The Honorable the President, and Chairman, of the Honorable the Court of Directors, under whose orders, and authority the Commerce of Great Britain is carried on with the Chinese Nation at Canton, to the high and mighty Lord, the Tsontock [Tsung-tu], or Viceroy, of the Provinces of Quantong [Kuangtung] and Kiang-si, Greeting.

When Muslim forces under the Ghurid sultan, Mu'izz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām, made their first major breakthrough into Hindūstān in the 1190s, they brought with them two institutions that had long since taken root in the Islamic world. One was the iqṭā' or assignment of land or its revenue, in some cases in return for military service (sometimes misrepresented as “fief” on the Western European model). The other was the mamlūk, or military slave. Mamlūk status, it should be stressed, bore none of the degrading connotations associated with other types of slavery: mamlūks – generally Turks from the Eurasian steppelands – were highly prized by their masters, receiving both instruction in the Islamic faith and a rigorous training in the martial arts, and were not employed in any menial capacity. The mamlūk institution, whose origins go back to the first century of Islam, came into vogue from the first half of the third/ninth century, as the ‘Abbasid Caliphs built up a corps of Turkish mamlūk guards and their example was followed, with the disintegration of their empire, by the various autonomous dynasties that sprang up in the provinces. Turkish slave officers themselves went on to found dynasties, as in the case of the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids in Egypt and the Ghaznawids in the eastern Iranian world. The institution surely entered upon its heyday in the seventh/thirteenth century, with the military coup of 648/1250 in Cairo: a group of mamlūk officers overthrew the last Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and inaugurated a regime in which slave status was the essential qualification for high military and administrative office.

Of the ten incarnations of Viṣṇu which he is believed in classical Hinduism to have undergone for the welfare of the human beings on earth, the sixth is that of Paraśurāma, a Brahmanic hero whose characteristic feature was the axe (paraśu) with which he is reported to have slain innumerable Kṣatriya warriors in 21 combats. We may perhaps recall here the most important events of the legend as it occurs in the Mahābhārata (III.116, XII.49.27–60, cf. also XIII.153) and in the Purāṇas: Harivaṃśa (I.33), Vāyu (Adhy.94), Matsya (Adhy.43), Viṣṇu (IV.11.9–20), Bhāgavata (IX.15, 16), Mārkaṇḍeya (Adhy.17), Brahmāḍḍa (III.26–47, very extensive!), and Viṣṇudharmottara (I.Adhy.25–7 ff.):

In treating of the Hindú religion, much confusion has arisen from considering all the nations settled in the plains, and ranging over the mountains of Hindustan, from the Himálaya to Cape Comorin, as originally embued with one faith, and following one religious ritual.

The date of Kaniṣka is not a subject which I should have expected to be discussing in public. It is one of those long-standing problems in regard to which one at an early stage conceives an opinion or receives a bias, but which, either for lack of decisive evidence, or because the mind, after considering many conflicting views, is incapable of an act of faith, one leaves in the sphere of things unsettled. I myself should have been well content that the finishing stroke should be dealt by the spade, which even now is probing the ruins of Taxilā. Moreover, at the time when Mr. Kennedy first propounded to me his conclusions, I was fresh from the perusal of Professor Oldenberg's paper, which seemed to have said the last word in the discussion. If we have now invited a debate, and one at closer range than a trimestrial journal allows, the responsibility rests with Mr. Kennedy's extensive articles, their confident tone, and the interest which they have evoked.

One of the most interesting and valuable of all the objects-which were presented half a century ago by the late Sir Charles Nicholson to the University of Sydney, for the purpose of forming a nucleus of a “Museum of Antiquities”, is a stele inscribed in two kinds of writing, Egyptian and Karian.

The traveller in Egypt who wishes to visit the Mosque of Amr may now leave Cairo either by train or carriage, and step out in the immediate neighbourhood. But he who prefers the most picturesque and interesting route will either ride or walk, and taking the street which runs parallel to the Khalīg, or Canal of Cairo, will pass out of the town by the gate of Sayyida Zeinab. Following the road past the picturesque little Mosque of Zein al Ābidin, he will pass under the Aqueduct, and proceed along the track which leads him through a country of mounds and dust-heaps past the Mosque of Abu-s-Suūd to the N. front of the building which he seeks (see Plan I.). Here let him ascend the mound which lies outside the huts by which the facade of the Mosque is shut in, and, facing towards them, take a general view of the scene. To his left he looks over a dusty space of comparatively low-lying ground, to the Aqueduct under which he passed twenty minutes ago; on his left front the citadel of Cairo stands out in the distance beyond a large expanse of high dust-mounds. Straight before him is the Mosque, but he can see little of it excepting the higher part of the two minarets, the mass of huts shutting out the view of the low walls; but behind the Mosque, at some two miles' distance, the limestone cliffs of Mukattam gleam in the sunshine: while further to the right the eye rests on a dusty height crowned by disused windmills.

The only Pai. quotation connected directly with the Bṛh. is given by Mārkaṇḍeya (seventeenth century): Bṛhatkathāyām kupaci pisāḷam (Grierson, EPG., 134). Keith, HSL., p. 269, observes, “We really cannot be sure that we have a single relic of the Bṝhatkathā, still less that so late a grammarian as Mārkaṇḍeya actually had the text before him.” Pisālaṃ, moreover, is a neo-Indian form, which normally would not occur before the twelfth century, for the words in AMg pisalla (PG 595) and in Pkt. pisalla (Hem., i, 193) are normal Mid-Indian as contrasted with Mar. pisāḷeṇ “madness”.

Among the objects of Natural History, which attracted the attention, and excited the wonder of the followers of Alexander the Great, when that illustrious conqueror Carried his victorious arras across the Indus, was the Banyan, or Indian Fig-Tree. It is well known that that extraordinary man, whose talents, as well as achievements, have certainly no parallel in history, was generally imbued with a love of science, and, as Pliny expresses it, inflamed with a passion for Natural History.* To his great preceptor, Aristotle, he had delegated the care of digesting, and elucidating, the vast materials that were collected, in the king's progress through a quarter of the globe, which, to the inhabitants of Europe, was absolutely a new world.

In a letter received on the 1st March last from Major Kittoe, engaged in antiquarian researches under the Bengal Government, he informed me that in excavating the mound constituting the rain of the great Buddhist temple of Sárnáth at Benares, he had turned up some scores of miniature chaityas in baked clay, the base of many of them being impressed with an inscription in the carly Deva Nágarí charecters in a seal form. Some of the chaityas being broken transversely at the base, it was found that an independent seal with an inscription, not in itaglio, but in cameo, was enclosed in the base; and that the seal was first prepared and hardened, and the chaitya then fashioned round it while the clay was plastic, was manifest by the raised letters of the seal having imbedded themselves in the clay, and leaving fac-similes of their forms. Major Kittee readily discovered that the seals or stamps comprised the Buddhist religious dogma, or confession of faith, “Ye dhama,” &e.or “Ye dharma,” &c., as it happened to be in Páli or Sanskrit, and he refers their date from the form of the Deva Nágarí letters to the early part of the eleventh century; but why these chaityas, the first of the kind met with, stamped with the confession of faith or containing a seal with the dogma in relief letters upon it should have been lodged with in the temple, Major Kittoe does not discuss. As the discovery of the chaityas is new in antiquarian research in India, and as there are certain circumstances connected with this confession of faith being met with in different parts of India in mongrel Sanskrit, I have thought that a drawing of a chaitya and of the enclosed seal, together with a few remarks upon the confession of faith, might be acceptable for reference in the Journal of the Society.

The subject of this Memoir was born in the year 1779. He was the fourth son of the eleventh Lord Elphinstone, by Anna, daughter of Lord Buthven. The Elphinstone family is one of great antiquity in Scotland, and many of its members took a considerable part in the political events of their times. It maybe sufficient, as connected with the present sketch, to mention that Mr. Elphinstone's father was a General Officer in the British army, was for some time Governor of Edinburgh Castle, and sat for several Parliaments as one of the representative peers of Scotland; also, that several of his relations were connected about the middle of the last century with the trade and settlements in the East. Mr. Elphinstone's uncle, Mr. Fullerton Elphinstone, was, for many years, a Director of the East India Company; and to this circumstance we may attribute the destination of Mr. Elphinstone, and one of his brothers, to the Civil Service of India.

An indigenous record of the nomade tribes of Tartary, who shook the world with their conquests during the middle ages, would no doubt form an interesting episode in universal history. Although the Mongols made their power to be felt from east to west, comparatively little was known in Europe of their actual condition; but that little is sufficient to stimulate curiosity, and while the names of Genghiz and Tamerlane have gained a world-wide celebrity, very much that pertains to their people, as a nation and as individuals, is left to be filled up by the imagination. Tokens of former grandeur are still to be met with in the northern wilds, suggesting to the mind of the traveller a host of questions, which receive no satisfactory solution from the erratic nomades who inhabit those sterile regions. How many monarchies were overthrown by these children of the desert; how many kingdoms reduced to desolation; how many nations subdued, their power broken, and their inhabitants dispersed ? Questions allied to something higher than the mere inquisitive faculty attach to some of these points; and, while we scan the débris of bye-gone generations, we are impelled by the conviction that all efforts in that direction are auxiliary to the more mature knowledge of the history of the human racé.

“Soon after my arrival in Nipál (now six years ago), I began to devise “means of procuring some accurate information relative to Buddhism: “for, though the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign “to my pursuits, my respect for sci ence in general led me cheerfully “to avail myself of the opportunity afforded, by my residence in a “Bauddha country, for collecting and transmitting to Calcutta the “materials for such investigation. There were, however, serious “obstacles in my way, arising out of the jealousy of the people in “regard to any profanation of their sacred things by an European, and “yet more, resulting from the Chinese notions of policy adopted by this “government. I nevertheless persevered; and time, patience, and “dexterous applications to the superior intelligence of the chief minister, “at length rewarded my toils.

The word śāsana means “a royal charter” and tāmra-śāsana “a royal charter engraved on a plate or plates of copper”. Revenue-free gifts, granted by ancient Indian rulers in favour of persons, deities, or religious establishments were usually endowed with a deed engraved on durable tāmra-paṭṭa, i.e. “a plate or plates of copper”. By lakṣaṇā, a tāmra-śāsana was sometimes called tāmra-paṭṭa. Often again the word indicating the deed or charter was applied, by lakṣaṇā, to indicate the land granted. But the expression tāmra-śāsana, in this modified sense of a gift of revenue-free land, was often indicated either by tāmra or by śāsana. The word śāsana in this sense is used not only in the medieval records of Orissa but even in modern Oriya. Numerous villages in Orissa still bear names ending with the word śāsana, indicating that originally they were gift villages. Besides the word tāmra-śāsana, early Orissan epigraphy knows of two other types of śāsanas. These are the deeds called kraya-śāsana and kara-śāsana.