Unfortunately very little is known about the life and personality of the author of the Kitâb al-muḥabbar. Abû Ja‘far Muḥammad b. Ḥabîb, al-Hâshimî al-Baghdâdî as he is usually called, was a mawlâ of the family of Muḥammad b. 'Abbâs b. Muḥammad al-Hâshimi. Ḥabîb is stated to be the name of his mother, a freed woman of the Hâshimite family, his father's name being unknown. However, in the Fihrist and by Yâqût who quotes the Fihrist he is called Muḥammad b. Ḥabîb b. Umaiya b. 'Amr. The date and the place of his birth are equally unknown and the only date we know for certain is that of his death, which occurred in Sâmarrâa in the year a.h. 245 (a.d. 859/860) in the reign of al-Mutawakkil. All the sources agree about this date, some adding the month, Dhu'l-Ḥijja, and the day, namely the 23rd of this month.

The high esteem in which Bishr b. abī Khāzim is held by the native theorists and critics has been the main motive that induced me to collect his verses. The widely scattered quotations of his work present still better proof of the æsthetic merits which his poems held for the Arabs than the favourable judgment which an authority such as al-Aṣma'ī passed upon him by inserting him into the ranks of the fuḥūl. Four of his qaṣīdahs have found their way into the Mufaḍḍaliyyāt (ed. Lyall, poems 96–9); six more are contained in the anthology of Hibatallāh b. al-Shajarī, known as the Dīwān mukhtārāt shu'arā' al-'Arab (lithographed Cairo, 1306, pp. 65–81). Hartigan, who has tried to establish Bishr's biography (MFO., i, 284 ff.), mentions his fragments (loc. cit., 293), claiming a knowledge of 131 verses belonging, in his opinion, to thirty different poems. He does not, however, name his sources. He obviously had the intention of making an edition himself, but this never appeared. From the standpoint of modern literary history, the work of Bishr has the special interest of permitting a deep insight into the formation of poetical schools in ancient Arabia. To provide a solid foundation for any such investigation, a complete edition of his poetical remains has proved indispensable. In spite of the somewhat unfavourable circumstances under which I was obliged to complete this collection,

This manuscript is written in the rather inelegant “Bihari” hand, which C. Stewart quite properly described as “a branch of the Cufick”. The scribe has used a curious colour-scheme for each page, writing line 1 in blue, line 2 in red, lines 3–6 in black, line 7 in red, line 8 in blue, line 9 in red, lines 10–13 in black, line 14 in red, and line 15 in blue: the garish effect is further accentuated by the use of gilt ornaments to mark the verses, sections, etc., and by a minute Persian interlineary translation in red ink. There are rather crude ornamental panels on foil. 1–2, 199–200 (beginning of S. xix), and 412–13. The pages are somewhat damaged by damp, and some have been torn and inexpertly mended. The binding is Indian, of about 1830.

It is clear then that the ships plying in the Arabian Sea in 1250–1350 were structurally weak. The question whether this feature persisted until 1500 must be answered almost exclusively from the early Portuguese literature. It is very voluminous; most of it is either badly indexed or not indexed at all; and I have not been able to search it all through, but have looked only in the likely places. My collection of passages may thus be incomplete, while those I have found are mostly fragmentary, and to interpret them itis necessary to have a general view of the course of shipping in the Arabian Sea.

A Glance at the recently published African Native Music: An Annotated Bibliography (London, 1936), will reveal the fact that early references to the music of negro and negroid peoples are rare. Indeed, in this very useful bibliography no work earlier than the seventeenth century is quoted. The truth is that many early references have been neglected. It may be admitted that these neglected references occur in Arabic works, but most of these have been translated into European languages, so that they are available to the general musicographer.

Before publishing, with a view to further study by scholars, the available text or texts in this language, it may be advisable to supplement the notes previously contributed to this Journal (JRAS., 1926, pp. 505–6; 1928, pp. 630–4) by a few further observations.

The following three qmahia are all inscribed on a long, narrow slip of yellowed Persian paper originally kept in a metal tube and worn by the owner. It is number 33 of my collection. The list of copiers together with their genealogies which usually ends such documents is missing and the writing is poor. The scribe makes mistakes, for instance, being unfamiliar with the word lilipiatha he writes at first “liliatha piamana” (nonsense), then several times “liliatha”, but becoming convinced at last that he is mistaken, he transcribes thereafter lilipiatha as written in the roll from which he copied. He occasionally omits a word though it is obvious that he intended to write it. In such cases I have inserted what is missing in brackets. Another peculiarity is that the laqab or worldly name of the person for whom the phylactery was written is given as well as the religious or magical name. In most magic documents the latter alone is given. From the laqab, Shabur br Dahba, it may be deduced that the owner was of the Iranian group of Mandæans who dwell on the banks of the Karun River.

The tablets published here for the first time belong to the British Museum and to the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. I am indebted to Mr. Sidney Smith for permission to publish the British Museum tablets and to Dr. L. Legrain for permission to publish the tablet in the Pennsylvania University Museum.

H. Ritter has referred again to the Arabian manuscript Tübingen Weisweiler, nr. 81, in Islam, 21 (1933), p. 91. It contains the only copy hitherto known of the oldest mystic book on the subject of love, the k. 'aṭf al-alif al-ma'lūf 'alā' l-lām al ma'ṭūf of Abū'l-Ḥasan 'Alī b. Muḥammad al-Dailamī. The year of al-Dailamī's death has hitherto not been established; he was a pupil and the rāwī of the well-known author on mysticism, Abū 'Abdallāh Muhammad b. Khafīf (died 371 h. = a.d. 981), therefore probably one of the older contemporaries of Ibn Sīnä (died 428 h. = a.d. 1037). A year ago, Dr. Arberry kindly drew my attention to the fact that this manuscript contained some quotations of ancient authors which could not be traced and which might be worth considering. The opinions of the astronomers, scientists, and on love are discussed in the first part of the book; the passage on the scientists (32b 7–33b 9) is specially interesting, as it offers two hitherto absolutely unknown fragments, one of the last century of the Alexandrian-Greek literature, the other very probably of a lost dialogue of Aristotle.

Certain periods of Indian history present extraordinary difficulties to the scholar who would deal with them, because he should be equally expert inso many different languages and literatures, and no one in practice can be a specialist in all. This is particularly true for the centuries when the Greeks were a force in the land. Incomplete and scattered statements from Greek and Latin historians and geographers have to be dovetailed in with the stillmore imperfect information to be derived from Sanskrit and Pali literature, as well as with inscriptions and coins; and in addition Chinese reports haveto be reckoned with. Hitherto this period has been mostly treated from the Indian angle and, though much use has been made of the classical authorities, that use has not been accompanied by adequate critical knowledge of the sources. We Indologists have therefore every reason to be deeply grateful to Dr.Tarn, whose recently published Greeks in Bactria and India, the fruit of many years' labour, explains authoritatively the bearing of the Greek evidence and enables us for the first time to see the history of the age as a coherent and intelligible whole. In carrying out his task, he has naturally had occasion to draw deductions from the Indian material, for which he is dependent on second-hand information. Now, while I have no desire spill ink on so useless a matter as purely destructive criticism, I am of opinion that some of his inferences are based on misunderstanding of the evidence from this source and will not stand the test of critical examination.

The following article is based on a paper that was read to the Christian Orient Section of the Twentieth Congress of Orientalists in Brussels, September, 1938.

The most popular instrument of music with both the Arabs and the Persians during what we term the Middle Ages was the lute. It was to them what the lyre and cithara were to the Greeks of old. At the same time it was not an instrument of the people. It was the instrument of the professional musician and all music theory was made conformable to its technique.

Though much has been written on the Jātakas or Buddha's Birth-stories, there is no consensus of opinion as yet about the exact signification of the term Jātaka as employed in Buddhist literature. One may correctly say, no doubt, with the late Professor Rhys Davids that the Jātaka proper is atītavatthu or the “story of the past”. It is precisely in this sense that the Bharhut labels designate many of the illustrations. Though this is generally the case with the Jatakas, Professor B. M. Barua contends for a definition of Jataka which embraces also the paccuppanna-vatthu, or the “story of the present”. He points out that according to the Culla-Niddesa, a work of the Pāli Canon, which cannot be dated earlier than the third century b.c., the term Jātaka is obviously applied alike to the story of the present and to that of the past, the undermentioned four Suttantas being mentioned as typical examples of Jātaka:—

(1) Mahāpadāniya.

(2) Mahā-Sudassanīya.

(3) Mahā-Govindiya.

(4) Maghādeviya.

In the 38th section of his Itqān the polygraph Suyūṭī furnishes a summary of a monograph called al-Muhadhdhab fī mā waqa‘a fi'l-Qur'ān min al-mu‘arrab, in which he dealt with the question whether the Qur'an contained any foreign words, and if so, to what language they belonged. The orthodox felt some difficulty about admitting the existence of such an element in the language of the Sacred Book, which claims to be in perspicuous Arabic; it was, however, difficult to maintain that the proper names which occur in the volume were all of Arabic origin, and certain other words have an obviously foreign appearance. Suyūtī himself compromises by admitting in such cases the foreign etymology, but maintaining that the words had received Arabic naturalization.

Some twenty-four years ago there was carried on a high and formidable argument between two Professors of Chinese concerning the rhinoceros and his Chinese name. In the end each contestant remained, as is usual in such literary warfare or “incidents”, of the same opinion still, while the third parties to the dispute finding their minds in some confusion on the matter, concluded that either Professor A was in the right, or else, perhaps, it was Professor B. And so the question rested for some years, and sleeping dogs were allowed to lie. But in due course An Yang in the Province of Honan surrendered its long hidden store of bone and tortoise-shell, inscribed with archaic characters. And on the discoveries and problems thus presented we have been browsing ever since. Among these novel forms are two, each of which is partly one and partly the other. Discoveries, because though written forms do exist, these do not descend from the archaic figures under discussion. Problems, because the equation of certain bone pictures with the exact identity of the quadrupeds indicated in the inscriptions, has hitherto been disputed or equivocal. The bone figures of both these novelties display beasts of large bulk, both have horns, and both are furnished with tails, carefully marked by trifid tufts by the scribe. In the recording entries both follow a word chu, meaning to chase, and those who hunted the quarry were the Yin Sovereigns of the time. Where then is the difficulty in identifying the particular species of Big Game hunted by the sporting rulers of the Shang-Yin line ? Briefly, the horns in each case have been a dilemma hindering full assurance of our conclusions

THE origin of this note is to be found in a passage in Mr. C. N. Parkinson's Trade in the Eastern Seas (Cambridge, 1937), where, in connection with the Portuguese enterprise in the East, the suggestion is made that Asiatic seamen were deterred from rounding the Cape by want of courage rather than technical equipment. The passage is as follows (p. 6).