The reader of the Tso-chuan cannot but be impressed by the number of suicides it records. Two instances at least are given of suicide because of the loss of wealth, both by men who had no claim to be considered virtuous—Fu-ch'ai, King of Wu (xn, xxii, 2), and King Ling of Oh'u (x, xiii, 2). I Chiang, marchioness of Wei, preferred death to the disgrace of being superseded in her husband's house (II, xvi, 5). Tsang Chien died on a point of honour. Taken prisoner to Ch'i, the marquis of which State sent a eunuch to condole with him and promise protection, he bowed in acknowledgement, but said: “I thank your master's condescension; the favour, however, is not complete, for why has he sent a castrated servant on a visit of courtesy to an officer ?” Then he drove a stake into his wound and died (IX, xvii, 4). When Wu made its great invasion of Ch'u, the plan of defence drawn up by Marshal Hsü was wrecked through the self-seeking of the Chancellor, and all the marshal's efforts could not retrieve the disaster. After repeated battles he fell wounded, but not mortally. “In each of these three battles,” he said, “I have been wounded, and now I am of no more use. Which of you officers will carry off my head ?” One of low rank at length offered his service, and the marshal, referring to the courage which would face the obloquy of having killed his superior, said: “It is my fault that I did not recognize your worth earlier” (XI, iv, 15).

The present text is a duplicate of Ki. 1904–10–9, 87 (for a copy of which see AJSL., vol. xxxv, p. 138, and for transcription and translation Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, vol. vi, p. 32), as indeed has been already noted by Güterbock (ZA., xlii, p. 9). But the fragment previously published was so small as to be scarcely intelligible, and the present fragment (K. 5119) throws a great deal more light upon the real nature of this text. It is probably, as will be shown, a text concerning Etana, thirteenth king of the first dynasty of Kish and subject of the famous myth in which he ascends to heaven on the back of an eagle in search of the plant of birth; but it is a type of text not hitherto associated with that hero.

Two years ago an attempt was made in these pages to give a general survey of archæological events since 1899 at An-yang, in the north of Ho-nan province. Though excavation was still in progress, and investigation of results far from ended, the great interest taken by Western students called for an interim statement. This was specially needed because most of the literature of the subject is written in Chinese. Besides the clandestine activities of treasureseekers and the earlier, less organized digging by the peasants, scientific exploration had been carried out since 1928 by the National Research Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, which had published three parts of Preliminary Reports of Excavations at Anyang under the editorship of Dr. Li Chi . The main purpose of the present article is to take account of part iv, which appeared in 1933 after my former article was written, and includes the results of excavation during 1931 and 1932.

Venkayya and I are of opinion that the Koḍumbāḷūr inscription of Bhūti Vikramakēsari must be dated in the tenth century a.d.; Father Heras proposes a date three centuries earlier. The arguments originally put forward by Venkayya, together with others drawn from Cōḷa inscriptions, have been summarized by me in my paper on the Koḍumbāḷūr inscription to which Fr. Heras has referred in his paper published in a recent issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (January, 1934, pp. 33 ff.). I propose here to examine the steps by which Fr. Heras reaches his conclusion.

The latest scientific opinions concerning the origin of the Magyars may be summed up as follows. The primary home of the Magyars as an Ugro-Finnish tribe was probably in Eastern Europe between the Volga and the Ural Mountains. Here they may have lived with kindred Ugro-Finnish peoples, the ancestors of their near relatives, the Ostyaks and Voguls, and of their more distant relatives, the Finns, Lapps, Mordwins, Zyryäns, and Tsheremis, about 2500–2000 b.c. From there they drifted eastward. In the fifth century a.d. they moved south-westward in close connection with several peoples of the Turkish race, chiefly with the Bolgars, Sabeers, “Blue” Turks, and Khazars, absorbing a considerable Turkish stratum, to become organized into a nation, or rather an alliance of several tribes, on the territory of South-Eastern Europe of to-day. About the year 800 they were in the region of the Caucasus, then on the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the last years of the ninth century the Magyars, under the pressure of kindred tribes, proceeded westward and occupied their present home in the basin of the Carpathians.

Professor Louis Massignon, the value of whose contributions to the study of Sufism cannot be overestimated, gives a short but penetrating account of the doctrines of Junayd in his Essai sur les Origines du Lexique Technique de la Mystique Musulmane. This account is preceded by an analysis of the contents of the manuscript of Junayd's opuscula which is preserved at Istanbul. In his Recueil de Textes Inédits Massignon gives extracts of this manuscript. It has recently been my good fortune, through the generosity of the Egyptian University, to obtain a photograph of this manuscript—and I must not omit to acknowledge the kindly services of Dr. Ritter in this connection—as a preliminary to the fulfilment of what has been for some time my immediate intention, namely, to write a monograph on the life and doctrines of Junayd, and to edit all his surviving reliquiae.