Exchange and reciprocity are central concepts in all forms of human society. Based on a system of mutual obligation, they denote any activity in which valuables are circulated between individuals or groups of people. In the religious sphere they include the transfer of both material and immaterial goods between human and spiritual beings. As outlined by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don, the classic work on the total system of reciprocity, such exchange is governed by the principle of the gift entailing the counter-gift.

The aim of the present article is to describe the morphosyntactic properties of Iranian Coastal Balochi as spoken by the Afro-Balochi community. The Afro-Baloch have completely switched to Balochi and there are no traces of African languages in their speech. In comparison with other Balochi dialects of Iran on the one hand and Coastal Balochi dialects of Pakistan on the other, Coastal Balochi as spoken in Iran shows archaic characteristics, particularly in its case system, in the demonstrative pronouns and in the alignment features. This particularly applies to the speech of the Afro-Baloch, who due to persisting social segregation have limited access to education and media.

The Kan narrative presents a series of events that are believed, by many Cambodians today including top leaders, to be the historical contestation for kingship between a commoner named Kan and members of the royal family during the early sixteenth century. Discussing the contents, the formats, the epistemology, and key figures bound up in the Kan narrative, this article provides insights on its contextual origins and reception as well as the texts that recount it. Rather than a proven historical episode, the narrative was effectively re-constructed by two groups of chronicle writers during the early 1900s in order to promote ideas about ‘treason’ and ‘loyalty’ to the throne. Uncovering the contextual origins and reception of the narrative not only allows us to understand the process whereby a long-held body of local scholarship lying outside the scholarly practice of ‘history’ in the present-day sense was used to shape collective knowledge, but also to see its profound impact on colonial and post-independence collective memory and culture.

The second part of this paper will be occupied by an attempt to show how the ancient Indian system of numeral signs, described in Part L, was simplified. In other words, it will be attempted to show how this old system became the parent of that now used in India, which employs only nine units and a zero,—indeed of that system as used not in India alone, but now almost universally both in eastern and western countries

In my previous note on page 655 ff. above, I have given the narrative of the Mahāparinibbāna-Sutta about the cremation of the corpse of Buddha and the original distribution and enshrining of his corporeal relics. We come now to the tradition about the subsequent fate of the eight deposits of those relics, which were placed in Stūpas or memorial mounds at the localities shewn in the list given on page 671. And we take this matter in the order, as closely as we can determine it, of the dates of the writings from which we gather the tradition ; which, however, is of course not necessarily the order in which the tradition was developed.

The extensive literature of Buddhist legends may be divided into three groups: (1) the legends on the rebirths of the Buddha anterior to his last life in this world, these are the ‘Jātakas’ (proper); (2) legends of the Buddha in his last, historical, existence; (3) legends of the Buddhist disciples, these are the ‘Avadānas,’ which last name, however, is also applied to legends in general.

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed out that the English East India Company's objective in re-entering East Asian waters during the second half of the seventeenth century was the re-establishment of a direct trade with Japan from which the company had withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But, far from being an inconsequential historical footnote, the unintended consequence of this policy was the beginning of a direct trade with China, first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove of greater consequence to the company's fortunes than the chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It is within this context and that of the changing fortunes of the English company and its Dutch rival as well as the broader East Asian situation that the brief, and largely ignored, history of the company's factory on Taiwan is worth examining.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tempted several European nations to exploit the opportunities for overseas trade by expanding their influence in distant seas and lands. When Vasco de Gama discovered a new route between Europe and South-East Asia during the last decade of the fifteenth century, Europeans increased their search for new colonies and for new trade routes. Like many other nations of the region the people of Balochistan also felt the impact of this new phenomenon. The Portuguese were the first European Colonisers to reach their shores.

The ancient lunisolar calendar of the Hindus is still widely used in India, especially for ritual purposes. In most of India, months are lunar and the discrepancy between lunar and solar years (12 lunar months equal approximately 354 days) is resolved by the periodic addition of an intercalary month into the year. However, in Tamilnadu, Kerala and eastern India (Bengal, Orissa and Assam), months are solar, but because the lunar calendar is also used, complications arise which are absent in areas employing only the lunar calendar. The aim of this paper is to describe the calendrical system currently in use in Tamilnadu and to explain the basic principles of the Tamil almanacs.

The IAVs. closely follow the rules of the Sanskrit stress-accent (as distinct from the ancient musical accent) which have been noted by Prof. Jacobi in ZDMG. xlvii. 574 and ff. The only difference is that the IAVs. do not usually throw the accent further back than the antepenultimate if the word ends in a long syllable. The general rules are as follows:—

(1) The stress-accent falls on the penultimate if it be long. Examples—Skr. and Ts. kīrti ‘fame’; G. janōi ‘a sacrificial thread’; M. gīdh(a) ‘a vulture’; kāṇā ‘one-eyed’; S. rahāū ‘a dweller’; H. asūj'hā ‘invisible’; kisān(a) ‘a husbandman’; B. choṭákkā ‘small.’

I. The Malagasy belongs unquestionably to the stock of languages which have been denominated Malayo-Polynesian, and more particularly to the great Western Branch, which comprehends the languages of the lank-haired races of the Indian Archipelago and the Philippines, and which we shall call Malayan (from the most predominating language in that part of the globe), to distinguish it from the Eastern Branch, which may be called Maorian (from the Maori of New Zealand), the geographical term Polynesian haying the disadvantage of not excluding the languages of the crisp-haired races. The Malagasy bears the greatest analogy to the Toba dialect of the Batak in pronunciation (III), and many salient points in its grammatical structure may be pointed out (IV) to prove its affinity to Javanese, Batak, Malay, Dayak, and other Malayan tongues.

A pseudo-Aristotelian treatise called de pomo et morte incliti principis philosophorum Aristotelis has been printed several times in Europe, the earliest editions being without place or date. This work is a Latin translation of a Hebrew tract bearing the name “The Book of the Apple,” the translator being Manfred, King of Sicily (ob. 1266), or, as Steinschneider suggests, a Jew employed by him. The Hebrew text professes to be a translation from the Arabic made by R. Abraham B. Hisdai, an author who flourished at the end of the thirteenth century. There are MSS. of B. Hisdai's work in the Vatican and at Oxford, and it has been repeatedly printed, first at Venice, 1519. It was republished with a new Latin translation and a copious but irrelevant commentary by J. J. Losius, at Giessen, in 1706.

The Coimbatore District, containing more than 8000 square miles, is almost centrally situated in the south of the Peninsula, within the region occupied by the Tamil-speaking race, being about 250 miles west of Madras, and 80 east of the Malabar coast. Mysore bounds it on the north, and the Madras and Tinnevelly districts lie between it and Cape Comorin. Megalithic monuments are found in all the Madras districts, but I am inclined to think are most numerous in Coimbatore, where singly, in twos or threes, or in assemblages of scores or hundreds, they occur in every variety of situation, high on the ghauts and wild mountainsides, in remote jungles and malarious river-valleys, on wide open plains, on cultivated land, amid fertile gardens and rice tracts. Excluding the Nilgiri Hills, which, though belonging to Coimbatore, are a separate region, with a group of remains peculiar to themselves, the Coimbatore monuments are all sepulchral, consisting of kistvaens or tumuli, containing cists or chambers, originally underground, but now often more or less exposed. Stone-circles and standing stones are almost always associated with the tumuli, but never, so far as I know, found independently, as in other parts of India and in Europe. Neither am I aware of any true cromlech in Coimbatore. It may be interesting to give some account of two of the principal assemblages of these remains, one on the east, and another on the west side of the district. Seven miles north of Perămdoŏry, the chief town of a talook of the same name, midway between the towns of Salem and Coimbatore, after passing along a tract of fertile bottom-land, luxuriant with topes and gardens, the ground, iust beyond the village of Năllămpătti, rises into one of the wide rolling barren maidans characteristic of Southern India, on which a great cairn-cemetery is situated. Many hundreds of cairns are spread over a considerable tract; in general appearance heaps of blackened stones, some very small, and thence of every size up to 30 feet and more in diameter, they vary in height from one to four feet, but have evidently been much worn down by lapse of time and weather.

About a mile and a half from Damghan is a mound called Tepeh i-Hissár, in which, during last autumn, some human bones were found. The people thinking that there had been in ancient times a burial-place, began digging in different parts of the mound, and discovered some black earthenware pots together with silver and copper ornaments. As soon as Government heard of this, a person was ordered to excavate this mound; and, since then, a number of objects, with about seventy or eighty skeletons, have been brought to light. The objects are, most of them, in the Shah's Museum, but the skeletons have unfortunately been thrown away as useless. I visited the mound in March last, and again in September. At my first visit, I saw that most of the objects were damaged or destroyed by unskilful digging, and I recommended a water-course being led to the mound, so that the objects might be washed out. They followed my advice, and a number of earthenware vessels, ornaments, etc., have been got out intact.

One of the questions that has prompted this study is this: despite the fact that various Xiongnu and Xianbei groups dominated the political arena in Northern China for almost 300 years between the collapse of the Western Jin and the founding of the Sui , and the usually unacknowledged fact that their descendants continued to do so for several hundreds more years,1 why is it that one could learn so little about their cultural heritage in traditional historiography?2 Even the linguistic affinity of the Tuoba Xianbei remains to this day a matter of controversy.3

In the British Museum there is a gold coin issued by the Zanj rebels, hitherto inedited, and consequently of sufficient historical importance to warrant special publication. There is, so far as the present writer is aware, only one other coin (also in gold) surviving as a witness of that disastrous Slave Revolt which is estimated to have cost over 1,000,000 lives. This latter coin was published by Casanova in the Revue Numisrnatique (1893, pp. 510-516) and is now in the Paris Cabinet. By kind permission of the Conservateur I have been enabled to have it photographed. The mint, in both instances is the same, but the specimen in the British Museum is three years earlier in date, and preserves for us a more complete portion of the peculiar reverse marginal legend, that enables us to emend to a great extent the conjectural rendering suggested by Casanova in his article above mentioned.

By the Scientific Expedition to the Northern Etbai, despatched by his Highness the Khedive in the beginning of the year, that part of the eastern desert of Egypt which lies south of a line between Kina and Kosair and reaches rather below the twenty-fourth parallel of latitude, was rapidly examined and surveyed. The map is in the hands of the engraver of the Royal Geographical Society; the geology exhibited in a map and sections is before the Geological Society; and a map of the antiquities is attached to the present memoir. The country embraces an area of 23,000 square miles of mountain and desert, and is called by the inhabitants the Northern Etbai.