According to the Prakrit Grammarians of the Western school, the Śaurasēnī-Mahārāṣtrī equivalent of Skr. ṣṭh is ṭṭh (Pischel, § 303), but the Māgadhī equivalent is sṭ (or, according to Namisādhu, śṭ) (Hc. iv, 290 ; Pischel, § 303). Nevertheless, the Māgadhī equivalent of tiṣṭhati is ciṣṭhadi (Hc. iv, 298), as compared with the Śaurasēnī-Mahārāṣṭṛi ciṭṭha (d) i. I shall deal later on with the initial c. So much for the Western school.

More than thirty years ago Professor Sylvain Lévi, in his excellent book Le Théatre Indien (1890), p. 361, suggested that the Śakāra, the ridiculous, brawling scoundrel of a king's brother-in-law (śyāla) in the Hindu drama, is in reality a Śaka, a type of the Scythian princes ruling during nearly four centuries in Western India, as seen from the Indian point of view. This very judicious suggestion was repeated by Professor Lévi some ten years later in a very interesting article in the Journal Asiatique, ix, 19 (1902), p. 123, and might be looked upon as being fairly well established though its author has not given any detailed proofs to support his hypothesis. No reasons whatsoever have been adduced by Professor Konow in his book Das indische Drama, p. 15, for rejecting this theory, and so we need scarcely regard his rejection more seriously than several other less well-founded assertions in his work.

The following pages bring together passages from Chinese books, some of which have been translated before in a different context, illustrating them by reproductions of woodcuts which are unfamiliar and of great interest.

Nalōdaya, the short alliterative literary curio of four chapters, which is “ confessedly a difficult work as much so as Persius is in Latin and Pindar in Greek ”, and which is a superb example of the ingenuity displayed “ in the manipulation of varied forms of alliteration and elaborate tricks of style ”, was for a long time considered to be the work of that prince of Sanskrit poets, Kālidāsa, not because that there were any colophonian clues in the poem itself that could countenance such an attribution, but that the uncritical pandits of the orthodox set had opined that Kālidāsa alone could have been capable of the difficult feats of verbal gymnastics exhibited in every line of the kāvya, and had, as a salve to the literary conscience that perceived the incompatibility of such an artificial poem as the Nalōdaya emanating from the same hand as wrote the Raghuvaṃśa and the Śākuntala, invented the story that the poet was goaded on to its composition by the mischievous scepticism expressed by his friends as to his alliterative capacity. But since the discovery by Professor Peterson of a manuscript of the Nalōdaya whose commentator, Rāmarṣi (c. A.D. 1600), had attributed the work to one Ravidēva, scholars have been entertaining the view that this kāvya was the production of a certain Ravidēva, about whom no other biographical details were, however, available. I shall here examine the question of the real authorship of the poem in the light of the information furnished by another commentary on the same work, which is available in manuscript in the Palace Library of H.H. the Maharaja of Travancore.

Ḫarrian is one of “ the eight languages of Boghazköi ”, that spoken in the eastern part of the Hittite Empire. The principal facts concerning Ḫarrian may be found in two articles by Dr. Forrer in Mitteilungen d. deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 61, Dec, 1921, and in Zeitschr. d. deutschen Morgenländ.-Gesellschaft, 76, 1922, 171 ff. The articles will be referred to as MDOG. and ZDMG.