In a very excellent book on the Shans at Home, recently published by a member of this Society, Mrs. Leslie Milne, it is stated that “the chief source of early Shan Buddhism was probably the Talaings and Cambodians”. This is the opinion of the Rev. Wilbur Willis Cochrane, who at the same time states that it is his conviction that the Tai got their alphabet and early literature probably from the same sources. Mr. Cochrane is an American missionary, who has spent something like twenty years among the Tai and is an accomplished Tai scholar. There is a quite considerable Tai literature, mostly of a religious kind, but with a very creditable amount of folk-tales. Unfortunately there is nothing that throws any light on the early history of their country. Previous to our occupation of the Shan States, as a consequence of the annexation of Upper Burma, the whole of the States had been involved in almost incessant civil war, and for a century before that the wars between China and Burma and Burma and Siam had led to the marching and counter-marching of armies through the hills. The troops were Buddhists, no doubt, but they had very little regard for sacred things, and the result is that most of what writings there may have been on the history of the country perished with the monasteries.

The Synonymy of what is well known as the Pāñcarātra is thus given in the Pādma-tantra (one of the 108 Tantras or Samhltās):—

Sūris suhrid bhāgavatas satvatah panca-kala-vit

Few people ever give a thought to the origin of the alphabet they use beyond the Latin or perhaps Greek characters, and fewer still are aware that many letters in daily use now have scarcely altered their shapes in the last 3,000 years. This would mean that the inventors have given finality to some letters and all but finality to others. Nothing could be more satisfactory than this, yet the question of the origin of alphabetic writing remains a profound mystery. Many famous scholars have attempted to solve this mystery, have displayed amazing ingenuity and profound learning, yet the result thus far has only been divergent opinions and theories which flatly contradict one another.

The chief cause of the undoubted monotony of the Ṛgveda is, of course, its essentially sacerdotal character. In the case of the vast majority of the hymns there can be, and has been, no doubt as to their purpose: they are praises of the gods who are worshipped in the ritual, and the native commentator, whose work, with all its defects, has done much to render the study of the Ṛgveda fruitful, provides us with references to the passages in the Sūtra where the ritual use of the verses is laid down. It is true that we cannot believe that the later ritual really gives us an accurate idea of the employment of the hymns which make up the Saṃhitā: without postulating any very violent change of practice, we can yet readily feel that the ritual has deviated from the form in which it must have appeared when the Saṃhitā was brought into being, but at any rate it is certain that there was a ritual, and that the hymns normally found a natural place therein. All the more interest attaches, therefore, to the comparatively small number of hymns for which Sāyaṇa gives no technical ritual employment, and which have generally a dialogue form, or may legitimately be deemed to have that form. The Bṛhaddevatdā shows that the technical term for such hymns was Saṃvāda, but there seems no doubt that they could also be included in the more general term Itihāsa and perhaps Ākhyāna.

It is the aim of the following paper to present to the readers of this Journal the problem of the origin of Chinese writing as it appears at the opening of the historical period in the ninth century b.c., and to give some account of the new light thrown upon the subject by recent discoveries in North China. It is also my hope to show that there are reasons for endeavouring to stir an interest in this question of origin, and some grounds for defining, as clearly as present conditions allow, the main features of what is already known of the problem, and indicating the lines along which fruitful investigation must advance. Especially valuable it should be to investigators of other primitive systems of writing to have a working knowledge of the rise and progressive changes of a script, probably of very ancient origin, certainly claiming a continuous history of 3,600 years, still in vigorous activity, betraying no signs of impending decay. The facts of such a life-history, properly ascertained and appreciated, might well contribute some illuminating sidelights or useful suggestions on analogous inquirics.

Though large numbers of the temple-records of Tel-loh have been published, and notwithstanding that they are mainly texts of but little importance, linguistic and minor historical details, to say nothing of the questions involved in Babylonian manners, customs, and religious beliefs, require that as many of these seemingly worthless records of the people who used the wedge-formed characters of the Sumerians should be published as is possible. On this account I need not crave the indulgence of the reader for issuing here these minor texts from the little Southern Babylonian state of Lagas. Their contents will be their own justification for claiming the attention of the student, as they have claimed mine.

Un folio (papier), slanting brāhmī, 367 X 80 mm. Même format, même écriture que les autres fragments Ch. vii, 001. Numéro d'ordre, au verso, peu lisible.

It is generally supposed that the lingual ḷa is a very rare letter in the inscriptions north of the Narmadā before the time of the Guptas. From the Sānchi inscriptions BÜuhler quotes one instance only: Vāḷīvahanikāyā in B; 344 (EI., ii, 378, No. 199): the ḷī is reproduced in Bühler'sIndische Palaeographie, table ii, 41, xviii: the form of the letter is practically the same as that appearing in the Allahabad Praśasti. The second instance is furnished by the word Āḷikāyāṁ in the inscription B, 43 (JBBRAS., xx, 269 f.), the find-place of which is unknown, but which must come from Northern India: there is no reproduction of this inscription. A third la is found in, kālavāḷasa in the archaic Mathurā inscription B, 94 (EI., i, 396, No. 33). According to the reproduction of this inscription in the Ep. Ind. there seems to be a great difference between the Sānchi and the Mathurā signs. But this is actually not the case. Two beautiful impressions before me clearly show that the sign in the plate has been “corrected”. In reality the long line slanting upwards, which in the reproduction forms the tail of the ḷa, is not connected with it, but is the i-stroke of the ti of the mutilated word prati[ṣṭhāpito] in the next line. The whole difference of the two signs thus consists in the greater cursiveness of the Sānchi sign.

In an article entitled “Vyuthena 256”, published in the Journal Asiatique, 1911, part 1, pp. 119–26, M. Sylvain Lévi has reopened the subject of that record of Aśōka which we have, in various recensions, at Sahasrām, Rūpnāth, and Bairāt in Northern India, and at the Brahmagiri hill, Siddāpura, and the Jaṭṭiṅga-Rāmēśvara hill in Mysore. He has taken us another step towards the right understanding of the record, by showing that the words misā and amisā, which stand in one of the opening clauses, cannot mean mṛishā, ‘in vain, wrongly’, and amṛishā, ‘not in vain, not wrongly’, and do not represent the ablatives of misha, ‘false appearance, fraud, deceit’, and its converse amisha, but stand for missā and amissā, Pāli forms of the Sanskṛit nominatives plural miśrāḥ, ‘mixed’, and amiśrāḥ, ‘not mixed’. But we cannot agree with him in taking the word dēva in the same clause as denoting ‘kings’: in a record of Aśōka dēva can only mean ‘a god’. Nor can we agree with him in his interpretation of the general purport of the record.