The very hard, grey basalt stone on which this inscription is cut was discovered in 1961 by Mr. Shalom Kotzer (of the kibbutz Shā'ar ha-Golān) in shallow water off the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, near the modern amphitheatre ofTsēmaḥ (Samakh). In 1962 it was moved from the water to the kibbutz by Mr. Kotzer and his son Moshe. A preliminary note on the inscription in Hebrew by the present writer appeared in 'Al ha-Mishmār of 11 January 1963. The inscription consists of eight readable lines insimple Kūfī script, incised on afairly smooth surface. The back of the stone is not worked.

Between October 1963 and August 1964 the writer was engaged in linguistic field-work in the Cairns Rain Forest of North Queensland, while employed as Research Officer by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Intensive studies were made of the Dyirbal, Giramay, and Mamu languages, and linguistic descriptions of these languages are at present being prepared for publication. In 1942 Tindale had mentioned a language that he called ‘Barbaram’, spoken on top of the Dividing Range about 70 miles inland from Cairns. Entirely on the basis of the 11 words Tindale quoted, it seems, Mbabaram acquired a reputation of mystery, and has been singled out as one of the two Australian languages which seem least able to be fitted into the linguistic pattern of the continent. Recent work by Hale on 30 Cape York languages seemed to emphasize the possible uniqueness of Mbabaram.

The following schedule of an inheritance was discovered by me in 1962 when, by courtesy of the Kano Native Authority, I was carrying out a survey of manuscripts contained in the Library of the Shahuci Judicial School, Kano. In the course of my searches I unearthed from the back of a cupboard a bundle of miscellaneous papers. On examination these proved to consist largely of single folios of Arabic, Fula, and Hausa MSS displaced from their contexts. Scattered among them, however, were a number of sheets which appeared to be taxation returns; lists of booty; household accounts of the palace; fragments of prayers, wirds, Qur'anic charms and the like. Among them was this incomplete schedule of an estate.

In a recent paper on tone-marking systems employed during the last hundred years in African language studies, Professor Tucker has referred incidentally to parallel developments in Chinese language studies. The present note, offered as a footnote to Professor Tucker's paper, documents recognition, early in the nineteenth century, that Chinese and a number of African languages have in common the feature of semantic tone.