In reading through the Pali Canon one cannot help being struck by the frequent occurrence of phrases which lay stress both on the real objective character of the truth and the supreme importance of “ self ” in the matter of the subjective aspect of the truth in so far as it is the function and duty of the self to realize (i.e. make real) the truth which the self recognizes by means of its cognitive and intuitional faculties. This emphasis is in keeping with the definite assertion of a positive and real self all through the Canon

The Arabic manuscript Or. 9200 in the British Museum collection, copied in Cairo in a fairly clear Naskhi hand in the year A.H. 1181 (A.D. 1767), contains three short works. The first of these, covering sixty–one folios, bears the title al–Jalīs al–anīs fī tahrim al–kkandarīs. Its author is the famous lexicographer Muhammad ibn Ya′qūb al–Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1415). It is a vocabulary of all the Arabic words known to him which signify wine or any other intoxicant, and he is careful to emphasize that he composed it in loyal support of the Islamic ordinance of prohibition no less than as a contribution to Arabic philology.

There is perhaps no writer held in greater esteem in the Tamil country than the poetess Avvai or Auvai, as her name is given in the old commentaries and in a poem of the Sangam age.1 The editor of a selection of poems from those traditionally ascribed to Avvai says that the poetess was an incarnation of the goddess of learning, while the writer of the foreword to his book says the joy of her presence is with us in the world to-day. An editor and annotator of a philosophical work ascribed to her writes in much the same strain, remarking that the work in question is the fruit of the penance of the whole Tamil country.

One of the most important works of the great Tatar poet Gabdulla Tuqaj (27th April, 1886, to 15th April, 1913) 1 is said to be the poem “Şyrale (The Forest-Demon) ”, written in 1907. There is no doubt about the literaryimportance of this work, although many “enlightened ”Tatars disparage it as a mere nursery-tale 2 ;but it is likewise important for folklore and literary history.

The village of Qïzïl Qujašis situated in the district of Okťabŕ, about three miles from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I collected material on the dialect of this village from the Uzbeks Xamidov εnver (51 years old) and Eaxmatov Qulmet (49 years old), during their stay in Vienna in August, 1944. Neither of them had ever left their native village, where they had worked as agricultural labourers. Their parents also lived in the same village. These two Uzbeks had never gone to school and were illiterate.

The Tārīkhi Qumm was originally written in Arabic by Hasan b. Muhammad b. Hasan Qumml in the year A.H. 378 (A.D. 988–9). No copy of this is known to exist. A Persian translation was made in the year A.H. 805–6 (A.D. 1402–3) by Hasan b. Alī b. Hasan b. Abd al–Malik Qummī for Ibrāhīm b. Mahmūd b. Muhammad b. Alī as–Safī. The translator states that the original contained twenty chapters and fifty sections. None of the known manuscripts, however, contains more than the first five chapters.

After the death of Han Yü in 823, his literary works were collected and edited by his relative and disciple Li Han . These works were soon forgotten, and the name of Han Yü remained virtually unknown until the chance discovery of a fragmentary copy by the child Ou Yang Hsiu in the house of a friend in 1016.1 Ou Yang Hsiu, who within thirty years had done much both to restore Han Yü′s text, and to demand for him the recognition that he had claimed but never received during his lifetime, was followed in his work by every Confucian scholar of note, until Han Yü′s position as the last of the classical writers was irremovably established. In his original edition Li Han had arranged Han Yü′s works according to categories: he may have made some attempt at a chronological order within those categories, but if so, the disintegration of copies during the 200 years of neglect undid his work.

Amongst some material recently recorded for me by Mr. E. A. W. Engmann, a native of Christiansborg, was a passage from his prize essay, “ Ganyo bi”. The passage contained a Gã, folk tale told some years ago to Mr. Engmann by his aunt (minyε nukpa). Apart from any intrinsic merit, the story affords an interesting example of the adaptation of a borrowed theme. A detailed comparison with the well-known Akan version would undoubtedly prove profitable. I give Mr. Engmann′s text below.

The importance of the oath in Ismā′īlism was recognized at an early date, and some of the earliest tracts against the sect devote several pages to the oaths demanded from new recruits. Of particular interest is a passage in a medieval Egyptian manual for secretaries, giving the formula of oaths to be sworn by Ismā′īlīs. The work, the Tā′rīf bi ′l–Muskdah ash–Sharīf, is administrative rather than theological in scope, and may, on the whole, be relied upon as giving the approved formula for the numerous Ismallls still to be found in the Mamlūk dominions. The author was the respected and well known chief Qādī Shihāb ad–Dān b. Fadl Allah al–Umarā. Qalqashandi quotes the passage, with some explanatory and critical notes, in his chapter on the Ismā′īlīs.

In possession of the Cambridge University Library (Or. 830) there is a copy of a Catalogue of the Kanjur, handwritten in Tibetan characters. The MS. has no head-title or colophon, and no indication of the author or the date of its origin is given. The colophon in the MS. 30a, 2–306,12, refers to the collection, and not to the Catalogue. The MS. is written distinctly, and at least three different handwritings are traceable. The size is a medium quarto, and one side of the paper only is filled. It consists of 22 ff. No original pagination of the folios is to be found, and this fact caused the present pagination, added by somebody not knowing Tibetan, to be utterly misleading. In the first half of the MS. the empty pages are numbered as well as those written on, and thus the next page after 56 is la, after 76, 9a, and so forth. After page 13 the mistake has been corrected and henceforward the pages run in their natural order, except for the other mistake, this time in binding, where the binder confused a few pages, and the “paginator”, not noticing it, kept up the natural order of the numbers.

Ptolemy (vii, 1, 50) mentions Eragassa as the last but one of eighteen places which he assigns to the Kaspiraioi, whose territory is stated by him to stretch from the country1 of the Pandoouoi (or perhaps from the town Iomusa) towards the east as far as the Ouindion, i.e. the Vindhya. Eragassa is called a metropolis, and must therefore have been a place of some importance. Let us briefly survey the identifications proposed by various scholars. Lassen located Eragassa at “Komulmir”, i.e. Kumalmer, a fort in the Udaipur State of Rajputana. Vivien de Saint-Martin, while suspecting the name to be a “Latin interpolation”, explained it as a corruption of VaranasI, the ancient name of Benares. According to Colonel Yule it would correspond to Giriraja, “Royal Hill”, a name which might indicate Govardhana, near Mathura. Dr. W. W. Tarn1 gives us the choice between Ajmer and Eran in the Sagar district of the Central Provinces. But the ancient name of the lastmentioned place is known from inscriptions to be Airikina or Erakana. Possibly this hst does not exhaust the identifications proposed.

This present study is the result of observations I made on the speech of Mr. S. M. Ahamba, while he was at the School in 1946. Mr. Ahamba is an Igbo, and was born and brought up in Lorji, a small rural village situated near the western bank of the Imo River, some twenty miles east-south-east of Owerri town. He has spent some time at Obosi and Awka, both in Onitsha Province, and also at Egbu, three miles from Owerri. It must be emphasized, however, that the type of Igbo he speaks is not that of Owerri town itself. It could be most nearly described as the Lorji dialect spoken by a school teacher who has spent some years away from home.

The Sogdian “Ancient Letters”, no doubt one of the most important of Sir Aurel Steins many finds, have been attributed to the middle of the second century of our era, on the strength of archaeological evidence (Serindia, ii, 671 sqq.). Their editor, H. Reichelt, expressed a mild doubt (Die Soghdischen Handschriftenreste des Britischen Museums, ii, p. 6), and so did Pelliot in his review of Reichelts edition (Toung Pao, xxviii, 1931, 457–463). If the date originally proposed by Sir Aurel Stein (between A.D. 105 and 137, or in 153) could be substantiated, the Letters, which are on paper, would have to be regarded as the oldest paper documents in existence.

DANS un livre, écrit en langue néerlandaise et qui a paru pendant la guerre,1 M. H. Wagenvoort, étudiant les traces du concept “primitif” de mana chez les Romains, a fait des observations intéressantes sur l′usage du mot latin gravitas. L′expression gravis auctor, qui se trouve fréquemment, n′a pas seulement la signification de “auteur ou informateur important ou compétent”, mais aussi celle de “homme d′influence et qui prend l′initiative”. La qualité la plus saillante de Vauctor, mot qui à l′origine a du signifier “celui qui augmente”, est celle que nous désignons par le terme “prestige”. Et comme auctor est un mot “mana”, c.à.d. un mot exprimant un concept relatif à l′ensemble des idées primitives et sémi-primitives qui se groupent autour du “mana”, M. Wagenvoort cherche à démontrer qu′il y a aussi des traces de “mana” dans l′usage du mot gravis. En preparant son expose sur gravis etc. il m′a demande quelques renseignements sur le mot Sanskrit guru- “lourd, etc.”, et sa question a attiré mon attention sur la signification primitive de guru- “maitre” et sur la croyance, répandue dans l′antiquité classique, que les dieux et les etres surhumains en général ont, en vertu de leur mana, un poids extraordinaire.

The following few pages, dedicated to Dr. L. D. Barnett in memory of many A kindnesses, may call up for a brief moment the forgotten princes, the acaryas, Buddhist teachers, who in the tenth century on their way between Khotan and China were plundered and distracted by the Turks who met them on their way. They are religious teachers and have no enemies, said their guides to the Turks. The short text forms part of the Buddhist legacy of India to Central Asia. The Stein MS. Ch 00269 contains, after some incomplete phrases in lines 0–8, the drafts of three letters: 9–23 concern a certain Prabhākaravardhana; 24–108 and 108–120, here edited and translated, give the letter of the messengers, written in Sacū (1. 84), and the letter of the seven princes. Lines 75–80 were quoted in BSOS 8. 883 (twelve years ago) for their importance for the Tokharian problem. The companion piece to this MS. is P 2741 at the Bibliotheque Nationale, of which an edition has been given in this same volume XII of the BSOAS. Both were prepared for the press as long ago as 1942, but it has not been possible hitherto to publish them.

A frequent phenomenon in Tamil and Malayalam loan–words from early XX Indo–Aryan is the dropping of an initial sibilant.1 More rarely examples occur in Telugu and Kanarese. Cases can be quoted for all the three Sanskrit sibilants, though the immediate source of the borrowings are forms with Prakrit s-.

On several occasions, when my Persian coaster ventured into the Indian Ocean and was battered by too heavy seas, and I was murmuring the verse of Hafiz:– Dr. L. D. Barnett, like the expert pilot he is, came to the rescue. As a token of gratitude I wish him to accept my translation of the chapter on India extracted from the unpublished part of Gardīzī′s historical work.

Avestic has a series of compounds in which the word for ‘foot’, IE. *ped-, appears in its weakest ablaut grade, viz. -bd-: bibda-, βribda-, vīspabda- ‘double, treble, universal fetter’. Corresponding to these Sanskrit has forms with full grade: dvipád-, RV. nom. -pát, Pān. dvī- ‘ two-footed ’, RV. tripod-, AV. sdrvapad-; also RV. apád- ‘footless’ and, with other numerals, RV. cátuspad-, AV. sátpad-, VS. saptápad-, RV. astápad-, áatápad-, sahásrapad