In Bsos. viii, 781 ff., Mr. E. J. Thomas argues that “Tathagata” may have been taken over by the Buddhist from the Jain Tathāgaya, and that it may be an incorrect Sanskritization of some unknown non-Aryan and non-Dravidian word. This seems very far-fetched. Mr. Thomas does not take any account of possibly Vedic origins, common to Buddhism and Jainism. We have shown incidentally elsewhere that countless Buddhist terms, for example arkat and attā, are purely Vedic, and have argued that the Buddha legend is almost wholly made up of Vedic material with only such modifications as are inevitable when the eternal birth is to be retold in terms of a temporal narrative. We are convinced, in other words, that the Buddha, the “Kinsman of the Sun”, the “Eye of the World”, and “Great Person” of the Pali texts, the Buddha who may be represented in art by a pillar of fire, is an incarnation or descent (avatarana) of the Vedic Agni.

Manuscripts from the Yemen mention this sect. The following account of it is taken from works in the British Museum; possibly further details could be found in manuscripts in Berlin. It is said that these heretics are to be found in most countries. One writer declares tantalizingly that their errors are too many for him to mention them all. By their show of devotion to the family of the prophet they spread error in Islam, making men think that it was the teaching of the family. They studied their creed in their conventicles. 1 They are called ṭabī‘īya, which D. B. Macdonald translates as deistic naturalists.

They taught2 that God has forty names; they are he and he is they and they are eternal as he is. Therefore they are worse than the Christians in the proportion of forty to three. Nature is outside the power of God though living beings are within it. Such phenomena as creation, the means of livelihood (rizḳ), death, life, growth, and decrease do not come from God but are due to chajiges of bodies and the effects of natures. Therefore sickness and pain do not come from God (one account makes them come from the devil), while storms and hail are the result of chance. God has no grace, no power to give good things to men; the believer gets the means of livelihood as a reward, the unbeliever takes them by force.

According to PW. barhánā is an old instr. of a *barhána- from the 2 √ barh-, “kräftigen,” etc., and means adverbially: “dicht fest, derb, nachdrücklich, tüchtig”; emphatically “sehr, gar, recht eigentlich”. Grassmann, Wb. zum Rigveda, s.v. has: (1) “Kraft, Macht,” (2) “insbesondere Macht über jemand (gen.), (3) as an adverb: “mit Macht, kräftiglich.” In RV. 1, 166, 6, the word is used, according to him, to denote a weapon “wie etwa ein Schleuderstein”. So also for 8, 63, 7. Ludwig agrees on the whole with PW.

The connection of Ait with Geography is obvious, but in the case of Persia the problem is somewhat different from that presented by other countries.

For example, the most immediate influence of the natural environment on the landscape painters is hardly of any importance in Persia, where the miniaturists present their heroes in purely imaginary surroundings, now of radiant sunny spaces, now of fantastic rocks reminding one of coral reefs.

The story of the Persian document which forms the subject of the present article is not devoid of romance. It was discovered in 1896 by the well-known Bosnian scholar Ṣafvet-beg R. Bašagić in the possession of a local noble, Nuri-beg Čengić of Ustikolina. This family is said to be immigrants in Bosnia; their forefathers must have come as officials of the Ottoman Empire, then received fiefs and settled in the country. The farmān in question being kept in the family archives, and evidently connected with the ancestors of the Čengić, points to the origin of the family from far-away Kurdistan.

A facsimile of the interesting document was published by Bašagić1 first accompanied by an article in Serbian, and then by a German translation of the latter. On the whole the work of the late Bosnian scholar quite satisfactorily served its immediate purpose, if we take into consideration the difficulties the author must have had, working as he was in a provincial town, wheTe-a knowledge of Persian was certainly no common attainment.

There is no article “funeral” in the Enchclopædia of Islam so it seemed good to collect the material on this subject. The first charge on a Musulim' estate was the cost of his funeral, the provision of grave-clothes, tomb, and the expense of washing the body.

Washing

The body was washed by those nearest to the dead; normally men prepared a man for burial. “They turned up their sleeves, tucked their shirts into their belts, washed him, and wrapped him in the winding sheet.” Abū Baki was washed by his widow and Jābir b. Zaid gave orders that his widow should wash his body; this rule is generlized in al-Mudawwana.

The present notes were suggested by the publication of the Glossary to the texts contained in the Khotanese MS. designated E by the late Professor E. Leumann.

The Glossary has been awaited eagerly. Professor Ernst Leumann's work, as one of the pioneers in the study of the unknown languages of Central Asia, has already been warmly recognized. And to his son, Professor Manu Leumann, we owe the edition of the Glossary, and of the two previous parts containing the text and translation. In all three parts we find the same exact work.

In an article by W. Eilers, entitled “Eine mittelpersische Wortform aus frühachämenidischer Zeit ?” (ZDMG., 90, 160 ff.), it is contended that already by the end of the sixth century B.C. the nominal inflexions of Old Persian had completely disappeared from the Persian spoken language, in contradistinction to the literary language of the Achsemenid inscriptions. The author's arguments are based entirely upon his own novel interpretation of two short passages contained in Neo-Babylonian private letters of the time of Darius I, which are to all intents and purposes identical the one with the other, and which may be provisionally transliterated:—

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.

The Zāyande Rūd, from Lenjān to the Gāv Khūnī, was regulated by an elaborate system, which is said to go back to Safavid times. This system remained in force until A.H. 1315 (shamsī, A.D. 1936), when it underwent alteration, owing to the fact that, on government orders, the cultivation of cotton was substituted in the lands watered by the Zāyande Rūd for the cultivation of rice.

The details of this regulation are found in an interesting document, popularly known as Shaikh Bahā‘ī’s ūmār, to be found in the Finance Ministry of Isfahan. The precise date of the origin of the ūmār is uncertain. The following words are written at the beginning of the document: “Written in the sealing office of the late Shah Tahmasp 923.”

As the publication of the Manichæan fragments in the possession of the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften will necessarily take some more years, it may be found useful at present to make the linguistic material contained in those texts available to students of Iranian languages. The following list of words which are not yet attested in the texts hitherto published, is offered as a contribution to this aim. Out of the materials made known up to now, a few words are included which have not yet been fully explained. I am greatly indebted to Geheimrat Lüders for kindly permitting me to make use of the fragments belonging to the Akademie of Berlin.

Rifā‘ahbey, for by this name is he generally known, was born at Ṭahṭā, in the province of Girgā, in 1801. His genealogy goes back to Muḥammad al-Bāḳir b. ‘Alī Zain al-‘Ābidīn b. al-Ḥasan b. Fāṭimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muḥammad. His ancestors had been well-to-do but when Rifā‘ah was born, his parents were in great pecuniary difficulties. They were apparently affected by the confiscations by Muḥammad ‘Alī of the iltzamāt during the early part of his reign. Rifā‘ah’s father was compelled to go from one place to another in order to seek hospitality. At one time the family stayed with relations at Mansẖa’at an-Nīdah, near the town of Girgā these peregrinations, the young Riā‘ah began to memorize the Ḳor’ān under the care of his father.,

Cairo is probably one of the noisiest towns in the world but it is amusing, if not interesting, to endeavour to sort out some ofthe sounds so familiar in Cairo's streets. The main thoroughfaresare crowded with hawkers of every description; as one sits in acafe, one is offered articles of the most extraordinary variety by them, hair-pins and oranges, daffodils and bananas, sand-paper and flywhisks, sausages and sadlery, the latest editions of French and Arabic novels, copies of works on Quranic Exegesis and the Traditions, motor car tyres and flea-powder.

Before considering the literature of Egypt of the eighteenth century, a glance at the state of the country would not be out of place. There was not such a great difference between Egypt under the Turks and under the Circassians. The Sultan sent a Turkish governor but the Amīrs, no longer the great men of earlier times, were still the rulers. The governor lived in perpetual terror of his own garrison, while the Amīrs, who had formed themselves into parties (the Ḳ¯simīs and the Fiḳārīs were the most famous), fought and intrigued with one another for power. At times the anarchy was unbearable, but street fighting seems to have been of such common occurrence that the tradesmen sometimes did not even bother to shut up their shops while it was going on. Occasionally a really strong Amir was able to prevail over the rest of his rivals for a few years and a few names of such strong men are worth mentioning, for it was under them that Egypt was able to regain some of its prosperity.

This little text on the correct way to write letters is to be found in Pahl. Texts (ed. Jamasp-Asana), pp. 132–140. In transliteration I have followed the Pahlavī spelling as far as the ambiguity of that alphabet will permit. Thus, for I write bāt, though I have adopted bavāt for the ideogram. The text consists of a series of formulae to be used in writing formal letters: §§ 2–17 contain a selection of suitable proems; §§ 18–24 deal with condolence letters; §§ 28–36 appear again to be proems; and §§ 37 to the end give a selection of suitable epilogues.

From the point of view of Europeans there is no book that deals satisfactorily with Urdū, metres, and as the metres are numerous, it is difficult for a student to recognize any except the three or four commonest. They have all been taken over unaltered from Persian, and Persian took them almost unaltered from Arabic. To Europeans the rules of Urdū prosody seem arbitrary, because metres must conform to certain rules for which there seems to be no adequate reason.

For example the commonest Urdū, metre is scanned as follows: maf‘ūlu fā‘ilātu mafā‘īlu fā‘ilun. It might just as well be scanned mustaf‘ilun mafā‘ilu mustaf‘ilun fa‘al or in other ways, but we should be arbitrarily told that there are no such metres and that in fact they would be impossible.

Bekanntlich unterscheidet sich die Tamil-Malayālam-Gruppe in ihrem Lautsystem dadurch von den anderen dravidischen Sprachen in wesentlicher Weise, dass sie im Anlaut nur stimmlose Verschlusslaute, in intervokalischer Stellung und nach tönenden Lauten dagegen nur die stimmhaften Varianten derselben kennt. Weil die Aussprache eines Verschlusslautes somit durch seineStellung im Worte bestimmt ist, kann die Schrift mit einem Zeichen für die stimmlose und stimmhafte Variante beide Lautwerte wiedergeben. Nun zeigt die Tamilschrift, die aus den ersten Jahrhunderten unserer Zeitrechnung stammen muss, dieses Prinzip seit der ältesten Zeit, offenbar wurde also das Lautsystem schon zur Zeit der Einführung der Schrift von dieser eigentümlichen Regel beherrscht.

Im Anschluss an diese Auffassung hat dann Subbaya, Ind. Ant., 1909, 217 u.s.w., zuerst den Versuch gemacht, den stimmhaften Anlaut, der in alien dravidischen Sprachen ausser der Tamil-Malayālam- Gruppe sehr häufig vorkommt, zu erklären. Einige Jahre vorherhatte dagegen Sten Konow, Ling. Survey, iv, 288, den entgegengesetzten Standpunkt verteidigt, dass namlich die eigentümliche Eegel, die im Tamil den Gebrauch von stimmlosen und stimmhaften Konsonanten beherrscht, sekundär und sogar ziemlich jungen Datums sei. Auch Bloch, BSL., XXV, 12, vertritt diese Ansicht.

The following documents were discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in his last Central Asian expedition, in 1930. Since he was not allowed by the local authorities to bring anything out of the country on that occasion, these texts are edited from photographs. The originals are presumably not likely to be seen again.

During a recent stay in Cairo, I found in the Taimūr¯ya library a manuscript copy of an interesting Ismaili work entitled Kitābu'1-Iḋāḥ wa'1-Bayān, by the Yemenite dā'i Ḥusain ibn 'Ali.

The manuscript is of 165 pages, 16 by 23 cms., in two hands—the first till p. 70, at 22 lines per page, the second pp. 71–165 at 19 lines per page. The first and last lines of each page are in red ink throughout. The copy was started by the Sharif 'Abdullah Abū Yūsuf, and completed on his death by 'Ali b. Shaikh Ibrāhīm Al-Haidarābādī. It is dated 22nd Dhu'l Hijja 1286 (= 26/3/1870), and was made by order of the chief Dā'i Al-Ḥasan b. Ismā'īl.

The vocabularies of the present notice are due to Dr. W. M. Strong. They were collected at Panakrusima (Earle Island) in the east-centralpart of the Calyados Chain, about 48 miles south-east of Panaieti(Deboyne Island) and at Panatinani (Joannet Island), about 18 milesto the east, close to North-West Tagula (Sud-Est Island).