The interest in ‘Omar Khayyám is perennial, not only among those who can only appreciate FitzGerald's masterly version, but also among those who can study the Persian poet at first hand: and within the last few years notable contributions have been made to the biography of 'Omar and more critical examination of the verses attributed to him. It is with this last subject that I wish to deal in the present article.

In April, 1927, the School received from Mrs. H. de Watteville a large collection, comprising over 400 volumes, of Japanese books, mostly of the nineteenth century. This gift was made in memory of her brother, Lieut.-Col. E. F. Calthrop, who had during his residence as Military Attaché at Tokyo formed this valuable collection.

The full title of this little work, which occupies 19 pages in 8vo, is as follows:—

Verdadeira e exacta Noticia dos progressos de Thamas Kouli Khan Scach da Persia no Imperio do Gram Mogô, Escrita na lingua Persiana em Delhy em 21 de Abril de 1739, e mandada a Roma por Mons. Voulton.

Acrecentada com outras chegadas por varias partes, com hum Mapa do Thesouro do Gram Mogôr levado a Hispahan pelo mesmo Schach. Dadas a luz na lingua Portugueza.

When, in the beginning of last May, I visited Professor Sir E. Denison Ross, of Oriental Studies, he showed me a book entitled Ch'ao hsien Kuan i yu. It was of great interest to me, as I had not seen it before, and T asked permission to examine it. He willingly complied with my request, but at the same time asked me to write some explanatory notes on the book. Being only on a visit to the country, I am unable to refer to Corean books of reference, and for the explanations, etc., which follow, can only trust to my memory.

In the great mass of material already collected for the study of African folk-lore—to which fresh additions are daily being made— we do not find any considerable number of what may be called heroic legends. Yet some there are, as in the traditions of Kintu and other early kings of Uganda, in the tale of Mbega, current in Usambara, and probably many others, as yet unrecorded.

In my Foreword to the fifth volume of The Ocean of Story (Mr. Penzer's reprint of Tawney's translation), I had occasion to discuss the well-known Burzoë Legend, which forms part of the preliminary matter in Ibn Muqaffa's Kalila wa Dimna. This legend relates how Burzoë, a physician at the court of Anushirwan the Just, was sent to India to discover a wonderful book of wisdom, how after infinite pains he found it, and having translated it, brought back a Pahlavi version to the Persian monarch. The story is too well known to need repetition, nor am I here concerned with the question of its origin.

Besides the well-known Vālmīki-rāmâyaṇa, three other Sanskrit poems entitled “Rāmâyaṇa” are current in northern India, and are highly esteemed. They are (1) the Yōga-vāsiṣṭha-mahārāmâyaṇa, (2) the Adhyātma-rāmâyaṇa, and (3) the Adbhuta-rāmâyaṇa. Of these the first and the last claim to have been composed by no less a person than Vālmīki himself; but the Adhyātma-rāmâyaṇa forms a section of the Brahmâṇḍa-purāṇa, and does not suggest any pretension to his authorship.

Of all the literary languages of Asia, the one to which in this country least attention has been paid is perhaps the language of the Mongols. No grammar or dictionary of any importance has ever been compiled in English; the study of the Mongolian language has in fact been almost monopolized by Russian and Scandinavian scholars, although some valuable contributions to the same cause have been made also by French, German, and Japanese scholars, published, however, in their own languages.

The chinese have held to the architectural standards of the past no less tenaciously than to other traditions of their ancient civilization. Buildings standing at the present day testify to this fact, and innumerable written records indicate a continuity of architectural practice lasting more than 2,000 years. The probability is that foreign importation has affected Chinese architecture least of all the arts.

The purpose of these notes is to review the Vedic and Avestic data relating to Yama and the Gandharva and to consider the possibility of connecting them with the Glaucus-saga. Without neglecting the works of predecessors in this field, I have re-examined to the best of my ability the Vedic and Avestic material, but have abstained from drawing to any great extent upon the later literatures.

Le grand homme d'état des commencements de la dynastie mongole fut un personnage énigmatique auquel les Chinois donnent le nom de Yaloutchhou Thsaī; les chroniques du Céleste Empire racontent qu'il était de la race des Tatars Khitan, et qu'il appartenait à la famille impériale des Liao, laquelle avait été dépossédée par les Tatars Kin, les Altan Khagan, auxquels Tchinkkiz fit une guerre sans merci pour s'emparer de leurs possessions du Nord de la Chine.

We know that in the Pali and Jain scriptures we find, as we do not find in other early Indian scriptures, the triplet: action of mind, action of word, action of body. We know that the triplet is a feature in the ancient Persian thought which we associate with the work of Zarathustra. And we may or we may not have noted as significant, how three great founders of creeds which were primarily concerned with the importance of man's will and man's actions or conduct, should be credited with the wording of this triplet, while the intermediate development in India of the creeds of the rite and the ritual, the piiest and the sacrifice, leftthe triplet unstressed. When this threefold wording of thought, word, and deed as modes of action (kamma) came into use in Buddhist teaching we do not know. It does not appear everywhere in the Pali scriptures. In many books it scarcely appears at all. It attains its chief prominence in the fourth, or Anguttara Nikāya. But wherever it does occur, it occurs as an unquestioned and accepted way of wording.

While busying himself with reviewing, for this Bulletin, vols. iii–v of Professor von Le Coq' great work Die Buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien the present writer had an opportunity of making a somewhat closer acquaintance also with Professor Grünwedel's very important book Altbuddhistische Kultstätten in Chinesisch-Turkistan (1912). Various Passages of this work, and most specially pp. 65–75, contain interesting descriptions and pictures of Jātakas (or Avadānas) found in the different caves in Eastern Turkestān Visited by Herren Grünwedel and von Le Coq.

The jungle tribes (or, as the Malays style them, Orang Utan) of the Malay Peninsula are not altogether an unknown quantity from the point of view of anthropology and linguistics. A number of scholars and travellers have devoted themselves to the study of them, the most important being Hrolf Vaughan Stevens, R. Martin, W. W. Skeat, the leader of the Cambridge expedition, Annandale, and Robinson.

The events following the death of Shīr Shāh in A.H. 952 (A.D. 1545), which led to the succession of his younger son, Jalāl Khān, and the ousting of his elder son, 'Ādil Khān, are related, with more or less of consistency though with a good deal of confusion, by the principal historians of the period.

In a previous number of the Bulletin, I submitted a translation of a little known work describing the history of the Mission of the Society of Jesus in Persia. I now propose to supplement this history by giving a short abstract, and translation of a part, of an interesting work which appeared in 1681, bearing on the earlier and wider activities of the Society in the East, including Persia.

There forms of the Marāthi passive are found in the Jñāneśvarī or Jñānadevī, a commentary on the Bhagavadagīāa in. the ovī metre, written by the poet Jñāneśvara or Jñanadeva in the year A.D. 1290. These may be termed the “ ij ”, “ p ”, and “ pij ” forms. The “ ij ” form is the one most frequently employed. It occurs on almost every page and frequently more than once on the same page. Its derivation has been discussed by Beames, Bloch, Grierson, and others. It is employed with any verb, whether used transitively or intransitively. The subject of the sentence, if expressed, is put into the instrumental case. The object is generally in the nominative (subjective), but the dative also occurs, especially where there are two objects. The use of the dative is especially noticeable when the construction with the postposition “ with reference to” is employed. eventually became the modern “ lā, ” termination of the dative. In this connexion the use of the dative in the Karmaṇi construction may be noticed. The Aorist (old Present) is the tense most frequently employed and is often used as an Imperative, to which the precative termination “ o ” is added, e.g. audhārijo “ let it be heard by you ” (cf. the je, jo forms of the GujarātI honorific Imperative). Several examples of the future (jel, jail, jatīl) and past tenses (jele, jelẽ) occur. This form of the passive does not occur in the modern language, except in the case of dīje “let it be given” and kīje “ let it be done” in formal documents, and of mhaṇaje “let it be said”, “that is to say”, “then”, and pāhije “it is necessary”, “must”. In the Jñāneśvarī pāhije generally means “it is seen”, “let it be seen” (e.g. in xi, 594), but the extended use in the sense of “it is necessary” occurs very occasionally (e.g. x, 261).

Burushaski, the language of Hunza and Nagir, has not up to the present received any undue measure of attention.

The list of authorities in the Linguistic Survey of India is a short one containing only nine items. Of these only three are of serious importance:—

Dr. G. W. Leitner, The Languages and Races of Dardistan, Lahore, 1877.

Col. J. Biddulph, JRAS., vol. xvi, pt. i (1884), “The Boorishki Language,” being a corrected reprint of the Grammar and Vocabulary of the language, published in his Tribes of the Hindu Rush, Calcutta, 1880.

Dr. G. W. Leitner. The Hunza and Nagyr Handbook, pt. i, Calcutta, 1889.

No authentic portrait of Abu'l Fazl, the accomplished minister and panegyrist of the emperor Akbar, has yet been published; yet he was one of the most prominent figures at the court of one of the greatest sovereigns known to history, and the long portrait gallery of the dignitaries of the Mughal Empire in the period of its zenith is incomplete without him.

During the Third Session of the Oriental Conference held in Madras (December, 1924) I had the opportunity of examining cursorily some newly acquired manuscripts on Sanskrit Alamkāraśāstra in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library. I propose in this paper to note briefly certain pieces of information which I have been able to gather from them, as it was too late to incorporate them in the second volume of my Sanskrit Poetics (to which I refer below as SP.).