It appears from those who have written the history of Russia that neither native nor European authorities know anything about it before the latter half of the ninth century, and that the tenth century is nearing its end before anything like firm ground is reached. Their name is by this time quite familiar to the Arabic chroniclers, and Ibn al-Athir even takes the trouble to record the commencement of the conversion of the Russians to Christianity; according to him in the year 375, i.e. 985–6 a.d., the Byzantine emperors being besieged found it necessary to invoke the aid of the king of the Russians, and offered him their sister in marriage. She declined to marry one who was not of her religion, whence this Russian king adopted Christianity, and that was how the religion began to be propagated in his country. The date of the first conversion of a Russian king given by Morfill on the authority of a Russian chronicle is within two years of that assigned by Ibn al-Athir; the former 988, the latter apparently 986; and Ibn al-Athir is here following a contemporary record. The name Rūs, i.e. Russians, was already familiar to Ibn al-Athir's readers and indeed those of the authority whom he excerpts owing to their being mentioned by the popular poet Mutanabbi in his most celebrated poem, describing the victory won by the Hamdanide Saif al-daulah in 954 over a force mustered by the Byzantine general called the Domesticus, wherein according to the poet so many tribes and tongues were represented that a staff of interpreters was required.

1. śāra-

IN BSOAS 13. 130–1 I pointed out the Indian manaraǵa- ‘ boy ‘, attested only by the plural manare in Niya Kharoṣṭhī, as a bye-form of the Indian māṇava- (with -ka)‘ Brahman boy ’. I noted too that the Kharoṣṭhī word gave the explanation of the Agnean manark ‘ Brahman boy ’, of which the meaning made an Indian origin plausible. I pointed also to Niya kaṣara, corresponding to Central Indian kaṣāya- ‘ yellow robe ‘, whose connexion with Agnean kāṣār is now well-known.

That recognition of the Middle Indian influence in Central Asia is most important can, I think, be shown also in connexion with another word, familiar in just such Buddhist texts as were brought into Central Asia by Buddhist communities. It is decidedly necessary to search out all such intrusive Indian material before the vocabularies of Central Asian languages can be used for wider purposes, historīcal or linguistic in Indo-European comparative grammar. And such material is itself of great importance for the history of Indian culture in Central Asia. Naturally it is in cultural, specifically Buddhist, terms that the Indian element is most prominent.

The word I propose to consider here is attested in Sanskrit śāṭa-s, śāṭaka-s, -m, śāṭtī, śāṭīkā ‘ piece of cloth, garment’, snāna-śāṭaka- ‘ bathing robe ’,śiraḥśāṭaka- ‘ head-cloth ’, well known in Central Indian literature. Beside the Brahmanical literature we have in Jaina books, Ovavāiya-sutta 54 s¯ṭiya-; Antagaṭa-dasāo (translation L. D. Barnett, p. 67) sāṭaa-; and Ratnachandraji gives in his Ardḥamāgadhī Dictionary sāṭa- ‘ garment’, sāṭaga-, sāṭaa- ‘ upper garment’, sāṭī ‘ garment’, sāṭiyā ‘ upper garment worn by ladies ’, sāṭilla- ‘ silken garment’, sāṭollaya-‘ upper garment’.

The languages of India Proper belong to two great families— in the North, the Indo-Aryan; and in the South, the Dravidian. The map here displayed shows the localities in which the former are spoken. These Indo-Aryan tongues again lull into two main groups, viz., those of the Midland—indicated on the map by red — and a number of Outer Languages, indicated by blue. These two groups differ from each other in an important characteristic, which has affected their respective literatures to no inconsiderable extent. In the Midland the languages are all analytical. Their grammars are very simple, they are cumbered by few grammatical forms, and they indicate the various relations of time and space by the aid of auxiliary words, just as we do in English. The Outer Languages, on the contrary, are synthetic. Their idioms depend chiefly on grammatical form, and, as in Latin or German, each has a more or less complicated system of declension and conjugation.

The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of ‘prestandard Old Burmese’ (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative word-list of Old Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan (CWL) to be less ambitious in scope or polished in format than Luce would have wished. Even so, the CWL is a mine of fascinating comparative material, not only for OB, where Luce's first-hand expertise was second to none, but also for Archaic Chinese (AC) and Written Tibetan (WT), where he had to rely for his data on Karlgren's reconstructions and Jäschke's dictionary.

Through the courtesy of the authorities of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek I have had the opportunity of reading in the India Office Library the apparently unique copy of Abū Sa'd 'Abd al-Malik b. Muhammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Wā'iz al-Khargūshī's manual of Sūfism entitled Tahdhīb al-asrār. Khargūshī, who is otherwise known for his voluminous biography of the Prophet and a treatise on the interpretation of dreams, died at Nīshāpūr in 406/1015 or 4Q7/1016. He is therefore an earlier authority than Sulamī (d. 412/1021), Abu Nu'aim al-Isfahānī (d. 430/1039), and Qushairī (d. 465/1072), but is junior to Sarrāj (d. 378/988), Kalābādhī (d. 385/995), and Abū Tālib al-Makkī (d. 386/996). These comparisons are important, for they show Khargūshī as being a sufficiently early writer in the genre of systematic Sūfism. His name is not included in Nicholson's list of eight authorities for the history of early Sufism, and he does not appear to have received the attention which he deserves; though it is true that he has been utilized by Massignon in his study of Hallaj. The purpose of the present note is to supplement the somewhat exiguous account of the work given by Ahlwardt, and also to estimate the true value of Khargūshī's manual as a primary source.

In a recent study entitled ‘The muwashshaḣāt: are they a mystery?’, I described the muwashshaḣāt as the product of the simple and natural attempt by the Arab literati to extend the proliferation or permutations of rhyme in Arabic prose to Arabic poetry. I pointed out also that in order to accommodate this proliferation of rhyme or to make it possible in poetry, Arabic verse forms had to undergo two notable and quite pervasive developments:

In the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, London, at pp. 107 to 117 of III, 1, are to be found some criticisms by Messrs. Krishna Pishāroḍi and Rama Pishāroḍi on my views of Bhāsa and his authorship of Svapna-Vāsavadatta and the connected dramas published in the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series. Their arguments are summarized hereunder with replies thereto:—

I. “Every open-minded critic must perforce admit that Pratimā-nāṭaka must come after Kālidāsa, Chārudatta after Śūdraka, and Avimāraka after Daṇḍin.”

In the course of a visit to Urfa in south-eastern Turkey in 1961 I was able to re-examine and to photograph the short inscription at the bottom centre of the Tripod mosaic which I had discovered in 1956. The photographs are incorporated in the colour transcription of this mosaic by Mrs. Seton Lloyd, published with my article ‘The Sabian mysteries’, in E. Bacon (ed.), Vanished civilizations, 1963, 204. The revised text of this inscription, however, has not yet received detailed analysis; I venture to return to it here because it contains features that may be of interest to students of Semitic philology and religion.