Comparison of the vocabularies of Tibetan and Chinese, although attempted in the past, cannot be said as yet to have been undertaken along lines likely to produce outstanding results. All too frequently single words have been singled out for comparison, or a single member of a known family has been selected from the one language and placed beside a single word, seemingly related, likewise torn loose from a known group in the other. Or, again, an entire series of comparisons seems to rest on identity of meanings no matter how widely dissimilar the words which carry them may be in the two languages. The dangers of such methods are obvious. We are not only very probably selecting the wrong members on one side, or on both, but are detaching the words so used entirely from their semantic backgrounds.

The text K. 2612, cited by me in my Lexicon of Accadian Prayers as a duplicate of Ebeling, Quellen, i, 40 f., and K. 2373 and Sm. 690, has now been joined to Rm. 2, ii, 269, enabling a more accurate restoration to be made of several of the lines. The text shows several notable variant readings.

Some ten years ago a Brahman scholar was travelling by rail from Jaunpur to Allahabad. At a country station there was an incident familiar in those parts: a number of women crowded the platform, weeping and bidding farewell to their men-folk, who were going to Calcutta to find work. Two or three of the women got into the carriage with their husbands, and, as the journey continued, began a, song. One line of this made a great impression on the Pandit. “The railway, my rival, has carried away my beloved.” A bold metaphor. In the poetry to which he was accustomed, the rival wife with her interference would be compared to the swan with its mythical power of dividing milk from water. But, after all, was not the railway simile much more natural and vigorous ? The swan simile was part of the stock in trade of centuries of poets, and required a special education and tradition for its understanding. The railway simile spoke from the heart to the heart.

One of the most complete and entertaining accounts of the instruments of music of Turkey is that given by the chatty and voluble, though highly imaginative writer, Ewliyā Chelebī 1611– ca. 1669. Although his family held high appointments at the Ottoman court, yet young Ewliyā yearned for a literary career and, like many such Parnassian aspirants, began his public life as a ḥāfiẓ in Aya Sofia on the Lailat al-kaḍr of 1045 (=A.D. 1636), whenhe attracted the notice of Sultan Murād IV, who took him into the royal household. Here he was specially favoured, mainly on account of his musical and literary gifts. He had been taught music and singing by one of the best masters of the day, the Khalwatī dervish 'Umar Gulshanī, who lived to the great age of 140 years, himself having been taught by the eminent shaikh Ibrāhīm Gulshanī (d. 1533–4) of Cairo. After two years' service as a muṣāḥib, Ewliyā began his travels which have made him famous.

The curious ancient figure illustrated in the last paragraph of Part I of this paper, ingeniously conjectured by Mr. Hsü-Chung-shu to stand for the modern character chüeh, in its sense of nobility, servesto introduce us to a peculiar word and its character, often used in Chinese texts dealing with the old-time agriculture.

Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra states: tad (= tatra, sc. devayajane) etāṃ prācīnavaṁśāṁ śālāṃ māpayati; kṛttikāḥ khalv imāḥ prācīṃ diśaṃ na parijahati: tāsāṁ, saṃdarśanena māpayed ity etad ekam; śroṇāsaṃdarśanena māpayed ity etad ekam; citrāsvātyor antareṇety etad aparam.

A Lucky find in 1933 enables us to supply the missing beginning and end of the long Ras Shamra tablet printed in JRAS., October, 1932.

Scarcely ever has Islām experienced more tragical times and more hardships than during the Mongol invasion in the course of the thirteenth century a.d. With the despite of the nomads, practitioners of the open-air life, for sedentary occupations, the people of Jengis Khān turned against and mercilessly destroyed the towns and works of civilization everywhere. Their disastrous campaign was only facilitated by the decomposition of the political unity of Islām at that time. In Baghdād the 'Abbāsid caliphate still subsisted, but its splendour was on the wane; to the west of Baghdād, in Egypt, Palestine, and a part of Syria, the Ayyūbids reigned, and in Asia Minor the Seljūqs, while to the east of Baghdād the Turkish princes from Khiva had, a rather insecure hold on the vast stretch of the Khwārizmian empire from the Ganges to the Tigris and from Turkestān to the Indian Ocean. This state of affairs was inviting to an enterprising invader of the sort of Jengis Khān who, in 1218, crushed the Khwārizmian empire, while his grandson, Hūlāghū Khān, put an end to the 'Abbāsid caliphate in 1258. The western provinces of Islām, including Egypt, were, however, spared from the devastating fury of the Mongols by the Mamlūk Sulṭān's victory over Ketbogha, Hūlāghū's general, at 'Ayn Jālūt, Palestine, in 1260. When in 1299–1301 his grandson Qāzān failed in conquering Syria Islām was definitely safe from further Mongol attacks.

Even if a king follows a path contrary to religion and to reason he is nevertheless praised by his subjects (on account of fear); he, therefore, hardly knows what is appropriate or not.

In the April issue, 1934, of this Journal, I edited and translated the first chapter of this work of the great Nāgārjuna, still a fundamental treatise in the monasteries of Tibet. I now publish the remaining portions of the second and fourth chapters, the second being incomplete and the third entirely missing. The fifth and last pariccheda contains chiefly vinaya-rules, and will be published in a subsequent issue, along with the Tibetan text and the English translation of the missing portions.

The MS. consists of 203 folios; but the first leaf bears only the title of the work. Size of the written page is 8½ in. by 5½ in.: thirty to thirty-one lines to a page. On the titlepage appear the words , which are of a much later date than the MS. itself, and added probably by some bookseller. The colophon, which is written in the same hand as the text, contains the date 7th Sha'bān, 547. The whole MS. is very closely written and with hardly any diacritical points or vowelsigns. The absence of these and the peculiar style of the writing make it rather difficult reading. Unfortunately the work is not complete in this MS. The whole work was divided into twenty-three sections (), of which the last ten sections (14–23) are given here complete and the greater part of section 13, of which only a page or two seem to be missing. Thus the first portion of the MS. comprising more than half the work is missing.

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.

In his article on Gandhara Grama that appeared in the issue of October, 1935, of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Mr. A. H. Fox Strangways observed that a particular line in Damodara's Sangitadarpana regarding Ga-Grama, had induced him to visit India thirty years ago. The whole of that article, now under consideration, induces me to revisit the region of the Grama-question.

In the course of my lecture on “Some Coins of the Mauryas and Śungas”, delivered before the Royal Asiatic Society in June, 1935, I emphasized two symbols found on the signed coins as being essentially Mauryan, namely, the “moon-on-hill” and the hollow cross. What seems a clinching piece of evidence on the question has since become available to me from the Rāmpurwä copper bolt of Aśoka, now in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, through the kindness of my friend, Mr. Durga Prasad, who examined the bolt and found the marks. A rubbing of these on tissue paper given to him by Mr. N. G. Majumdar, Superintendent in charge of the Archæological Section of the Museum, is reproduced on Plate II. The symbols (written from right to left) are arranged in columns as below (Pl. II (a)):—

It is remarkable that four important works on the criticism of Arabic poetry, and at the same time anthologies, should appear in one year and, to avoid any misunderstanding, I shall deal with them in the chronological order of the deaths of their authors.

In 1931 the cuneiform alphabet of Ras Shamra was derived from the Sinaitic alphabet by M. Sprengling and A. T. Olmstead (The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinaitic Inscriptions, Chicago); and in March, 1934, by E. Ebeling, apparently without knowledge of the work of Sprengling and Olmstead, from Babylonian cuneiform (Zur Enstehungsgeschichte des Keilschriftalphabets von Ras Schamra, Sitz.-Ber. d. Preuss. Akad. d. Wiss.). In June, 1934, J. G. Février, also independently of Sprengling and Olmstead, showed connections with South Semitic, suggesting that the South Semitic alphabet was for the most part derived from the Ras Shamra cuneiform or from a common source (Rev. des Éitudes sémitiques, pp. xiii–xvi). In the same month T. Gaster accepted the theory of Olmstead (Ancient Egypt, 1934, p. 34), and in July, 1935, defended in some detail the origin of the Ras Shamra alphabet from a derivative of the Sinaitic approximating to the Phœnician (PEF. Quarterly, 135 ff.).

In this article I propose to examine the position held by the executive officers ofthe Mogul Empire in the light of some new documentary evidence, and from a standpoint different from that occupied by earlier writers on the subject. It is well known that there was no differentiation between civil and military employment: all officers, from the princes of the blood down to what would now be called sergeants and corporals, formed a single State Service, in which each individual had a definite rank or position (manṣab); and ordinarily each of them had to maintain out of his emoluments acontingent of cavalry available for the Emperor's work. Some officers might receive their emoluments in cash, but as a rule payment was made by an assignment of the land-revenue of a specified area (jāgīr), which the recipient made his own arrangements to collect. The questions at issue relate mainly to the remuneration ofofficers and the size and constitution of their contingents.

Among the royal titles used by the early Sinhalese kings there are two which, as royal titles, were not adopted by any of the dynasties known to us in India, and were therefore peculiar to Ceylon. An investigation into the history of these two titles is likely to throw some light on the origin of kingship in ancient Ceylon, and I therefore propose in this paper to pursue this line of study so far as the material available at present allows us to do so. The conclusions at which I have arrived by a study of the available data on this may not, in the present state of our knowledge, be taken as definitely established; but they might, nevertheless, be worthy of consideration by scholars interested in the early history of the Sinhalese people.