In November of 1952 I received a note from a medical doctor who some two years earlier had returned to Britain from Ch'üanchou, in the province of Fukien. A Chinese acquaintance had given him photographs of carved stones, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian, collected by him in recent years, with the hope that someone in the West might publish them. At first glance I recognized fifteen undoubtedly Christian crosses, five with figures of angels on either side, and seven with considerable inscriptions. With the photographs came a copy of a Chinese monograph published by the collector, Wu Wen-liang, An Introduction to the Ancient Stone Carving of Ch'uan-chou. I had enlargements of the Christian set of photographs made, as published in plates II to XVII, 2 sent a set to Professor A. C. Moule, and sought his help. That help has been generously given, in translating part of Wu's monograph, in corresponding with other scholars who might decipher the inscriptions, and in assessing the significance of these new finds. It seems more suitable to recognize general indebtedness here than to refer to him by footnote at the end of every paragraph.

It has been a frequent experience in Khotanese texts to find that two words spelled identically are widely different in meaning. The many different words comprised, for example, in bara- were quoted in Asia Major, n.s. 2. 40. It has been the same with vara. Beside the vara, varata “there” and vara “to”, varālsto “towards”, it has been possible to trace two other words written in the same way.

In the chapter on Apabhraṃśa in Hemacandra's Prākrit Grammar (Siddhahema, iv, 330 if.) are found some instances of a curious phraseological turn to express the ablative of motion, which is unknown from OIA, viz.:—

iv, 355

jahāhontau āgado “from where he came”; tahāhontau āgado “from there he came”; kahāhontau āgado “from where did he come ?”;

iv, 379

mahu hontau gado, majjhu hontau gado “he went from me”;

iv, 372

tau hontau āgado, tujjha hontau āgado, tudhra hontau āgado “he came from you”;

iv, 380

amhahã hontau gado “he went from us”;

iv, 373

tumhahã hontau āgado “he came from you”.

The stone fragments here published were recovered from the ruins of Shabwa, in the Hadramaut, in 1938 by Major the Honourable R. A. B. Hamilton (now Lord Belhaven and Stenton) and presented to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1952. The finder has described his work at Shabwa in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, published in the Geographical Journal, and in his book The Kingdom of Melchior.

Though the Pahārī schools of Rājput painting are fairly well known since A. K. Coomaraswamy's monumental Rajput Painting (1916), the schools of Rājasthān, the principal Rājput area, have long remained a terra incognita and even to-day pose numerous unsolved problems.