Once upon a time, scholars believed that tracing the history and diffusion of folktales led to knowledge of a shared human culture. The enlightenment of the twentieth century, however, rooted out this superstition, with its evolutionary and devolutionary premises, and replaced it with a rigorous identification of tales, descriptions of their contents, and, more recently, analyses of the circumstances of their telling. The textual precision and ethnographic depth of these studies, not to mention the increasing number of folktale indexes, have taken us far beyond the naiveté of those nineteenth-century claims for a Buddhist or mytho-poetic origin to virtually all folk narrative. Deriving, for example, an English proverb (‘Don't count your chickens before they hatch’) from a Sanskrit story about a man whose dreams destroy him is almost as entertaining as it is untenable. One wonders, however, if, in reaction to such excesses, research did not retreat into a safer but more limited sphere by studying the stories of a single society. Without wishing to return to the hyperbole of those early folktale scholars, this essay acknowledges their comparative vision, bold hypotheses, and dedication to the international study of the folktale.

1. From the period of the rule of the Kuṣāṇa family of the Saka kings cor three inscriptions from Mathurā. Of the first two neither is completely preserved, but in both a word bakanapati is unmistakably present. The first inscription is of the time of the mahārāja rājātirāja devaputra Huviṣka. The second inscription written on a pedestal seems to contain the name Vima, and this by both K. P. Jayaswal and Mme van Lohuizen de Leeuw is considered to mean Vima Kadphises, though Sten Konow expressed his doubts.

At the beginning of September 1854, almost six months after Commodore Perry had concluded his convention with Japan, Sir James Stirling, Commander-in-Chief of the British East Indies fleet, took his squadron into Nagasaki harbour to negotiate with the Japanese officials there. Unlike Perry, his primary object was not to obtain a treaty of commerce and friendship. War between Britain and Russia had broken out in March, and it was his duty to hunt down, if possible to destroy, Admiral Poutiatin's squadron then in Pacific waters. This task, he realized, would be made much easier if he could use Japanese ports for obtaining stores and refitting on the terms usually allowed a belligerent by a neutral state, and if this meant that Russia could use those ports on similar terms, he was confident that he could deny her access to them by his own greater strength at sea. In fact, whatever secret hopes he may have had as to the ultimate effect of his discussions on Anglo-Japanese relations, Stirling went to Nagasaki principally to settle a point of practical importance to his conduct of naval operations. He wished to know in what light the Japanese government would view the use'of its ports by the belligerents, and was ready to suggest, perhaps insist on, a policy favourable to Great Britain.

Despite this limited objective, there followed an exchange of letters, some weeks of waiting, and a number of discussions with the Nagasaki Bugyoo (the Governor of Nagasaki), as a result of which Stirling obtained a convention similar in many respects to that of Perry, though somewhat more restricted in its provisions.

Though the linguistic interest for Indo-Iranian predominates in the study of the texts from Gostana-dea (Khotan), the contents offer also considerable materials for closer understanding of pre-Muslim Chinese Turkistan in Central Asia.

A New religion has no theology; that develops later. It is only natural that Islam should show some influence of the older religions among which it grew up. New ideas came in with converts or through talk with men of other faiths. Muslim theology moved in a circle, and came back to its starting-point with the same ideas deeper and riper. The second and third centuries of the Hijra were the formative period, after which thought degenerated into the splitting of hairs. The religious world was in a ferment which threw out many strange ideas. Sober thinkers mostly belonged to the Mu‘tazila, who taught the freedom of the human will to free God from the responsibility for sin and evil. Others found a solution of this problem in other ways, some being forerunners of al-Ash‘ari, who in 300 A.H. deserted the Mu‘tazila and used their methods to build up the system of orthodoxy. Many of these men were not Arabs, and their writings have perished; so all that is known of their teaching comes from the works of their opponents. The earliest of these is Maḳālāt al-islāmiyyīn by al-Ash‘ari; it is also the most valuable, for it is objective and free from theological hatred. The author has done his best to report what these men taught, and his education fitted him for this. Later books are not so impartial. ‘Abd al-Ḳāhir al-Baghdādi († 429) calls each deviation from the strait path an error.

Written Tibetan (WT) is unusual among Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages in possessing a relatively complex verb morphology which contains—apart from distinctive ‘prefixes' for intransitive/transitive verb pairs, a phenomenon found elsewhere in ST—prefixes and suffixes for certain tenses as well as a morphologically significant ablaut system, none of which can be found, or at least, none of which are common in other ST languages. The simplest ways of dealing with the problem of the origin and development of this system in the light of comparative ST researches are, firstly, ignoring it, and secondly, coming up with ad hoc theories about its independent development, thereby not affecting the apparently stable edifice of ST in any way.

In 1679 the Fifth Dalai Lama issued a decree appointing Sangs-rgyas rgya mtsho to conduct the administration of secular affairs on his behalf in the post usually known as that of regent. The decree, sealed with the imprint of the Dalai Lama's hands, is inscribed in the Potala on a wall opposite the steep triple stair leading down to the great eastern courtyard called Bde-yangs-shar. It is referred to in the third volume of the autobiography of the Dalai Lama (Du-ku-la III, fol. 128a) and in the Vaidurya ser-po composed by Sangs-rgyas rgya-mtsho in 1698 (VSP, p. 360); but the complete text does not appear to have been published in any Tibetan or western work. The copy transcribed below is derived mainly from a photograph kindly given me by Ernst Krause who accompanied Dr. Ernst Schaefer to Lhasa in 1939. As can be seen in the reproduction in plate I the last two lines are obscured by a wooden frame protecting the Dalai Lama's hand-prints and for that passage I am indebted to the Tibetan scholar and author, Tsipon W. D. Shakabpa.

The sculptured frieze that forms the subject of this paper is carved on the main shrine of the Śiva temple at Tārācuram, 5 km. south of Kumpakonam, a provincial town in Thanjavur District, Tamilnadu. Narrative friezes of the great Indian epics are a quite usual feature of Hindu architectural ornament both in India and beyond. It is also the case that individual Tamil Śaiva saints, to whom the collective name in Tamil, Nāyaṉmār, sing. nāyaṉār, is applied, appear commonly in iconography in temples of the Tamil-speaking area. But the frieze at Tārācuram is exceptional in being a portrayal of the complete set of the 63 Nāyaṉmār as they figure in that closely-related group of Tamil medieval texts of which the most important is Cekkiḻār's Pěriya purāṇam. Indeed, as will be shown, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Tārācuram frieze is virtually a set of illustrations to that work, and that the one would tend to confirm the date assumed for the other. Moreover, the various anomalies in Pěriya purānam, such as the total omission of Māṇikkavācakar and the reversing of the logical order of events in the case of Nāyaṉār 51 (N51), Kaḻaṟciṅka nāyaṉār and N54, Pukaḻttuṇai nāyaṉār, are precisely mirrored in the Tārācuram frieze.

It is a commonplace in the study of pre-Han texts to acknowledge that the received version of a given text cannot be assumed to reflect with any significant degree of fidelity its original form. A text is, as the literal sense of the English word implies, something woven, something stitched together (cf. Skt. sūtra, Ch. ching), and once woven, it may ravel. It would then be subject to re-weaving, either in its entirety alone, or together with other, originally distinct texts. In the former case individual phrases or lines might be introduced throughout the piece for reasons for euphony, stylistic balance, or perhaps because of a misunderstanding of the original sense on the part of a later scribe. In the latter case wholly independent accounts might become interwoven, begetting a new, hybrid document. Such re-weaving with its gratuitous additions of new material might occur several times, further distorting the primary content on each occurrence. The end result of such a process of textual alterations would be a composite and thoroughly heterogeneous work of diverse provenances, and of uncertain internal uniformity.

In the 1950s when Professor Stein was engaged in his research on the Gesar epic, he wrote: ‘If there ever existed a complete recension of all Chapters, they remain unknown to us. Neither written texts nor oral versions contain the totality of the epic story. And the ones that we know of at present, present themselves in the form of a literature that is still alive and mobile.’

Since then, the situation has totally changed with the publication of many previously unknown chapters, not only those that have come down to us from the past but also the new products of a literature that is still expanding, as Professor Stein so accurately observed. What I am concerned with here, however, is the theoretical basis which underlies the ordering of the episodes relating to the hero and his life, and the notion of a correct ‘chronological order’ which the tradition presents, however fictitious the events may be. It is the materials which existed before our time which are most pertinent here and which permit us to identify the theoretical basis of which I speak. That basis provides a perspective on the question as a whole, and a guide through the tangled structure of the Tibetan epic. We are now, as I said, in a better position than in the 1950s to make an assessment of the whole body of Tibetan epic literature.

Nothing is more disconcerting to the student of early Muslim history than the way in which Tabarī and the other historians alternate between detailed and comprehensive narrative and jottings of the most meagre and involved nature, filled out, in some cases, by picturesque but obviously legendary tales. These faults, which are to a large degree inherent in the method of compilation from oral tradition, come out most clearly in the narrative of the brilliant series of campaigns by which the Arab general Qutayba ibn Muslim conquered and annexed the lands eastward from Herāt and the Oxus to the Pamīr, during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph Walīd I (a.d. 705–15). Thus we are given a fairly sufficient account of the long drawn out operations against Bukhārā, but none of the actual conquest and colonization of the city : much 'of the expeditions against various princes subject to the kingdom of Tukhāristān, but practically nothing of the annexation of Tukhāristān itself.

Part I concluded with the suggestion that certain general-phonetic features, those of rounding and spreading, and those of vowel closure, might profitably be given a prosodic statement for the word as a whole, as:—

I. a 3-term system: y/w/ә

II. a 2-term system: o/c

A given word might thus be assigned to a prosodic category, to the ‘ y ’, the ‘ w ’, or the ‘ ә ’ term, and treated as a ‘ y word ’, ‘ w word ’, or ‘ neutral word ’ (yW, wW, әW). Similarly a given word might be assigned to either term of the closure system, and treated as a ‘ close word ’ or as an ‘ open word ’ (cW, oW). Theoretically it is a matter of indifference which of the two systems should be stated first. Since, however, they cannot be stated simultaneously in practice, the method of statement adopted here gives priority to the w/y/ә system; the exponents of ‘ w ’, ‘ y ’, and ‘ ә ’ are stated in turn. The o/c system is considered within the framework of these three categories, the exponents of o/c being given for wW, yW, and әW in turn, immediately after the exponents of ‘ w ’, ‘ y ’, and ‘ ә ’ respectively.

In their learned and sumptuously illustrated work Mushrooms, Russia and history, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and K. Gordon Wasson have given a comprehensive and fascinating survey of mushroom lore. All kinds of traditions and conceits connected with fungi have here been discussed, together with the often picturesque and fanciful, sometimes unsavoury names denoting them in many diverse languages. The etymologies are frequently quite clear, and give a good clue to the understanding of the strikingly parallel reactions evoked everywhere by ‘the rich world of mushrooms and toadstools’. Other words are of uncertain origin, and in some cases we come across resemblances between words from unrelated and unconnected languages, which the philologist may be inclined to ascribe to ‘mirages linguistiques’.

It is customary to describe the Ṛavedic dialogue of Purūravas and Urvaśī (ṚV 10.95, referred to hereafter as D) either as the source ‘from which all the different versions have originated … an exaltation of a popular fairy-tale’ (H. D. Velankar, The Vikramorvaśīya, New Delhi, 1961, xxxxiii) or as ‘ein einheitliches festgefügtes Kunstwerk’ based on the fairy-tale narrated ‘im alten schlichten Märchenstil’ in Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 11.5.1 (K. F. Geldner).

The system of endogamous castes arranged in a hierarchic order is a form of social structure characteristic of India and certain neighbouring countries affected by the influence of Hinduism. Its origin and historic development is the subject of a large literature based primarily on Sanskrit sources stemming from ancient and medieval times. Our knowledge of Indian social life in those times is due almost entirely to the work of Sanskrit scholars, and studies of the phenomenon of caste from a sociological point of view, such as that of Max Weber, remained few in numbers compared to the volume of treatises viewing the system in a purely historical perspective.

John Wansbrough's rebukes to historians find their wittiest expression in his ‘Res ipsa loquitur’, an essay in which the nub of the problem seems to be this, that he thinks historians are writing novels and they think they are presenting the facts. Accused of engaging with language games, narrative structures and creative mimesis, a wise historian might decide to be flattered, and stick to his last. Wansbrough, after all, is also a historian: a typological assessment of his work will not (yet) find that he has slipped into the genre of novel, or theology. Even his extensive exercises in literary criticism are part of an effort to tell the history of a community. His objections are to the arbitrarily privileged position of ‘reality’, the tyranny of some narrative structures, the eschewal of interpretative versatility, and a lack of methodological and literary self-consciousness. Significant criticisms, but presented in a context which implies not only serious concern with but enjoyment of the achievement of these historians, novelists malgré eux.

In the course of an examination of George Sale's translation of the Qurʼán, I was struck by certain remarks made by him in his address to the reader. He says first that, with the exception of a MS. of Baydawi's Commentary, which he borrowed from the Dutch Church in Austin Friars, he relied solely on MSS. and books in his own possession for his Moslem authorities.