I now proceed to discuss in detail the ascertained facts of each reign, inscriptions, of course, being the principal source of information, and in doing so shall permit myself a certain amount of latitude in digressions upon cognate topics. The inscriptions of the greatest value for establishing the genealogy of the royal family are Nos. 3, 8, and 19–22 of my List.

To Sir William Jones appears to belong the honor of first since the beginning of Sanskrit studies suggesting that Pythagoras derived from India the groundwork of his philosophy. His treatment of the matter, however, is inimportant compared with that that the Colebrooke, who discussed the question of the relation of Sāṃkhya and Phyhagoreanism in some detail and with his usual masteryof material. As often, his treatment remained for many years definitive; his arguments were repeated and extended, but nothing solid was added to the foundation which he had laid until in 1884 Dr. Leopold von Schroeder published his admirable study on Pythagoras und die Inder.

In a previous contribution (No. IV, in this Journal for 1908, pp. 997 ff.), discussing Dṛiḍhabala's share in the composition of the Caraka Saṁhitā, I had indicated (ib., pp. 1017–18) what appeared to be conclusive evidence of the truth of one of the two traditional serial orders of the chapters of its Cikitsita Sthāna. That was the order which is shown in column 2 of the Table (ib., p. 1000), and which is adopted by Gangādhar in his well-known Berhampur edition of the Saṁhitā.

Early in the last century it was made known that the chronology of Ceylon, and that of Siam and Burma, derived from Ceylon, places the death of Buddha in B.C. 544 or 543. This result was apparently taken from almanacs or tables, which were found, for instance, to couple the Buddhavarsha or “year of Buddha” 2364 (completed) with some point in A.D. 1822, the year 2372 (completed) with some point in A.D. 1830, and the year 2380 (completed) with some point in A.D. 1837: or else it was derived from verbal statements to that effect. It has been supposed that the Ceylonese chronology places the death in B.C. 543, against B.C. 544 according to the Burmese and Siamese chronologies.

The Kurdish dialect of Persian has so far received very little attention from Oriental students, though it fully merits study, for while actually nothing more than a Persian dialect it has not submitted to the erosion which time brings about in every language, and which is so marked a feature in the development of modern Persian. Nor has it been subject to that admixture of Arabic words which has become so great a part of Persian since the invasion of the early Muhammadan Arabs. As a consequence it has preserved intact many words now obsolete in the mother language.

This one of the most northerly of the Kurdish dialects, spoken by a large tribe of Kurds inhabiting the mountains around Erzerum and to the east towards Bayazid, may be reckoned as one of the most important of the Turko-Kurd tongues on account of the regularity of conjugations of its verbs and richness of grammatical form as compared with other Kurdish tongues. With very few differences it may be classed as a companion dialect to that termed by Lerch and others who have studied northern Kurdish dialects, Kermānjī. A very harsh pronunciation is adopted by the Shādī Kurds, which renders their dialect incomprehensible to the southern Kurd. As in the Kermānjī, the influence of the Chaldean (Neo-Syriac) dialects is here and there apparent, and in a few instances Arabic is employed. Turkish, which might be expected to have furnished a proportion of the common words used, has been very sparsely employed. Considered as a whole, and allowing for differences created by corruption of pronunciation, the dialect appears as a well-preserved old Persian tongue. The Shādi Kurds, in common with some other tribes of the south, claim that their dialect is ancient Persian, and have reserved for it the name of Fārisī.

Amongst the most beautiful and most technically perfect of small Indian bronzes are those Mahāyāna Buddhist figures which are known in considerable numbers from Java, and more rarely from Ceylon. The schools which these figures represent are evidently closely allied; but there has been hitherto little evidence to fix the exact date of particular examples, for Buddhist are extends in Java over the period from the seventh to the fourteenth century, and has, of course, a still wider range in Ceylon.

In the series of papers of which this is the first, I hope to give, as opportunity allows, as full as account as possible of the contents of the Bhakta-māla of Nābhādāsa, a work of which the importance has long been recognized, but the difficulties of which have hitherto repelled serious students. It is acknowledged as the great authority in regard to the history of the saints of the Bhāgavata reformation started by Rāmānuja, Madhva, and other, in the twelfth century A.D., and also, incidentally, as a compendium of the tenets of that religion. Indeed, a somewhat minute study of the work has convinced me that it is impossible to understand the various phases of modern Hinduism as professed by the Vaiṣṇava sects without a knowledge of its contents.

This inscription has been known for a long time. The stone on which it is engraved was discovered by General Court in one of the smaller Stၫpas surrounding the large Stūpa at Māṇikiāla Rāwal piṇḍī District, and was afterwards sent to Paris, where it is kept now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It closed the upper opening of the relic-chamber, the incised face being turned to the interior.

The most important advance in the reconstitution of the early history of India made for many years past has been effected through the demonstration, mainly due to Messrs. A. M. T. Jackson and D. R. Bhandarkar, of the great part played by the Gurjaras in Northern India during a period of nearly five hundred years, extending from about 550 to 1018 A.D.

Hitherto our authentic knowledge of the early history of Tibet has been derived, with one solitary exception, not from any records in the country itself, but solely from the references, contemporary and otherwise, embedded in the imperial chronicles of China, which have been rendered accessible to English students through the excellent translations of Dr. Bushell and Mr. Rockhill. The one indigenous early record we have possessed is the imprint of the treaty edict of “822 A.D. with the Emperor Mu Tsung”, which Dr. Bushell procured at Peking and published in this Journal in 1880. That edict, however, though affording an interesting side-glimpse into the state of civilization in Tibet at that period, and incidentally confirming the Chinese accounts, yielded few important historical data; and no other local source of trustworthy early history has been forthcoming. For the Tibetans, unlike the Chinese, are notably deficient in the true historical sense.

The first modern traveller to enter the oasis of Turfan was a German botanist in the service of Russia. Dr. A. Regel. His account of the ancient sites he had visited in 1879 appeared in Petermanns Mittheilungen, but, owing to the description of the obstacles encountered, the expedition failed to produce any practical results beyond furnishing the proof that substantial and most remarkable ruins and other remains were still existent in that distant land.

(39) I sacrifice to the power, success, glory, and swiftstrength of all those words of the sacred offering. (40) And I Sacrifice to all the waters, in springs, and to those flowing free; (hardly “from the hills”, literally “running”,srao-= Έrao-, “in their flow”).

This fact that in the fourteenth century of our era the Pāṇḍya country with its capital Madura was ruled over by Musalmān princes, is known from the Travels of Ibn Batūta. The Madras Journal of Literature and Science for 1888–9 contained an article by Mrs. L. Fletcher on “Ibn Batūtah in Southern India”, to which Mr. L. White King and Captain R. H. C. Tufnell appended a “Note on the Coins of the Muhammadan Viceroys in Southern India” (p. 55 ff.).

It was, apparently, Sir William Jones who introduced the to the Western world. Among his works is a translation of the twenty stories which form the illustrations to the twenty sections (maqālat) of the poem. In the advertisement prefixed to his translation Sir William remarks that the warmest admirers of cannot but allow that the sententious brevity of his couplets often renders them obscure, and he warns those who do not know Persian that they have no right to judge from his version of the merits of the original. His renderings are indeed admittedly so literal as to be arid and hardly intelligible, and were intended only to assist the student. Probably he meant to include them in his Grammar. One of the stories, however, namely the tenth, was so interesting and beautiful that it attracted attention in spite of the baldness and incompleteness of the translation, and has often been quoted and admired. Hammer-Purgstall translated it into German, and there is a versified rendering in Alger's Poetry of the East, Boston, 1856. I offer the following prose translation of the story and its moral. I have consulted the Persian commentary on the by Muḥammad b. Qiyām, and several MSS. of the poem, but, in spite of this, one or two lines are to me very obscure.

A Passage in the Last Edict of Aśōka, which is explained by, and at the same time endorses, certain statements in the Dīpavṁsa and the Mahāvaṁsa, shows that in the third century B.C. there existed a record, of the time elapsed since the death of Buddha, from which it was known that Aśōka was anointed to the sovereignty 218 years after the death.

The fragments of Hittite cuneiform tablets from Boghaz Keui, copies of which I publish herewith, all contain religious or ritual texts. Many of them must have formed part of the tablets I have published in earlier numbers of this Journal, or at all events of the same series of tablets as that to which the latter belong. No. 1 is in the possession of the Rev. Mr. McNaughten, Nos. 3—5 of the Rev. Dr. G. E. White; the rest are in my own collection. As they were all found before the German excavations were begun at Boghaz Keui, it would seem that the peasants had lighted upon a portion of the library in which the religious texts were kept. This would have been in a temple rather than in the archive-chamber where the political and historical documents discovered by Dr. Winckler were preserved.

This anthology, much the best of all the shorter mediæval anthologies of the kind, was compiled by the Deputy Chungon Fujiwara no Sadaiye, more commonly known as Teika, who died in 1242 in his 81st year. He has inserted one of his own compositions, the stanza numbered XCVII. The editions I have used are the following:—Hyakunin isshiu miné no kakehashi (“Steps to the complete Understanding of the Hundred Poets”), Sensai Hyakunninisshiu Yamato kotobuki (“The Ever-Famous Anthology of the Hundred Poets”), and, chief of all, the Hyakunin isshiu isseki-wa (“One evening's talk on the Hyakunin”—i.e. a brief commentary; the title being a humilific one).

Christian Maximillian Habicht was born at Breslau in 1775. He went to Paris in 1797 as Secretary of the Prussian Legation, and remained there until March, 1807, when he returned to Germany. During this ten years he studied Arabic under De Sacy and a Father Raphael, of Cairo, then teaching Arabic in Paris, and lived for some years in the same house with a certain Mordecai ibn an-Najjār, of Tunis, a Jew apparently from his (Epistolœ Arabicœ, pp. 2 f.; Breslau text, vol.i, p.iii).

The journal for 1903, pp. 545 ff., contained an essay of mine discussing the problem of Yaśodharman-Vishnuvardhana. In the meantime, 1908, Mr. Vincent A. Smith's valuable Early History of India has appeared in a second edition. As it offers an entirely different solution of the problem, it appears to me desirable to reconsider the evidences bearing on its solution.