A Buddhist practice existed whereby a dānapati, patron, had a manuscript of a Buddhist religious text copied, into which at the appropriate place his personal name was inserted with Sanskrit inflexion. In the Buddhist Sanskrit Sitātapatra-sūtra, the ‘Book of the white umbrella’, Stein manuscript S 2529, two personal names are inserted. In lines 45–6 occurs aṣṭānā mahāgrrahāṇā vaidhvasanakara hu ttrū 〈rakṣa rakṣa〉 mama vaṣayānasya ‘O destroyer of the eight great ravishers, hūṃ trūṃ. Protect, protect me Yaṣayāna’. In lines 48, 70, 88, 117 the name is Sīdyākaraca. Here we read:

48 auma svasta〈ka〉ra bavattū mama sīdyākaracasya

70 rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

88 ye ke cai salvā mama sīdyākaracasya ∥

117: rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

Instead of a name in line 122 occurs the word īthanāmasya ‘of so-and-so’.

THE early history of Central Asia, the background of the Turkish expansion in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of the Mongol eruption in the thirteenth, presents a large number of problems which the slowly progressing study of documents made accessible to us in particular by the late M. Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot is bringing nearer to solution. Among these documents those from the kingdoms of Khotan and Krorayina are of outstanding importance for the early period. It seems desirable to treat of some of these problems here.

1. The vocabulary of Khotan and the Iranian words in the Krorayina documents

A large part of the vocabulary of the Khotanese language is now known, much of it already accessible in print, and it is possible to confront it with the Iranian words found in Krorayina. It is at once noticeable that in the two vocabularies, while part is identical, as in lāstana- ‘quarrel’, corresponding to Krorayina lastana, or prahona- ‘garment’ to Krorayina prahuni, yet marked differences appear which are unlikely to be due only to difference of time.

I would notice here the following ten cases.

1. In an article Recent Work in ‘Tokharian’ (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1947, 149–150), I called attention to the difference between Krorayina guśura, Kuchean Sanskrit gauśura, and the Khotan *bisīviraa-, attested in the plural bīsīvīrā of high birth ‘(Suvarnabhāsa-sūtra, Khotanese Texts I p. 248, 73 r 1), and the related bäsīvärāssai, translating Sanskrit kulaputra, a person of good family. The treatment of the initial υ- shows that here two dialects are concerned.

Emphasizing the importance of balanced geographical and historical knowledge in the late sixteenth century, Richard Hakluyt remarked: ‘Geographie and Chronologie are the sune and moone, the right eye and left eye of all history.’ In current studies of archaeology and history this emphasis remains apt, for to write a proper account of both artifacts and kings, they must be set geographi- cally in space and chronologically in time. The regions south of the River Yamunā, anciently known as Gopakṣetra, Daśārṇa, and Jejākadeśa (Maps 1 and 2), are rich in antiquarian remains, and have played an important role in the history of India, especially from the Gupta period to the time of the Muslim invasion. Their historical geography, however, has been generally ignored, and scholars have been content to describe the area simply as ‘ Central India’. The purpose of the present essay is to give an introduction to the historical geography of these provinces, and as such it can be taken as a foundation for further studies in local history and archaeology.

Among the thousands of Jaina images found throughout India, those from Mathura produced during the Kuṣāṇa period are unique, for they alone contain representations of unclothed Jaina ascetics holding a single small piece of cloth in such a way as to cover their nudity. These curious figures cannot be identified with monks of the present-day Jaina sects of the Digambaras, who practise total nudity, or of the Śvetāmbaras, who wear two long pieces of unstitched white cloth wrapped around their bodies and occasionally a white blanket over their left shoulders. The veteran art-historian, the late Dr. U. P. Shah, in Aspects of Jaina art and architecture briefly mentions these figures, noting that ‘nowhere in the above references from Śvetāmbara as well as Digambara texts do we come across a reference to those figures on the siṃhāsanaof a Jina which we find in a number of sculptures of the Kuṣāṇa period from the Kaṅkāli Tīlā.’ Subsequently, in Jaina-Rūpa-Maṇḍano, he calls these figures ardhaphālakas (monks with partial covering) and speculates that these figures might be Yāpanīya monks, another Jaina sect that is now extinct, and states that these figures need further investigation. In addition to Shah, N. P. Joshi has also discussed these ardhaphālaka images. He states that ‘all the monks seen in the bas-reliefs, except one known to me, seem to belong to the Ardhaphālaka sect. … Besides the monks seen in the bas-reliefs, those hovering in the air (vidyā cāraṇas) or seen on some of the śilāpaṭṭāsare all Ardhaphālakas. This suggests that during the pre-Christian and early Christian centuries a large number of Jainas at Mathura followed this sect’.

The dissolution of ideological identities that had seemed since the middle of this century fairly stable would appear to be one of the characteristics of our times. In place of the struggle between Capitalism and Communism, Samuel Huntingdon would wish to erect a more fragmented competition between civilizational blocs, bearing such labels as the Confucian East and the World of Islam. Yet even such an analysis seems already distinctly old-fashioned, imposing a questionable cultural stability on more labile phenomena. As an alternative Lionel Jensen suggests that the first of these labels, at any rate, is in no small measure the creation of early European observers, and that far from basking in any unproblematic sense of identity, some of the best minds of twentieth-century China actually expended much of their ink on a highly problematic search for the origins of an identifiable Confucian group in the early Chinese past.

The change of p, initial and intervocalic, to h in Kanarese was noticed by Western scholars early. Caldwell says “the initial p of nearly all the words-whether they are pure Dravidian or Sanskrit derivatives-changes to h”. A more careful study of this change of p to h was made by Kittel in his Grammar. He points out that initial p was changed to h in Kēśirāja's time (1260) optionally. But he has not given evidence from the inscriptions to show when p changed to h.

May (God) bless the beginning (of the text) and favour its ending with good fortune. This is both said and written by Sīdi Sālim in praise of his Shaykh. Shaykh Mā' al-'Aynayn, may God prolong his life.

Bishop caldwell, the founder of the comparative study of the Dravidian languages, was interested not only in the relationship of those languages among themselves, but also in the question of their connection with other families of languages outside India. His investigations in this direction led him to believe that the Dravidian languages are connected with what he called the “Scythian” family of languages. By the term “Scẏthian” Caldwell referred mainly to the Ural-Altaic languages, though occasionally using the word in a rather wider sense than that. Within the “Scythian” family he held that it was possible to define the position of Dravidian even more closely, by attaching it to the Finno-ugrian group in particular. The evidence which Caldwell offered in support of this theory consisted partly of grammatical features which he held to be common to the languages concerned, and partly of comparisons of vocabulary. The former are to be found scattered through the body of his work, and the latter are collected together in an appendix entitled “Glossarial Affinities”. In presenting this theory Caldwell was quite modest in his claims; he admitted the possibility of being misled by accidental assonances, and claimed rather to have pointed the way to the possibilities of future research than to have demonstrated the relationship with any finality.

Having been in the first instance a classical scholar, Wilfred Whiteley well knew how important vernacular texts are for an understanding of a people's thought and values. He was also that rare combination of anthropologist and linguist and saw therefore in texts much more than phonetic, grammatical, lexicographical, and other purely linguistic problems, but also the semantic, which in effect means ethnographical, questions raised by them. He saw clearly that a people's whole way of life, and the way they see it, may be revealed in a single text. Consequently, and apart from their significance for the ethnographer who recorded vernacular texts among (generally) a pre-literate people, they can be, especially if presented in both vernacular and with a competent translation, of considerable pedagogic value, the student asking himself such questions as arise from their content.

In the Northern Church of the Negev town whose name has been preserved by the local Arabs as Ruḥeibe, on a flagstone still in situ in the south-westernpart of the atrium, Loc. 523, the following inscription was carefully and clearly inscribed:

The following paper does not set out to be a comprehensive comparison of tonal systems—it is rather an account of my own experiences with various methods, with special reference to tone-marking in dictionaries and vocabularies. For this reason a certain amount of biographical detail is inevitable.