In the autumn of 1977, sometime after my paper on salt production in Otoγ had been published, while searching for something of an entirely different nature, unexpectedly I discovered tucked away in a book from the library formerly belonging to the late Antoine Mostaert, another letter dealing with the same question of salt. It consists of one sheet of Chinese paper measuring 443 X 248 mm., with 25 lines of text: the copy of a letter of one of the ministers of the Banner of Otoγ addressed to another Banner functionary; the very last line evidently is not part of the letter but is a note whereby the addressee forwards this copy to somebody who remains unidentified, perhaps the resident priest of Boro-Balyasun; the church indeed had been involved in the salt negotiations and is also mentioned in the letter.

Among the philosophical schools of ancient China, the Nung-chia ‘School of the Tillers’ is the one of which we know least. The surviving information has been assembled by Feng Yu-lan , who identifies it as the one school which reflects the aspirations of the peasants. He finds only one recognizable spokesman, Hsü Hsing, the teacher of ‘the words of Shen-nung’ who came with his followers to settle in the small state of T‘eng , probably about 315 B.C. A disciple named Ch‘en Hsiang visited Mencius, and we have a report of the conversation from the Confucian point of view. Ch‘en Hsiang says of the Duke of T‘eng:

‘A worthy ruler feeds himself by ploughing side by side with the people, and rules while cooking his own meals. Now T‘eng on the contrary possesses granaries and treasuries, so the ruler is supporting himself by oppressing the people’.

The sculptured frieze that forms the subject of this paper is carved on the main shrine of the Śiva temple at Tārācuram, 5 km. south of Kumpakonam, a provincial town in Thanjavur District, Tamilnadu. Narrative friezes of the great Indian epics are a quite usual feature of Hindu architectural ornament both in India and beyond. It is also the case that individual Tamil Śaiva saints, to whom the collective name in Tamil, Nāyaṉmār, sing. nāyaṉār, is applied, appear commonly in iconography in temples of the Tamil-speaking area. But the frieze at Tārācuram is exceptional in being a portrayal of the complete set of the 63 Nāyaṉmār as they figure in that closely-related group of Tamil medieval texts of which the most important is Cekkiḻār's Pěriya purāṇam. Indeed, as will be shown, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Tārācuram frieze is virtually a set of illustrations to that work, and that the one would tend to confirm the date assumed for the other. Moreover, the various anomalies in Pěriya purānam, such as the total omission of Māṇikkavācakar and the reversing of the logical order of events in the case of Nāyaṉār 51 (N51), Kaḻaṟciṅka nāyaṉār and N54, Pukaḻttuṇai nāyaṉār, are precisely mirrored in the Tārācuram frieze.

The oldest texts—Rgveda and Avesta—of the Indie (Indo-aryan) and Iranian languages, which together form the Aryan family, agree in much of their vocabulary, as well as in much of their grammar and syntax.

Die besondere Keilschrift, die in achämenidischer Zeit zur Wiedergabe altpersischer Texte verwendet wurde, ist seit mehr als einem Jahrhundert immer wieder der Gegenstand von Untersuchungen gewesen. Es ist unmöglich, in dem eingeschränkten Rahmen dieses Festschriftbeitrages die einzelnen Auffassungen vorzuführen und kritisch gegeneinander abzuwägen; als Lecoq 1974 das Gesamtproblem darzustellen unternahm, entstand ein Aufsatz von der Stärke eines Buches. Ich sehe keinen anderen Weg, als aus der Fülle der Literatur über dieses Thema in scheinbar apodiktischer Weise jene Argumente für eine Schrift-Konstruktion in achämenidischer Zeit vorzuführen, die mich überzeugt haben und auf denen ich weiterbauen möchte (u. 2.1–2.3), sowie das einzige mir wesentliche Argument gegen eine Erfindung dieser Keilschrift (u. 3) zu erläutern, um dessen Entkräftung ich mich in diesem Aufsatz bemühen werde.

3.0. The nominal system

The description of the nominal system will be divided into three sections, the first, two dealing with nouns and pronouns, and the last with categories of items which are dependent upon nouns.

The existence of M Sogd. prqyš- ‘to imprison’, past stem prkšṯ-, and the meaning of the associated B Sogd. noun prk'š ‘imprisonment’ were first established by Henning in 1936. Later he recognized also the equivalent Parth. verb prg'c- ‘to incarcerate’. For the alternation between š and č he compared NP āγōš: Parth. 'gwc (‘side’) and MP āgustan <*ākuštan: Sogd. ākōč-/ākuγd- (‘to suspend’), remarking that ‘the discrepancy is found only in syllables that begin with k- and is therefore probably due to assimilation or dissimilation’.

Among manuscripts and documents collected for the Vrindaban Research Institute (VBI) from the Rādhādāmodara Temple in Vrindaban (Uttar Pradesh) are two (referred to below as documents A and B) which contain the text of testamentary depositions in the name of Jiva Gosvāmī. He is known to have founded the Rādhādāmodara Temple and to have been alive at the dates given in the text. It was Jīva who, consolidating the work of his uncles Sanātana and Rūpa, definitively established Vrindaban as the headquarters of the Caitanyapanthī Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sect. The testament, which envisages both posthumous implementation and possible revocation, contains Jlva's provisions for succession to the custody of the temple, idols, and library. The principal parties involved are known from other documents in the collection, and most names recur in Bhaktamāl and other related literary sources. Its over-riding importance lies, however, in the fact that no written Will has hitherto come to light in India, except those that are clearly influenced by European practice.

Since the publication of my review of To acquire wisdom by Julia Ching in BSOAS, XL, 2, 1977, 419–20, my attention has been drawn to the fact that the unusual number of printing errors cannot be laid at the door of the author but are, in fact, exclusively the fault of the printers. This has been acknowledged in writing by the publishers.

It seems appropriate, as a contribution to a volume in honour of a scholar who in a long series of brilliant etymological studies has solved many problems in Indo-Aryan philology, to offer a paper suggesting new etymologies for two Pali compound words which seem to be incorrectly denned in the Pali Text Society's Pali-English dictionary.

From the time of Vararuci on, most scholars, with the exception of some Gujarat Jain writers, have tended to view the Prakrit dialects in terms of Sanskrit and the divergencies from regular Sanskrit derivation have dominated discussions. T. Burrow's studies on the language of the Kharoshti documents from Chinese Turkestan (1931) brought a new perspective to Middle Indo-Aryan, and showed how much Prakrit was of intrinsic interest in its grammatical structure. One of the most striking characteristics of Prakrit is an internal and not a Sanskrit-dominated feature, namely the bewildering profusion of declensional endings and the apparently haphazard manner in which they can be used. Thus in the case of the nominative-accusative plural of the common neuter nouns in -a the grammars state that-ā, -āïm, -āï and -āni are all used in Prakrit (Pischel 1900: 255). It is well known that some of these endings are dialectal variants as will be discussed below, but this does not account for the entire situation. Such a profusion of alternants, and free variation of the kind postulated by Prakrit grammars would be unthinkable in any natural language. It would seem obvious that syntactic and stylistic variation must be involved. An attempt has been made in a recent paper (Schwarzschild (1977)) to show this in connexion with the locative endings and a similar situation is discussed here in relation to the neuter plural endings.

As is generally known, the correspondence Tibetan stes-dbaṅ-gis—Sanskrit daivāt or daivena was proposed by Johannes Nobel and translated by him as ‘durch Schicksalsfügung’ (by dispensation of fate). He did so in his edition of the Tibetan version Udrāyana, offering the correspondence as a conjecture for naivam. The equation has been taken over by Professor Lokesh Chandra into his Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary, though failing to refer to it there as a conjecture. While I do not wish to contest in any way Nobel's conjecture, I thought it useful to adduce certain other correspondences, most of which were found when trying—unsuccessfully so far—to corroborate the conjectuŕe by quotations from actual texts.