This article is an attempt to establish critically the synchronisms which appear to exist between the mediaeval portion of the Ceylon chronicle Mahāvaṁsa and the results of South Indian epigraphical research. The definite dates to which a number of Chōḷa and Pāṇḍya kings can now be assigned are due to the laborious and difficult calculations of my late friend Kielhorn, while several of the synchronisms were discovered by another old friend and fellow-worker, Rai Bahadur V. Venkayya, the melancholy news of whose sudden death at Madras on November 21, 1912, reached me while I was collecting materials for this article from his learned Reports.

Since everyone interested in Indian studies has probably read Mr. Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, and has learned from Mr. Yeats's Introduction to that work that its author is an expert in many other matters than poetry, it may be interesting to readers of our Journal to know that Mr. Tagore has written a very suggestive and original study under the title of Śabdatattwa of the grammar and phonetics of his native language. It would take too much space to give an account of the whole book, which, after all, contains many technicalities which are only useful to professed students of Bengali. But I may be allowed to give a brief description of the chapter which criticizes Mr. Beames, well-known Bengali Grammar. This chapter relates almost entirely to questions of pronunciation, and these are notoriously difficult to discuss in writing. The differences between Mr. Beanies and his critic are sometimes, I think, partly due to this difficulty.

The objects illustrated in the accompanying Plates are published with the aim of bringing to the knowledge of Orientalists and others a type of Chinese relic believed to be of unique design, and presenting an interest of more than one kind. Despite their excellent preservation, they must, for reasons given below, date back at least to the later half of the third century B.C., but how much earlier than that remains at present uncertain.

It is mainly with the two principal sets nē, nō of Gujarātī and rai, rō of Mārwāṛī, and with their older forms, that I propose to deal in these pages. Since the right clue to the explanation of them—with the exception of rō, which presents no difficulty—has been missed by scholars as yet, I trust that the present investigation into their origin will be of use even to such as might hesitate to accept all my views unreservedly.

[The fragments transliterated below by Professor de la Vallée Poussin, together with a number of smaller morsels, formed part of a large birch-bark pothī, of which each page contained ten or eleven lines and measured about 39 × 7 cm., and were found at Khadalik. The characters are of the upright Gupta type.]

Such is the beginning of the somewhat remarkable inscription which came to the knowledge of French antiquarians last year, and which has just been edited by M. F. Thureau-Dangin with a very complete critical apparatus. It is inscribed on a tablet of baked clay 37·5 cm. high by 24·5 cm. wide. The text is in two columns on each side, for the most part closely written, but the ends of the columns on the obverse and the beginnings of those on the reverse are unfortunately rendered incomplete by fractures. Including the widely spaced colophon, however, the document contains 430 lines of writing, so that the amount of new material is considerable. Between the columns are the usual little holes which are supposed to be for the escape of steam whilst baking, but which were probably for the insertion of pegs to enable the heavy clay document to be laid down on its side without damaging the sharpness of the writing.

The Jews have never practically lost sight of the Samaritans, unlike the Christians, who for at least a thousand years had entirely forgotten their existence, as no writer or pilgrim to the Holy Land speaks of them with the solitary exception of Mandeville. It was therefore a great surprise to the Western world when at the beginning of the seventeenth century the darkness began to be lifted, and through Scaliger, Huntingdon, and Della Valle for the first time authentic news about the Samaritans, their language, and their Bible began to reach Europe.

The date of Kaniṣka is not a subject which I should have expected to be discussing in public. It is one of those long-standing problems in regard to which one at an early stage conceives an opinion or receives a bias, but which, either for lack of decisive evidence, or because the mind, after considering many conflicting views, is incapable of an act of faith, one leaves in the sphere of things unsettled. I myself should have been well content that the finishing stroke should be dealt by the spade, which even now is probing the ruins of Taxilā. Moreover, at the time when Mr. Kennedy first propounded to me his conclusions, I was fresh from the perusal of Professor Oldenberg's paper, which seemed to have said the last word in the discussion. If we have now invited a debate, and one at closer range than a trimestrial journal allows, the responsibility rests with Mr. Kennedy's extensive articles, their confident tone, and the interest which they have evoked.