the simplicity of the Anatolian system represent something more primitive than the classic image of Indo-European, out of which the latter could be explained as a subsequent development, or was it the simplified outcome of an originally more complex system, close to that which had been reconstructed before the Anatolian family was known? Where Anatolian had isolated features (such as the ending -i(š) of the 3 s. preterite of the –ḫi conjugation) corresponding to features which characterized the whole of a paradigm in Indo-European (such as –s– in the sigmatic aorist), had it preserved a relic of a once fully-formed s– aorist which had been largely lost as a result of merger with other categories, or was this a 3 s. ending which had subsequently become incorporated into the stem to form a new kind of paradigm?.

The first part of this article seeks to discuss the development of Islamic architectural calligraphy in Sultanate Bengal in the context of its cultural history. Most early Islamic monuments of the region had some kind of calligraphic embellishment since in Islamic culture inscriptions are considered a powerful medium for conveying visual, cultural and spiritual messages. These inscriptions were rendered in various styles: Ku¯fi¯, thulth, naskh, riqa¯‘, rayha¯ni¯, muhaqqaq, tughra¯‘ and Biha¯ri¯. The second part focuses on some hitherto unpublished inscriptions discovered by the author in Gaur and Pandua, two early capitals of the Sultans of Bengal. Special attention is paid to deciphering and editing these new epigraphic texts, and to the analysis of information derived from them in their historical context, such as the names of the contemporary rulers, local administrative officers, religious figures, military commanders and their titles. These findings help us understand the contemporary political, administrative, social, religious and cultural implications for the region.

Tamīm al-Dārī was one of the Prophet Muḥammad's companions and an early convert to Islam from Christianity. His name is most closely associated with the eschatological traditions concerning the Dajjāl (the Muslim Antichrist), and various early ascetic ideas. The best known story involving him is in fact his meeting with the Dajjāl, after he and others of his tribe are shipwrecked on a mysterious island. He is taken by a creature called al-jassāsa to meet a chained man in a monastery, who asks the tribesmen a number of questions about the state of the outside world, most of which are related to the area of the Rift Valley in Syria. After they answer him, he proclaims himself to be the Dajjāl and announces that he is about to be let loose on the world. Somehow Tamīm and his companions manage to leave the island and come to visit the Prophet, who hears their story and relates it to the populace of Medina. However, in spite of this story, historical material about him, as is common with the Prophet's companions in general, is hard to come by. In this article I will explore some of the historical traditions connected with this figure and try to establish which material is reliable and which is not.

The Yao dialects constitute a clearly differentiated branch of the Miao-Yao language family, both in vocabulary and phonology. Phonologically, they are characterized by a wide range of vowels and the presence of final consonants, whereas the Miao dialects have generally a very simple system of rhymes but great complexity in the initials. Their close connexion is very apparent, although the rules for sound-correspondences have not yet been worked out. No affiliation of the Miao-Yao languages with any of the neighbouring groups— Tibeto-Burman, Chinese, Thai-Sui, or Mon-Khmer—has yet been convincingly demonstrated.