Until 1918 only a small amount of desultory work had been done on the prehistory of the Malay Peninsula. Systematic excavating, collecting, and recording was started in that year by Mr. I. H. N. Evans, Curator of the Perak Museum at Taiping, and continued until his retirement in 1932.

In 1941 while in New York City I was fortunate enough to purchase an Armenian MS. which I believe will be of interest to students of Eastern Christian iconography.

When the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain succumbed to internal faction and weakness, the country was split up into independent kingdoms, ruled by the men who for one reason or another were able to take control. In the confused history of these “Party Kings” the Abbadids of Seville played a spectacular role. Their history is known from the admirable writings of Dozy, as is also the history of other families of this period. But the Banū dhī'n-Nūn or Dhunnunids are comparatively unknown. The article by Seybold in the Encyclopædia of Islam is very short, and the references are confined to Maqqarī. There is enough, however, in various writers to give here some account of the family through a dozen generations on the scale which their importance merits. More precise information is likely to be contained in unedited manuscripts, notably the Dhakhīrah of Ibn Bassām, and also in printed books which were not to hand. It is hoped that what may be found elsewhere will add to the present sketch, rather than correct it.

The publication by Benveniste of the facsimiles of all Sogdian manuscripts preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Monumenta Linguarum Asiae Maioris, vol. iii, Codices Sogdiani, Copenhagen, 1940) enables us to check the correctness of Gauthiot's reading of the Vessantara Jātaka (published in JA., 1912, 163–193, 430–510). Since most people interested in Sogdian are more likely at first to try to read the texts so far unpublished than to compare the original with texts already published, it seems convenient to give a list of the comparatively few misreadings or misprints that have been noticed in Gauthiot's edition. I have also thought it useful to confirm the reading of spellings which one would have suspected to be misprints. Thirdly, there will be found a few attempts at explaining unclear words or passages. Here and there I have made use of Dr. Henning's kind permission to quote from his photographs of unpublished texts.

With the Tatar tribe which inhabits the north-eastern region of Poland there is connected a little known page not only of Polish history, but of history in general. Whereas all other Muslim peoples established themselves in Europe as conquerors (omitting the majority of Muslims in Yugoslavia, who are of Serb origin and were converted to Islam by their Turkish conquerors), the Polish Tatars inhabit a region never touched by a Muslim invader, and history teaches us that they began to settle in Poland from the middle of the fourteenth century and already professed the religion of Islam.

Among the Khotanese manuscripts from Tun-huang now in the Pelliot Collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, a fragment of a legend of Kaniṣka has been found. I transliterated these manuscripts during December, 1938, and January, 1939. In the roll numbered P 2787 there are 194 lines of Khotanese text. Lines 1–153 treat eloquently of the character and activities of the king of Khotan, called in line 50 śī kū śrrī vījītta sagrrāma and in line 82 śai-kū miḍā jasta śrrī vīśa' <sa> grrāma 'the noble lord, gracious god, Śrī Viśa' Sangrāma'. A second text in lines 154–194 contains the fragmentary legend of Kaṇaiska. and Aśagauṣa his kalyāṇamitra. The first three lines are written in the now familiar Gostanian Sanskrit, the Sanskrit of Khotan. These lines are then translated, with some variants, into Khotanese in which language the text continues.

Little attention has been paid by Sanskrit scholars to the fragments of Ctesias's account of India since McCrindle brought out a translation of them in the Indian Antiquary, x, 296–323, but, though later classical writers chose their excerpts almost entirely for their “news-value” as fairy tales of a distant and little-known land, it is to be hoped that they will be re-examined when Dr. F. Jacoby's new edition is published. This paper attempts to show that such an inquiry might well prove instructive, particularly with regard to Greek methods of reporting Indian names.

This article consists of a short Introduction enumerating the oldest documents in Modern Persian, and of a decipherment of a deed from Khotan (501/1107) and of some private documents from Bāiyan (6077/1211).

It seems difficult and sometimes futile to try to pursue in this year 1942 the essentially peaceful studies in ancient Chinese writing that have appeared for many years in the JRAS.

The following study of some Hebrew words of magical import is a sequel to my Prophecy and Divination. Its purpose is to supply philological evidence for the existence of sorcery and magic in Israel.

There can be few events in history so little known as Chinghiz Khan's wars with Hsi Hsia. Even in works dealing with the conqueror's life, one finds hardly more than a brief sketch of his conquest of this state. Doubtless this is due to the principal records extant on Hsi Hsia being written in Chinese. Many of these must include material originally drawn from Hsi Hsian documents, but to-day the latter are very rare, and until recently there was no one who could read them. Hence most of what has come down to us is from the pens of enemies, and even this is little known to students of Chinese or Mongol history. Yet in its day Hsi Hsia ranked among the great powers of Asia, and next to the empires of Chin and Khwarizm, was the strongest state overthrown by Chinghiz Khan.

The law books tell how the state should treat its subjects who were not of the Muslim faith, the dhimmis; it does not follow that the laws were observed.

A Translation and full explanation of the complete recension of the Bundahishn have been wanted ever since Anklesaria in 1908 published his facsimile edition, the few Iranian scholars having been occupied with the endless stream of fresh material that has descended upon them since the beginning of this century. This article contains a translation of the second chapter; the first and third chapters were made available by Nyberg, JA., 1929, i, 206–237.

I Remember when I was quite young, one day I heard a boy shout out to his mother:

.

and the mother immediately corrected him by saying, “The rice is not a human being, , you must say ”.

The Director (Sir Kichard Winstedt) introduced this sculptor to a large audience of members of this Society and of the Royal Central Asian Society in the following words: “Those who have seen Dora Gordine's sculpture in London or Paris, at the Tate Gallery or at London University, in Achimoto or Singapore, will know that they are to listen to a real artist. She is not one of those acrobats of art, who tickle a public too amused by novelty to appraise the antics of artists as Dr. Johnson appraised the antics of a dog walking on his hind-legs: ‘it is not well done, but one is surprised to find it done at all.’ Eccentricities in modern art are the now belated relics of revolt from realistic representation. Greek reason, fascinated at discovering itself, came to ignore other faculties of the human spirit, and left the world the doubtful legacy of a specious realism. It substituted for the emotional interpretation of the individual sculptor a cold art of formal rules and ideal types. To-day, too, in spite of the modern reaction against the tyranny of reason even the surrealist thinks too much and sees and feels too little. ‘You are an artist,’ Tchekov wrote to Gorki, ‘you can feel superbly. You are plastic, that is, when you describe a thing, you see and touch it with your hands. That is real art.’ Dora Gordine's mind, like that of every genuine artist, is, in Tchekov's phrase, plastic, so that she is acutely aware of the perfection of modulated planes in Maillol's best work, of the tense vitality beneath the apparent simplicity of an archaic Greek κρη, and of the vibrant rhythm of Hindu masterpieces. Feeling superbly, she can interpret sensations that admit of no equivocation.