This splendid vessel of the rectangular i type, dating from about the twelfth century b.c., is in the collection of Dr. N. Wessén, of Stockholm. The design on each of the four sides is dominated by a t'ao-t'ieh mask, the main features being represented by animal forms in low relief on a ground of spirals, “cloud-and-thunder pattern,” executed with wonderful precision.

By gracious permission of His Royal Highness, these four plates are reproduced from the volume reviewed on pp. 209–212. The captions and the following notes are derived from this work.

IX. This is Plate 1 in the volume. The frieze encircling the middle of the vessel “consists of three horizontally broadened t'ao-t'ie masks, each composed of two elongated animals facing one another. The frieze is bordered on either side by a single row of rings. The sunken lines of the relief were filled with a substance which now shows black. In places where this filling has disappeared the bottom is yellow in colour from some shiny pale golden substance. There is no inscription”.

In a brief article entitled Kaṇaiska in the Journal for 1942, pp. 14–28, was published for the first time a Central Asian text touching Kaniṣka, a repetition of the well-known story of Kaniṣka's stūpa. The fragmentary text began with three lines in the Buddhist Sanskrit of Khotan. These lines were then translated and the story continued in Khotanese. In the text the epithet of Kaṇaiska was pointed out in the form cadrra, that is, a Khotanese spelling of Indian candra. The epithet could be recognized as the equivalent of the epithet *tśiän-d'an (later ṭṣant'an) in Chinese references to Kaniṣka, and implied, as it seems, also in the Tibetan play upon the word zla-ba ‘moon’. The Khotanese and Buddhist Sanskrit cadrra (for candra) seemed to decide the problem in favour of candra- ‘moon’.

This neglected subject received a notable contribution lately from Professor Gustav Ecke in Peking. His Chinese Domestic Furniture is, I believe, the first attempt at an organized treatise (9). Existing literature was scanty. From Chinese sources there were sundry entries in encyclopædias, and chance allusions and woodcuts to be found in unexpected places. Specialized Western publications comprised only three portfolios of plates (3, 8, and 27), and several magazine articles (10, 11, 13, and 28), not counting the somewhat fanciful descriptions by eighteenth-century writers, such as Chambers, Chippendale, and the Halfpennys (4, 6, and 15). Last year a book by George N. Kates appeared, which covers much the same ground as Ecke's pioneer work, but is designed more for the general reader (22).

In a recent lecture before the Royal Asiatic Society I drew attention to a curious misunderstanding by Édouard Biot of a passage in the Chou li, as revealed in his French translation of that work. The mistake was repeated by Berthold Laufer, and by later writers; and since it has perplexed many antiquaries and collectors, it should, I think, be noted and corrected.

The importance of the Mishkāt al-Anwār for a full understanding of the thought of al-Ghazālī was long ago recognized by Goldziher. He impressed this on W. H. T. Gairdner, when, in 1911, he was guiding him into the higher reaches of Islamic studies; and in due course Gairdner produced an article on Al-Ghazālī's Mishkāt al-Anwār and the Ghazālī-Problem and a Translation of the opuscule accompanied by a thought-provoking Introduction. On the whole the problems there raised have not received from subsequent writers the attention which Gairdner's discussion of them merits and their own importance warrants.

To those interested in the translation of the Bible into Chinese it is well known that there is a manuscript of part of the New Testament in Chinese among the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum. But no exact description of this manuscript seems ever to have been published, and even its author's name was unknown till lately.

I should like to present some ideas on what, I think, is necessary revaluation of Islamic traditions in the light of our present knowledge; but am at a loss whether to call my conclusions something new and unprecedented, or something old and well known. No one could have been more surprised than I was by the results which the evidence of the texts has forced upon me during the last ten years or so; but looking back I cannot see what other result could possibly be consistent with the very foundations of our historical and critical study of the first two or three centuries of Islam. One of these foundations, I may take it for granted, Goldziher's discovery that the traditions from the Prophet and from his Companions do not contain more or less authentic information on the earliest period of Islam to which they claim to belong, but reflect opinions held during the first two and a half centuries after the hijra.

There are a number of journeys made, or alleged to have been made, in Arabia between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century of which there is no mention, or at least no adequate account, in Hogarth's Penetration of Arabia or in R. H. Kiernan's Unveiling of Arabia. Many of these omissions are due to the little use they made of the Portuguese historians.

Since publishing my general theory of cultural differentiation in Greater India I have read M. Stern's important book L'Art du Champa (Paris, 1942). His new chronology provides a firmer basis from which to operate than was hitherto available; so I propose now to make a more detailed analysis from the point of view of testing my conclusions as to what caused the Cham evolution to take the particular direction it did.

THE origin and history of the pandore and lute in the Near and Middle East is a perennial attraction to musicologists. Especially interesting is its emergence in Greece, where its Oriental origin is ackowledged. It has been surmised that the word πανδορα is derived from the Sumerian pandur or pantur (“little bow”), and it may be perfectly true that in primeval times the pandore would have evolved from a “musical bow”. Still, no such words have come down to us in Sumerian which actually indicate an instrument of music. On the other hand, a somewhat similar class of instrument is to be found to-day in the Ạrmenian pandir, the Georgian panturi, and the Ossetic fandur. Strange to say Nicomachus (a.d. second century) actually wrote ϕανδονρα The pandore itself is delineated in eastern art remains much earlier than in Greece. It occurs on a Nippur plaque (c. 1700), on Egyptian wall paintings (c. 1570), and in later Susian, Cappadocian, Hittite, and Assyrian Art remains. The earliest examples from Greece have been those of the fourth century b.c., as shown in the art remains from Mantineia and Tanagra, both possessing, seemingly, a narrow periform sound-chest and a long neck. A century later, the name πανδορα occurs in Euphorion, who spent most of his life in Syria.

The collections of Tradition compiled by Al-Bukhārī and Muslim are considered to be more authoritative than any other. Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ says: “Their books are the soundest after the mighty Book of God.” Most Muslims consider Al-Bukhārī's Ṣaḥīḥ to be the more authoritative of the two, but there have been some who have expressed a preference for Muslim's. Abū 'Alī al-Ḥusain b. 'Alī al-Naisābūrī is quoted as saying: “There is no book under the face of heaven sounder than the book of Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj.” Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ says that if this merely means that Muslim did not imitate Al-Bukhārī in giving statements in his headings unaccompanied by an isnād, there is no harm; but if it means that the book itself is sounder, it is to be refuted. Al-Nawawī remarks that Muslim's Ṣaḥīḥ has an advantage over Al-Bukhārī's because he gives all the lines of transmission when he mentions a tradition, whereas Al-Bukhārī repeats traditions in different places, sometimes giving one line of transmission and sometimes another. Al-Dhahabī quotes Ibn 'Uqda to the effect that Al-Bukhārī sometimes makes the mistake of mentioning a man on one occasion by his name and on another by his kunya and imagining that there are two men, whereas Muslim rarely makes an error. But Al-Dhahabī shows that he himself considers Al-Bukhārī to be superior, for after mentioning the words of Abū 'Ali al-Naisābūrī quoted above, he remarks laconically: “Perhaps Al-Bukhārī's Ṣaḥīḥ had not reached Abū 'Alī.” In addition to Abū 'Alī, some shaikhs of the Maghrib are said to have preferred Muslim; but the general view is that, while the two are of the highest authority, Al-Bukhārī's Ṣaḥīḥ takes first place.

In February, 1923, I was staying in Lucknow as a member of an official mission from Siam studying Rural Co-operative Credit in Northern India. One morning I was taken by my host on a visit to the Lucknow market, and I brought away with me three “prizes”, the first, a very delicate picture of a Mohammedan Saint, with Koran and rosary, sitting outside a rocky cell, by that famous painter of Shah Jahan's time, Mansūr; the second, a miniature of Nur Jahan, which has since been set in an ivory frame surrounded by sapphires; and the third, a small ivory head, the subject of this note.

For many years the official folk-lore of British India has included a story that Lord William Bentinck once contemplated the demolition of the Taj Mahal in order to sell its marble. The point of the story has varied with the mental climate of the time: at first it was an illustration of Bentinck's supposed meanness; the arch “clipper” would even lay hands on the Taj in order to make money. Later it became evidence of the supposed vandalism of the British in early nineteenth-century India; even Bentinck, the otherwise praiseworthy economical reformer, saw nothing in the Taj worthy of preservation. For many years, after the circumstances of its origin and its early expressions had been forgotten, the story lived on in the realm of verbal folk-lore, but more recently it has been revived in print and its truth largely taken for granted. The story, if true, would be a serious reflection on Bentinck according to the standards of any civilized age, and it is therefore worth asking with some particularity upon what basis of fact it rests.

A part from a few brief notes of a general nature, the Marsden manuscripts were first described in any detail as a collective whole, by Father H. Hosten, S.J., in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, August, 1910 (New Series, vol. vi, No. 8, pp. 437–461) from material supplied to him by Messrs. Philipps and Beveridge. With the transfer of the most valuable portion of William Marsden's magnificent Library from King's College to the School of Oriental Studies in 1918, the Marsden MSS., both those in the British Museum and those now in the School, formed the topic of two articles in the Bulletin of the S.O.S.—the first by Sir Denison Ross in vol. ii, pp. 513–538 (1923), and the second by Father Hosten, S.J., in vol. iii, pp. 129–150 (1925). A few years later Sir Edward Maclagan, who had already published some documents in extract in the JASB. for 1896, catalogued those dealing with Northern India and Bengal amongst the Letters and Reports which he listed on pp. 369–388 of his standard work, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul (London, 1932).

The title of this short essay is not the outcome of any foible on my part towards a chance euphonious coupling of two not ill-suited concepts. The phrase indeed, being short, simple, and succinct, should convey accurately the motive and method which have together dictated the form of this study. Restricted as it had to be, the field of research is still wide, and the flowers that grow therein are not only time-worn, but their types show many and often baffling variations. Among these a choice had to be made, and I have made it, mainly in each case for the contrastive effect aimed at and displayed in the symbols of Then and Now.