Seventeen years ago the lamented M. Soret published a description of a most interesting silver coin struck at Miṣr in the year of the Flight 525 (A.D. 1130–1), bearing a name Abu-l-Ḳásim Muḥammad Al-Muntaẓar-bi-amri-lláh, which does not appear in the list of the Fáṭimí Khalífahs of Egypt, though the place and date of the coin would certainly lead us to suppose that it was struck by a ruler belonging to this dynasty. A remarkable circumstance is that the coin was struck during the reign of Al-Ḥáfiẓ.

On February 9th, 1874, I read a paper before the Royal Geographical Society entitled, “Notes of a Journey outside the Great Wall of China,” made by the Hon. T. G. Grosvenor and myself in the autumn of 1872, including an account of a visit to the ruins of the city of Shangtu, the ancient northern capital of the Yuan Dynasty, described in such glowing terms by Marco Polo, who was there in the reign of its founder, the famous Kublai Khan. They are situate on the northern bank of the Lan-ho—the Shangtu River—about twenty-five miles to the north-west of Dolonnor, the populous city founded by the Emperor Kang-hi, as a trading mart between the Chinese and the Mongolian tribes. These ruins were identified by the existence of a marble memorial tablet, with an inscription of the reign of Kublai, in an ancient form of the Chinese character. A more detailed account of the history of the city so frequently referred to by mediaeval travellers, derived from Chinese and other sources, has been drawn up; and a plan of the ruins, with a facsimile and translation of the inscription, added, in the hope that it may prove of some interest to the Members of your Society.

[The writer desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the Trustees of the British Museum for permitting the publication of the plate, and to the Librarian of the Library of Congress at Washington for supplying photostat copies of Chinese texts.]

The Greco-Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara has for a long time been of singular attraction for students of Indian art. These sculptures of greyish-blue schist found in such quantities in the inaccessible valleys of the Indo-Afghan frontier, have from the outset been noted for their classical affinities, and many were brought to Europe by art-loving dilettanti. The particular qualities distinguishing them from all other Indian sculpture were duly extolled; they came to be recognized as the earliest examples of new ideas which changed the whole development of Indian art and propagated Western influence throughout the Buddhist world. But the rôle so enthusiastically assigned to them has not remained unchallenged. A younger generation, more eager to discover the truly national qualities of the arts of Asia, maintained that the only reason for this admiration was that on account of their Greek affinities the Gandhara sculptures were less strange to Europeans than Asiatic art proper. They considered Greco-Buddhist sculpture a weak and provincial offshoot of Western art, without much influence in the East, and for the most part of a quality which could not compete with the broad current of the Indian tradition. Even those iconographical innovations with which the sculptors of Gandhara had generally been credited, such as the creation of the Buddha image, were attributed by these scholars to other and more “national” schools. To this day no satisfactory solution of the problem has come forward.

For convenience of reference, the following list of MSS. which have existed or do exist is reproduced from the J.R.A.S., July, 1900:—

I. Bābar's autograph MS.

II. Khwāja Kilān's MS.

III. (Humāyūn's transcript.)

IV. Elphinstone MS.

V. British Museum MS.

VI. India Office MS. (Bib. Leydeniana).

VII. Asiatic Society of Bengal MS.

VIII. Mysore MS. (Tīpū's).

IX. Bibliotheca Lindesiana MS.

X. Hyderābād MS.

XI. St. Petersburg University Library MS.

XII. St. Petersburg Foreign Office MS.

XIII. St. Petersburg Asiatic Museum MS. (Senkovskī).

XIV. Bukhārā MS.

XV. Nazar Bay Turkestānī MS.

James Mill in his efforts to belittle the achievements of the Hindus took Jones as his chief antagonist; he tried to show how the Orientalist suffered from illusions about the Hindus and tended to magnify their importance without having any idea of what the term civilization meant. He said that Jones's description of the life of the Arabs and Hindus far surpassed the “rhapsodies of Rousseau on the happiness and virtue of savage life”. To Mill, Jones was a misguided man who failed to grasp the problems of India; his reason gave way to the romantic fascination of the East and so in his judgment on India he was uncritical. Ever since the first publication of Mill's work in 1817 the history of the British policy in India had been presented as if it were a struggle between Jones and Mill, the romantic versus the rationalist. This theme was developed in a recent conference on Indian historiography. Elsewhere Jones is described as a medievalist. In fact most of these writers presented Jones as James Mill had depicted him, even though their sympathies may have been with him.

Certain passages in the Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra and the reading of the inscription on the Māṇikiāla stone, published in this Journal for 1914 (p. 641), have invited some attention to the question how time was measured, marked, and told for ordinary use in ancient India; and Dr. Fleet has recently discussed the ancient Indian water-clock fully (p. 213 ante), showing how time was measured and marked by it. This paper continues the subject, dealing with the marking and telling of time for ordinary use. I have to thank him for drawing my attention to the passages in the Arthaśātra, the Jyotiṣaratnamālā, and the Divyāvadāna, and to the notice of the Jain muhūrtas, and for some criticisms and suggestions.

From the Rājatarangmī we learn that, when Kāsyapa raised Kāshmir above the waters, Nīla, whose royal canopy was the hood of the serpent, reigned there over the Nāgas.

In the title of my paper the stress is to be laid upon the word ‘etymological.’ The vocabulary does not contain all the Māldivian words which I collected during the last five or six years, either from printed books, or from manuscripts hitherto unpublished, or from the lips of Māldivian natives. For it was by no means my intention to compile a Māldivian dictionary for practical use: this would be premature; it may perhaps be done at some future time. For the present my purpose is purely philological. The present object is to publish linguistic materials which may serve as a basis for a scientific phonology of the Māldivian language. My vocabulary is, therefore, both an introduction and a supplement to the third part of my “Māldivian Studies,” which deals with that subject. First, I have excluded, of course, from my vocabulary the numerous words borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, as they do not belong to the original stock of the Māldivian dialect. But I have omitted also generally those words which cannot be explained in a satisfactory way by the help of phonetic laws confirmed by other etymologies which are not open to doubt. There remains, nevertheless, a sufficient number of words to show clearly the character of the Māldivian language. It is merely a dialect, and not even a very ancient dialect, of Sinhalese. This result is, I think, also of historical interest; for it appears from it that the Māldive islands were occupied by Sinhalese people, but hardly at an earlier period than about eight or nine centuries ago.

In his paper L'Arrivée des Portugais en Chine, published in T'oung Pao in 1912, M. Cordier, before giving a more detailed account of the events in the Further East following on the taking of Malacca in 1511, gave a lucid sketch of the events accompanying the first establishment of Portuguese power in Eastern seas. I consider that these events require to be further set forth, for as far as I am aware the existing histories do not give any adequate and consecutive account of the struggle for the mastery of the Arabian Sea carried out by the Portuguese against the Muḥammadan states, and more especially against the Turks, who in the sixteenth century were the most powerful military state in the world. In this paper I propose to deal with this subject to the best of my ability.

This book was edited for the first time by Professor Joseph Hell of Erlangen (Leiden, 1916), and since it is one of the oldest extant treatises on the literary history of the Arabs it will always be regarded as an important source of information. Unfortunately the printed text is very incorrect and often quite unintelligible. A large number of valuable emendations have been proposed by the late Professor H. Reckendorf in his review of the book (Orientalistische Literaturzeitung for May, 1917, columns 147–152), by Mr. C. A. Storey in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for April, 1918, pp. 349–355, and by Professor G. Levi della Vida in the Rivista degli Studi Orientali, vol. viii, pp. 611–636 (Rome, 1920). But many passages still remain obscure, and for this reason I venture to offer the following additional suggestions. If some of my remarks have been forestalled by others, I must apologise for my inadvertence. Mere misprints and incorrect vocalisations I have not thought it worth while to mention, except where they are likely to mislead the reader.