In a very excellent book on the Shans at Home, recently published by a member of this Society, Mrs. Leslie Milne, it is stated that “the chief source of early Shan Buddhism was probably the Talaings and Cambodians”. This is the opinion of the Rev. Wilbur Willis Cochrane, who at the same time states that it is his conviction that the Tai got their alphabet and early literature probably from the same sources. Mr. Cochrane is an American missionary, who has spent something like twenty years among the Tai and is an accomplished Tai scholar. There is a quite considerable Tai literature, mostly of a religious kind, but with a very creditable amount of folk-tales. Unfortunately there is nothing that throws any light on the early history of their country. Previous to our occupation of the Shan States, as a consequence of the annexation of Upper Burma, the whole of the States had been involved in almost incessant civil war, and for a century before that the wars between China and Burma and Burma and Siam had led to the marching and counter-marching of armies through the hills. The troops were Buddhists, no doubt, but they had very little regard for sacred things, and the result is that most of what writings there may have been on the history of the country perished with the monasteries.

THE Bashgalīs are the inhabitants of the valleys of the Bashgal River and its contributories. Their settlements extend so far as Bīrkot on the Chitral stream. According to Dr. Grierson, their dialect can be taken as the type of the language of the Siāh-pōsh Kāfirs of Northern Kāfiristan. An excellent book on Bashgalī has been published by Colonel J. Davidson, C.B., I.S.C., and the remarks which follow are exclusively based on it. I have also, throughout, adopted Colonel Davidson's writing of Bashgalī words, with the sole exceptions that I have substituted χ for his kh (sometimes written kh), ϒ for his gh (sometimes written gh), ṅ for his ng, and cancelled the underlining of sh and zh.

European science is indebted to Dr. M. A. Stein's industry for the remarkable document here published. It is one of the many valuable MSS. which fell to his lot through the partial acquisition in 1907 of an ancient library discovered, by a Chinese priest, in one of the Buddhist cave temples of the “Halls of the Thousand Buddhas” to the south-east of the Tun-huang oasis, as described by him in the Geographical Journal for September, 1909. Its excellent state of preservation, and the fact of its being written in the clear unequivocal letters of the Manichæan alphabet, renders this MS. a most valuable help to all interested in the study of the ancient Turkish speech in which it is edited.

The recent establishment of a fund in the University of Oxford for the encouragement of the study of the Georgian family of languages may in the course of time attract the attention of British philologists to the Western Caucasus, and an increasing stream of travellers will doubtless find their way thither seeking knowledge, health, sport, and scenery; it is for such visitors that the following vocabulary has been compiled. More than twenty years ago the late Mr. D. Peacock included Svanetian among the five languages of which he published vocabularies in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, but the material was scanty, and a large number of errors are to befound in it. Most of the books on the subject are in Russian, and the script into which the Svanetian words are transliterated is troublesome and is inconsistently used. What is required is an exact record of the spoken language by means of the phonograph, and it is to be hoped that some British student may undertake the task before long. All that is attempted here is to give a starting-point for serious study. As many forms as possible have been included, and no attempt has been made to distinguish the dialects of Upper and Lower Svanetia. The spelling is phonetic as far as may be. The abbreviation G. shows that there are Georgian words strikingly similar, and generally, though not always, having the same meaning; many of such words are borrowed by the Georgian from other languages.

PROFESSOR Nikolsky has been kind enough to send me a photographand copy of a new and important Vannic inscription which he has published, with translation and commentary, in the Reports of the Imperial (Russian) Archaeological Commission, 37. The inscription was found at Armavir. Its importance for the study of Vannic philology, as well as the fact that I believe I can improve upon Professor Nikolsky's translation, induces me to reproduce it here. In continuance of my previous notation its number will be XCI.

MĀWARDI'S chapter on the office of Ḳāḍi in the Aḥkām Sulṭāniyya, ed. Enger, dealt with in JRAS., 1910, p. 761, is followed by that on Walāyat-al-Maẓālivi; the substanceof this chapter is as follows.

The Synonymy of what is well known as the Pāñcarātra is thus given in the Pādma-tantra (one of the 108 Tantras or Samhltās):—

Sūris suhrid bhāgavatas satvatah panca-kala-vit

Having dealt in JRAS., October, 1909, and July, 1910, with the Talaing text of the inscriptions of the Myazedi pagoda at Pagan (Burma), I propose to offer a few suggestions here upon the hitherto undeciphered fourth text of this polyglot record. This text, like each of the others, exists in two copies, on two separate pillars. On the one it measures about 39½ by 13 inches, on the other about 45½ by 11 to 12 inches. I shall call the former A, the latter B, when a distinction has to be made between them. The script is an old form of the Indian alphabet.

IT is with regret that I now find it impracticable to accept as authentic a passage in the Haydarābād MS. which had been welcomed there, (1) because being with that good text, it accredited the same passage in Ilminsky's imprint and in the Mémoires de Baber, and (2) because, however ineffectually, it provides something to fill the Bābar-nāma gap of 908 a.h.

Few people ever give a thought to the origin of the alphabet they use beyond the Latin or perhaps Greek characters, and fewer still are aware that many letters in daily use now have scarcely altered their shapes in the last 3,000 years. This would mean that the inventors have given finality to some letters and all but finality to others. Nothing could be more satisfactory than this, yet the question of the origin of alphabetic writing remains a profound mystery. Many famous scholars have attempted to solve this mystery, have displayed amazing ingenuity and profound learning, yet the result thus far has only been divergent opinions and theories which flatly contradict one another.

The case set out in the first part of this article, pp. 479–96 above, will, it is hoped, make it clear that the Kaliyuga era is not of historical origin, dating from the occurrence of any actual event in b.c. 3102, and running in actual use from that time. It is nothing but an artificial reckoning —(almost as much so as is our Julian Period, beginning 1 January, b.c. 4713)—devised by the Hindū astronomers some thirty-five centuries after the initial point which they assigned to it; that is, roughly, at some time about a.d. 350–400. And it is the principal Hindū, astronomical reckoning (the other being the Śaka era begiṅning in a.d. 78); used in particular —(just as we use the Julian Period)— for the ahargaṇa or sum of days from the beginning of the reckoning down to any given time.

LE numéro d'Octobre 1910 du JRAS. a publié des critiques de M. Farjenel sur la traduction d'une inscription du Yun-nan que j'ai fait paraître dans le Journal Asiatique de Juillet-Août 1909. La place dont je puis disposer ici ne me permet pas de discuter phrase par phrase et mot par mot le texte dans son intégralité; je m'efforcerai cependant de ne laisser dans l'ombre aucun point essentiel; je donnerai d'ailleurs à la fin de l'article une traduction complète de la stèle, ce qui permettra au lecteur de juger des modifications que j'ai apportées à ma première traduction; ces modifications résultent, non des critiques de M. Farjenel, qui me paraissent mal fondées, mais des recherches nouvelles que j'ai faites pour élucider quelques unes des obscurités de ce texte.

This edict is displayed on the western face of the great monolith pillar standing in front of the Jo-k'aṅ temple of Lhasa, the eastern face of which bears the joint treaty-edict between the Emperor Tê-Tsung and King K'ri Sroṅ-lde-btsan of 783 A.D., already published by me in the first article of this series. Like the latter edict it is in bilingual form, Tibetan and Chinese.

In China the corpse of a Buddhist priest is commonly disposed of by one of three methods, viz.: cremation, burial, or preservation by drying.

The chief cause of the undoubted monotony of the Ṛgveda is, of course, its essentially sacerdotal character. In the case of the vast majority of the hymns there can be, and has been, no doubt as to their purpose: they are praises of the gods who are worshipped in the ritual, and the native commentator, whose work, with all its defects, has done much to render the study of the Ṛgveda fruitful, provides us with references to the passages in the Sūtra where the ritual use of the verses is laid down. It is true that we cannot believe that the later ritual really gives us an accurate idea of the employment of the hymns which make up the Saṃhitā: without postulating any very violent change of practice, we can yet readily feel that the ritual has deviated from the form in which it must have appeared when the Saṃhitā was brought into being, but at any rate it is certain that there was a ritual, and that the hymns normally found a natural place therein. All the more interest attaches, therefore, to the comparatively small number of hymns for which Sāyaṇa gives no technical ritual employment, and which have generally a dialogue form, or may legitimately be deemed to have that form. The Bṛhaddevatdā shows that the technical term for such hymns was Saṃvāda, but there seems no doubt that they could also be included in the more general term Itihāsa and perhaps Ākhyāna.

SEVERAL systems of expressing numbers, used in India, have been explained by Professor Bühler in §§ 33 to 35 of his work on Indian palaeography. There is a system, a highly interesting one, which was not noticed by him, because it has not been found used in inscriptions or in the pagination of literary works; namely, that of the astronomer Āryabhaṭa. It has been mentioned briefly by various other writers. And it was considered in some detail by Mr. C. M. Whish in 1820, and at more length by M. Léon Rodet in 1880. Those two treatments of it, however, scarcely suffice to do justice to it; particularly from lacking any table to make its details clear. And it deserves a full exposition, because it is of special interest in connection with two topics which have been reopened lately by Mr. G. R. Kaye; namely, the early use of the abacus in India, and the development of the decimal notation, that is, of the system of the nine significant digits 1 to 9, with the zero, cipher, or naught, used with place-value so that any particular sign denotes units, tens, thousands, etc., or the absence of them, according to its position as written in a row of figures. I propose, therefore, to consider it exhaustively here, but without venturing at present to offer any opinion on the two topics which Mr. Kaye has reopened: I only seek to exhibit fully, with a few introductory remarks about Āryabhaṭa himself, a system of numeration which must certainly be regarded as an important factor in considering them.

It is the aim of the following paper to present to the readers of this Journal the problem of the origin of Chinese writing as it appears at the opening of the historical period in the ninth century b.c., and to give some account of the new light thrown upon the subject by recent discoveries in North China. It is also my hope to show that there are reasons for endeavouring to stir an interest in this question of origin, and some grounds for defining, as clearly as present conditions allow, the main features of what is already known of the problem, and indicating the lines along which fruitful investigation must advance. Especially valuable it should be to investigators of other primitive systems of writing to have a working knowledge of the rise and progressive changes of a script, probably of very ancient origin, certainly claiming a continuous history of 3,600 years, still in vigorous activity, betraying no signs of impending decay. The facts of such a life-history, properly ascertained and appreciated, might well contribute some illuminating sidelights or useful suggestions on analogous inquirics.

NO doubt Dr. Grierson is right in translating the first of these words as “Adorable” (JRAS., 1910, p. 159 f.), in so far as that translation expresses to the devout believer the supreme divinity of his adored God. Nor is there any objection to the view taken by Govindācārya Svāmi in his paper on the Artha-Pañcaka (ibid., p. 591), that, to the same believer, Bhagavat is the perfect God possessed of the five (or six) attributes— knowledge, power, etc. In a later paper (ibid., p. 861), Govindācārya Svāmi shows that Blessed, Perfect, Glorious, or God, anything, in short, to render approximately the content of the native word, would be sufficient in a translation, which is at best amakeshift, and, because it is devoid of the connotation of the original, can never really translate it to the heart. Any merely etymological translation would, of course, be as unsatisfying to a worshipper of Bhagavat as “loaf-holder” would be if offered as an equivalent of our “Lord”.

Chao ju-kwa, in his famous ethnographical work published during the first half of the thirteenth century (between 1205 and 1258 a.d.), mentions, among the one hundred and more countries of Western India (Hsi- T'ien = the Sind of Edrīsī and later Arab writers), that of Nan-ni-hwa-lo, of which he gives an interesting account. This has been made readily accessible to non-Sinologists through a translation by Professor Hirth which appeared in an earlier number of this Journal.