One of the striking differences between the phonetic systems of Indo-Aryan and its parent Indo-European is the existence in the former of the cerebral series of sounds as well as the dental. These appear among the stops, the nasals, the sibilants, and later among the liquids also. Thus opposed to Indo-European t th d dh, n, s z, l r we find in the various Indo-Aryan languages the two series—

t th d dh, n, s *z, l r

ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh, ṇ, ṣ *ẓ, ḷ ṛ ṛh.

Of these, *z *ẓ belong to the prehistoric and ṛ ṛh to the modern period.

All those acquainted with Chinese art and literature are familiar with two fabulous birds, known in Chinese as Fêng-huang and Luan and in Japanese as Ho-ow and Luan respectively. Not very appropriately the name Phœnix has been given to the former in Western nomenclature.

In the month of Rajab, a.h. 987 (September, 1579), the ‘Ulamā of the Mual Empire issued a joint fatwa (maḥẓar), by which, according to Vincent Smith, “Akbar was solemnly recognized as being superior in his capacity of Imām-i-‘Ādil to any other interpreter of Muslim law, and practically was invested with the attributes of infallibility.” He therefore calls it the “Infallibility Decree”, and he interprets it as the turning-point of Akbar's religious life. He regards it as the “momentous innovation which should extend the autocracy of Akbar from the temporal to the spiritual side, and make him Pope as well as King”. By this step he rendered impossible all opposition to any future developments of his religious policy. This limited interpretation of the maḥẓar, however, in the light of the Dīn Ilāhī, seems to obscure the real policy of Akbar.

No genuine collection of Rūdakī's poems is known to exist to-day, and in the following article I have attempted to indicate how much of the poetry of Rūdakī has been preserved and how much has been wrongly attributed to him in the Persian Anthologies. Although one of the founders of modern Persian poetry, and the author of a poetic version of Kalīla wa Dimna, Rūdakī's works seem unaccountably to have disappeared at an early date. For although Asadī the Younger in his Lughat-i-Furs quotes more lines from Rūdakī than from any other poet, and although the Persian Farhangs abound in citations of single lines, the anthologists of the sixteenth century already complain that Rūdakī's poems are hard to come by.