In my examination of the tradition relating to the migration of the Parsees to India, in connection with the condition of the Muslim world in the middle of the seventh century, I have noted the account given by Balāḏurī (ed. De Goeje, 392), who states in his narrative of the conquest of Kirmān by the Arabs that a number of the Parsees sailed away in ships over the sea, i.e. in the direction of India. My point of view on this subject, as generally on all the materials which we possess relative to this question, I have formulated before: here I would merely reiterate that this account consists of two words only, unaccompanied by further explanations, of which one may be said to be obscure. Similar accounts in an expanded form exist in Arabic literature, and I think that it may be useful to give the following extract from an Arabic writer of recognized authority, albeit of later date—Yāqūt, who, in his famous Geographical Dictionary (ed. Wüstenfeld, iii, 31), has the following under Subuḏān:—

“Subuḏān. Ḥamza ibn al-Ḥasan relates the following. Four farsakhs from Baṣra is the town Ubulla on the shore of the Crooked Tigris (sc. Shaṭṭ al-'Arab); the inhabitants of this town were Persians, labouring on the sea. When the Arabs came near them, they loaded 400 ships with as much of their possessions as possible, and with provisions, and sailed away.

Over forty years ago a number of bricks, inscribed with Buddhist sūtras, were discovered in an underground chamber at Gopālpur in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces by men ransacking the site for building materials. Four of these came into the possession of Dr. Hoey and Mr. Vincent Smith, who published an account of the find with a transcription of one of the bricks in Proc. ASB., 1896, July, pp. 99–103, but there is reason to believe that a number more remained in the hands of the villagers or were built into an indigo vat by the local zamindar. No further steps were taken for publication of the texts, though references to them have been made occasionally since; and the bricks themselves were lost sight of. On taking over recently at the Indian Institute in Oxford, I noticed in one of the cases of the small Museum attached to it several inscribed bricks, which on examination were found to be the missing ones, Mrs. Hoernle having presented them some fifteen years ago. They were still largely encrusted with mortar, which made the reading of many characters difficult, but Mr. Rickard of the Ashmolean Museum proved equal to removing these deposits and to rendering them as legible as on the day they were inscribed, except for certain fractures. As the contents are of considerable interest to Buddhist scholars, I publish a transcription of the unpublished portion here, and for the benefit of those interested in palæography I adjoin photographs of IIa, IIIb, and IVa; it is not necessary to reproduce them in their entirety, as the writing on all the bricks is of the same kind and the repetitions in the matter are such that the portions not illustrated contain hardly any characters of which typical specimens are not available on the plates.

In the new edition of Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, translated from the Spanish by Guy Le Strange (publ. Harper and Brothers, New York and London, 1928), I noticed several errors and offer the following in correction thereof.

Ṭabarī (Annales, i, 2448), in his account of the capture of Madā'in-Ctesiphon, the capital of Sasanian Persia, in describing the booty which was taken by the Arabs, writes as follows:—

“And there (they found) two vessels (of a special kind). In one of these (was found) a horse made of gold, with saddle, tail-band and collar of silver, and in the silver were set gems and emeralds, and the bridle was similar; and (on this horse) was a horseman made of silver covered with precious stones. And in the other (was) a she-camel made of silver with saddlegirth of gold, and helm or rein of gold, and all these were set with gems; and on this (she-camel) was a man made of gold covered with precious stones.”

In search of fresh material for the history of the Saljūqs of ‘Irāq I had the good fortune, during my stay in Istanbul from the middle of September, 1937, till the end of January, 1938, to find and study many MSS., both in Arabic and Persian. I propose to give here a bare inventory of some of these MSS. to bring them to the notice of interested Orientalists, with little or no attempt at scholarly presentation, as my entire time, at present, is occupied with the subject mentioned above. But I hope to contribute a detailed study of the same at a later date.

Brockelmann, G.A.L. Erster Supplementband, p. 353, mentions a Kitāb Masā'il al-ruhbān, ascribed to the famous Ṣūfī Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī, of which a copy is preserved in the Āṭafīya Library in Hyderabad. (Two other copies of the same work, one in Hyderabad and one at Istanbul, are recorded ibid. Nachträge, p. 954.) Through the kindness of Dr. Stapleton I have obtained a copy of the Hyderabad manuscript (described in vol. i, p. 388, of the Āṣafīya catalogue), and this transcript is now deposited in the India Office Library, under the serial number 4585.