The interpretation of history is often a complex task. All too often, sources are misinterpreted because of historians’ preconceptions. This article takes issue with one such misinterpretation, the anachronistic view that the Strait of Melaka has been the principal sea route connecting the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea throughout most of recorded history. Beginning at a period when an overland journey across the Malay Peninsula was an essential link in the routes connecting South, Southeast and East Asia, it is suggested that the first entirely maritime itinerary to be used regularly passed through the Sunda Strait. Changes in itineraries affected the fortunes of the states of Southeast Asia, particularly of Funan and Srivijaya.

In a review of Professor Louis de la Vallée Poussin's book Le Védisme, p. 472 of this Journal, Mr. A. Berriedale Keith makes the following remark: “He [Poussin] is inclined with Barth and Winternitz not to reject as wrong Jacobi's great chronological argument: we think this is to be much too favourable to it. It cannot survive Whitney, Thibaut, and Oldenberg's onslaught.” As Mr. Keith probably does not stand alone in this opinion, may I be allowed to say a few words on this head?

In the last century the Vedic pantheon served as the best illustration of the theory that the gods of primitive and archaic religions were personifications of natural phenomena. The gods of the Vedas were seen as more recognisably such than, for example, the Greek gods, who had acquired more elaborate anthropomorphic features through Homer's poetic skill, so that their supposed natuie-substratum was hardly or not at all detectable. In India the matter seemed clear. Thus Oldenberg believed that the Vedic gods were predominantly deified Naturwesen, agents behind the great happenings and processes of nature. Moreover, he maintained that different gods in the Vedas had reached different stages of anthropomorphism and independence from their nature basis and he made much of the job of determining this degree in individual cases.

IN the latest addition to the series of the Kurdisch-Persische Forschungen, Dr. Karl Hadank, of Berlin, has presented Iranian philologists and students of Persian dialects with a work of great interest and importance.

The series was initiated by the late Oskar Mann (ob. 1917) and the present volume, Abt. III, Band I, 1926, as well as its predecessors is based chiefly on the material collected by him. Its main contents are described in the title: Die Mundarten von Khunsâr, Mahallât, Natänz, Nâyin, Sämnân, Sîvänd und Sô-Kohrûd.

By the Great Ming Emperor the Karma-pa GŽu'u la'i ta'i ba'u hva waṅ ta'i śiṅ rtsi tsa'i hu'o was invited and was made chief of all the ban-dhe (Buddhist monks) in the Empire. At Liṅ-gu svi-sde (temple) he performed a great service of prayers for the Great Imperial Father, Tha'i Ju, and the loving Queen-mother in order to deliver all creatures in the world from the round of transmigration and from hell. The service began on the fifth day of the second month of the fifth year of Yun Lo. On the first day there appeared an iridescent cloud of five colours, beautiful to see, expanding and contracting in various ways, in brilliance like the Wish-granting Gem. Also, above the mchod-rten (stupa) of Relics a ray of light, like the full moon, shone out unblemished and flickering a little. Also, two bands of golden rays rose above the dwelling place of the Precious Essence of all Bygone Buddhas, the Religious King, Powerful through Great Compassion, the Karma-pa gŽu'i la'i ta'i ba'u hva waṅ zi then ta'i śin tsi tsa'i hu'o, the place where he performed the ceremony after having made the dkyil-'khor (mandala).

In recent years explorations of great importance have been conducted on a Buddhist site in the Pālnād taluk of the Guntur district of the Madras Presidency, lastly under the superintendence of Mr. A. H. Longhurst, of the Archaeological Survey of India. The site in question which comprises several ancient mounds is situated in the midst of wooded hills on the right bank of the river Kistna or Kṛishṇā, the Kaṇṇapeṇṇa or Kaṇṇavaṇṇā (Skt. Kṛishṇavarṇā) of Pali literature, at a distance of some 15 miles from Macherla and on the border of the Nizam's dominions. One of those mounds is known by the name of Nāgārjunikoṇḍa. Mr. Longhurst claims it to be the most important Buddhist site hitherto discovered in Southern India.

“What then was to be looked for in a remote and extensive empire, administered in all its parts by men, who came out boys, without the plenitude of instruction of English youth in learning, morals, or religion; and who were let loose on their arrival amidst native licentiousness, and educated amidst conflicting superstitions?”

This complaint was made in 1805 by Claudius Buchanan, in the first influential evangelical tract on India. It was directed against the way of life of the servants of the East India Company in the second half of the 18th century. If certain assumptions are altered, Buchanan's complaint could be changed into praise: these men were not completely indoctrinated by narrow European, English and Christian values, but arrived with a remarkable openness towards what they found in the East, ready to accept different values and customs and to adopt a new style of life. What they were lacking was not so much education as indoctrination.

The number of subjects now labelled as Oriental and the increasing development of knowledge concerning each, of these subjects, make it materially impossible for an individual to derive more than a fraction of the advantages offered by a Congress such as that recently held at Leyden. There were no fewer than nine sections (in fact, there should have been ten, a special section for Islamic Art having been eliminated) and over 200 papers were read during the five days that the Congress lasted, some of the sections sitting nearly five hours a day. It was inevitable that keenly interested delegates should again and again have to choose between equally attractive papers, especially where the third section (Central and Near Asia) and the eighth (Islam) were concerned.

This collection of ancient Tibetan documents, of which I have been engaged in preparing an inventory under an arrangement sanctioned by the India Office, contains close on two thousand pieces, none of them probably of a later date than the ninth century A.D., and is certain to shed a flood of new light on Tibetan archæology, history, grammar, culture, religion, and folklore. Most of the documents were found at two sites, viz. Mīrān and Mazārtāgh. Mīrān is situated a few miles south of the westernmost end of the present Lop-nōr marshes, while Mazār-tāgh is a low barren ridge rising in the middle of the Taklamakān desert, on the left bank of the Khotan River. In his Ruins of Desert Cathay, vol. i, pp. 350 seqq., 439 seqq., Sir Aurel Stein has described the remains of the ruined fort which yielded these Tibetan records at the former site. For an account of the excavations which brought to light Tibetan and other documents in abundance from the refuse-layers adjoining the small ruined station on the Mazār-tāgh hill, vol. ii, pp. 417 seqq., may be consulted.

In his al-Munkidh min al-Ḍalāl al-Ghazālī states that he studied the works of al-Muḥāsibī, together with those of Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī, al-Junayd, Shiblī, and Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī, and of these Ḥārith b. Asad al-Muḥāsibī (ob. 243/857) was the earliest and the most prolific writer, and to him al-Ghazālī owes more of his teaching than has been generally realized, and much that has been attributed to al-Ghazālī as representing his original ideas, is in fact based upon the earlier teaching of al-Muḥāsibī and, in many instances, is directly borrowed from him.