Unless the past can be correlated with the present, it is dead and the present suffers from want of a tradition. Hence the need for the critic to define in the language of his age the value of bygone art for his generation. The Society therefore is fortunate when a contemporary artist of distinction has consented to select and comment on a series of Oriental masterpieces to be reproduced in this Journal.

Knowledge of scholarly literature produced in recent years in Georgia is all too little disseminated in England. I was delighted to receive a copy of vol. xiii of the Bulletin of the Marr Institute of Languages, History, and Material Culture, published by the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR (Sahartvelos SSR Mecnierebata Ak'ademia), Tiflis, 1942. This volume contains “A Bilingual Inscription from Armazi near Mcheta in Georgia,” by Professor George Tseretheli, written in Georgian with an almost complete English translation, and with three excellent photographs. The bilingual inscription is in Greek (10 lines) and Aramaic (11 lines), and is one of two inscriptions found at Armazi, 22 km. from Tiflis, in 1940 in excavations under the direction of the late I. Javakhishvili. A report of this discovery was made at the Session of the Scientific Council of the Institute in 1940, and at the first Conference of the Georgian Academy of Sciences on the 1st March, 1941. The Greek inscription was published by S. Qaukhchishvili (Qauχčlišvili) and A. Shanidze in 1941. Professor Tseretheli has analysed the Aramaic inscription, its script, language, and historical significance, and offered a translation. The script which he proposes to call Armazian Aramaic, a new variety of this alphabet; is of great importance for the history of writing in Georgia.

The Greco-Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara has for a long time been of singular attraction for students of Indian art. These sculptures of greyish-blue schist found in such quantities in the inaccessible valleys of the Indo-Afghan frontier, have from the outset been noted for their classical affinities, and many were brought to Europe by art-loving dilettanti. The particular qualities distinguishing them from all other Indian sculpture were duly extolled; they came to be recognized as the earliest examples of new ideas which changed the whole development of Indian art and propagated Western influence throughout the Buddhist world. But the rôle so enthusiastically assigned to them has not remained unchallenged. A younger generation, more eager to discover the truly national qualities of the arts of Asia, maintained that the only reason for this admiration was that on account of their Greek affinities the Gandhara sculptures were less strange to Europeans than Asiatic art proper. They considered Greco-Buddhist sculpture a weak and provincial offshoot of Western art, without much influence in the East, and for the most part of a quality which could not compete with the broad current of the Indian tradition. Even those iconographical innovations with which the sculptors of Gandhara had generally been credited, such as the creation of the Buddha image, were attributed by these scholars to other and more “national” schools. To this day no satisfactory solution of the problem has come forward.

Dr. Guillaume, following Professor Mowinckel, has recently examined a number of passages in the Old Testament in which he suspects traces of magical practices, incidentally throwing light on several obscure Hebrew words and phrases which have hitherto defied interpretation, or rather satisfactory interpretation.

It is unfortunate that I have no copy of this interesting book that is complete or in good condition. I possess a broken remnant (D.C. 45 of my collection of MSS.), blotted, dog-eared, and often illegible, and a book of excerpts copied by a priest in Baghdad. The latter (D.C. 46) is extremely incorrect. Besides these, I have borrowed and transliterated pages from another fragmentary loose-leaved copy, brittle with age. All these manuscripts were illiterate and corrupt, each talisman displayed variations due to miscopying or miscomprehension, so that originally identical texts showed considerable differences. A dictionary-maker, however, may neglect no text, however corrupt, and although the illiteracy of scribes has led me on many a wildgoose chase, the labour has been amply compensated.

The notice of Abū Bakr Ya'īsh b. Muḥammad b. Ya'īsh in Ibn Bashkuwāl, ed. Codera, p. 628, gives his death as in 418 or 419. This confirms the view that Dhunnunid rule began before 423. Abū Bakr Ya'īsh must have reached power about 400: Ibn Kauthar was killed by his orders in 403 (loc. cit., p. 39) while at the funeral of a certain Qushairī (not the mystic) in 400 Ibn Ya'īsh, presumably Muḥammad the father, took the prayers.

In recent years the advances made in the study of nomad history have done much to dispel the popular misconception of Chinghiz Khan. Carried away by the great conqueror's feats of arms, writers have frequently treated him as a political phenomenon, unique and apart from the current of history to which he properly belongs. In reality his career constitutes the most outstanding chapter in the history of the nomads of Northern Asia. Surpassing the most famous of his predecessors, he outstripped the greatest of the Hsiung-nu and Turkish rulers and left behind a name that is a household word from China to the Danube. Of all his exploits, none has impressed the Occident so much as his invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire. This, with its tremendous consequences for the world of Islam and Eastern Europe, has tended to draw attention away from his wars in China. Also it is only since the labours of M. Pelliot and other distinguished Sinologists that many valuable Chinese documents on Chinghiz Khan have become known.

It is uncertain when Islam began to penetrate the “western Sudan”: for a review of the evidence, reference may be made to the earlier chapters of Bovill's Caravans of the old Sahara. That the age-old north to south and west to east trade routes (carrying outwards gold and slaves, inwards cloth and manufactured articles, internally dates and salt as the main articles of commerce), provided the vehicle can be in little doubt, as also that, by the fourth century a.h. if not earlier, appreciable Moslem influence had begun to work in the area shown on modern maps as northern Nigeria. In this area Arabic is not a tongue spoken, save in dialect by the numerically insignificant tribe of Shuwas in the northeast. But with the spread and pre-eminence at first cultural and later political of Islam, written “classical” Arabic, which provided the only means of a literary education became the medium of diplomacy, commerce, and correspondence. This position it maintained until a few years ago, suggesting a parallel to the use of Latin in medieval Western Europe. Yet, so far as is known, although original works were produced farther north in the Sahara proper, until the “reforming” Fulani jihad at the end of the eighteenth century a.d. (active operations began 21.2.1804), few original compositions in Arabic emerged. The stimulus of this jihad appears, among other results, to have evoked the nucleus of an original indigenous Arabic literature, none of which has been printed or translated, save a few historical documents.

The only Pai. quotation connected directly with the Bṛh. is given by Mārkaṇḍeya (seventeenth century): Bṛhatkathāyām kupaci pisāḷam (Grierson, EPG., 134). Keith, HSL., p. 269, observes, “We really cannot be sure that we have a single relic of the Bṝhatkathā, still less that so late a grammarian as Mārkaṇḍeya actually had the text before him.” Pisālaṃ, moreover, is a neo-Indian form, which normally would not occur before the twelfth century, for the words in AMg pisalla (PG 595) and in Pkt. pisalla (Hem., i, 193) are normal Mid-Indian as contrasted with Mar. pisāḷeṇ “madness”.

The earliest Malay literature extant belongs to a time five hundred years ago, when in spite of having embraced Islam the Malay still cared enough for the Mahabharata and the Ramayana to translate them into a vernacular already full of Arabic loanwords. In addition he borrowed from India folk romances tricked out with motifs and descriptive passages from the two great Hindu epics. For example, in one such romance, the Hikayat Parang Puting, when the fairy lover “burning as if he would set fairyland on fire” is rejected by his mistress, he tosses sleepless until “the cocks crow, the birds of paradise sing in the sky, the parrots chatter in the angsoka trees, parroquets on the boughs of the nagasari and mynahs on the chempaka trees, and a drizzle of rain makes all the flowers bloom”. The Indian genius, like our own, will readily sentimentalize landscape to accord with human moods. But turn to the Malay version of a scene in the garden at Hastinapura that “astonished the moon by its beauty”:—“about midnight was seen a portent of the city's imminent doom. It was utterly still and the moon looked like a lovely woman peeping from behind a door. Gentle rain fell and a light breeze stirred in the distance. There were banks of clouds of all shapes and the birds were restless, flying here and there like a man with two wives.” So far as I know that last simile is a gloss by the observant, cynical Malay. In modern jargon, the Indian is an introvert, the Malay an extravert.

Konow's “The Home of Paiśācī” (24 pages) was printed in ZDMG., 1910, and Grierson's reply (38 pages) in ZDMG., 1912. Konow concluded that “the Paiśācī described by Prakrit grammarians was based upon a dialect spoken in and about the Vindhyas, and perhaps further to the south and east” (p. 118). Grierson believed that “the home in India of the Piśācas was in the North-West of India, where these (the ‘modern Piśāca’) languages are spoken, and that— the nidus of Paiśācī Prakrit was also in the North-West” (p. 85). The theories of previous scholars as stated by Konow and Grierson were that Pai. was a hill dialect (Lassen), a low Prakrit spoken by Dravidians identifiable with Apabhraṃśa (Hoernle), a Prakrit of the North-West (Pischel), and (the Pai. of Guṇāḍhya, author of the Bṛhatkathā only) based upon an Aryan language of the north-west or west, but spoken by non-Aryan peoples (Lacôte).

Considerable obscurity surrounds the introduction into Islamic thought of the orthodox doctrine that it is God who “creates” the acts of man, whereas man merely “acquires” them (kasaba, iktasaba). The doctrine is sometimes attributed to al-Ash'arī, but in his Maqālāt al-Islamīyīn he himself frequently uses the term in his accounts of the views of other writers. This paper examines the various uses of kasaba and iktasaba in that work to see what light is thrown on the origin and development of the conception.

In Baghdad of al-Ma'mūn's time there appears to have been a degree of intellectual enterprise, especially in the field of natural science, scarcely attained at any other period of Islam. The names of Muḥammad b. Mūsā al-Khwārizmī and Muḥammad b. Mūsā b. Shākir are well known among those which made the Caliphate of al-Ma'mūn, from this point of view, so celebrated in later times. Recently, while investigating the history of the Khazars, I was interested to see that al-Khwārizmī is credited by al-Muqaddasī (ed. de Goeje, p. 362) with a visit to Khazaria, and following this up to find that Suter (“Mathematiker, Nachträge,” p. 159, in Abhandl. zur Gesch. der math. Wissensch., vol. 14, 1902) thought that Muḥammad b. Mūsā b. Shākir must be meant. Elsewhere also Suter found confusion between the two names. It occurred to me that both names stood for one person, and in what follows various considerations are raised and some new material cited bearing on this possibility. It is not claimed that the identification is made out, but that it is worth considering.

Grenard has said, “it is largely because of human nature's delight in superlatives, that the world's famous captains have always been given perfectly fabulous hosts. Great generals must have huge armies. The names of Genghis Khan (Chinghiz Khan), Timur, Alexander, and Xerxes mount like wine to the brain of the historian. His figures become figures of speech: ‘one hundred thousand’ becomes his minimum. He soon leaps to ‘one million’. He does this with a sense of relish but also because he knows that his reader will tremble with pleasurable awe at the passing of a conqueror who leads countless warriors.”

In 1932 my friend Professor P. Pelliot handed to me eleven photographs of the Persian documents discovered at Bāmiyān. The originals must have been brought to Paris by the French Archæological Mission to Afghanistan, but I understood that they were to be returned to Kabul.

I am not clear as to what Professor Driver's exact position is. On the last page of his criticism of my paper on this subject, he says that “the majority of additional passages [in the O.T.] in which witchcraft is suspected are almost, if not quite, all susceptible of alternative explanations”; while on p. 6 he is good enough to say that some of my suggestions “seem eminently convincing”. As they all had to do with magical terms I cannot reconcile his statements.

The romance of the calendar is the history of 3,000 years of human effort to fix definitely the equinoxes and to harness the solar year to the lunar months. Our European calendar has fixed the equinoxes, but has abandoned wholly the lunar months in the struggle. India, however, has lunar months and a solar cycle. She also has a fifteen-day fortnight as well as a seven-day week. Let us first examine India's week.

I Have no space to relate the early history of Jhansi. Before her marriage, the Rani's name was Manubai Tambe. Her father, Moropant Tambe, was a Karhad Brahman from Wai in the Satara district. He obtained employment with the last Peshwa Bajirao II, and through his influence married his daughter to Gangadharrao Newalkar, the Raja of Jhansi, who was of the same caste as himself. According to Indian custom, Manubai thereafter changed her first name to Lakshmibai.

Av., x, 2, 8 c, d, and 26 c, d, taken together, read: Citvā cityaṁ hanvoḥ puruṣasya divaṁ ruroha hatamaḥ sa devaḥ? Atharvā … mastiṣkād ūrdhvaḥ prerayat pavamāno'dhi śīrṣatas, literally, “Who is that God who, having piled a piling in the Person's jaws, ascends to the sky? Atharvan … the Purifier, sent (them) forth upward from the brain, from the head.” What is “piled” and what “sent forth”?

In chapter 15 of the Ain-i-Akbari (translation, ii, p. 88), Abul Fazl says that when Khwaja Abdul Majid Asaf Khan was Vazir the jama-i-witayat was raqami. The late Mr. Moreland in The Agrarian System of Moslem India (App. E, pp. 238 sqq.) came to the conclusion that jama-i-witayat meant the valuation of land revenue, but he was unable to explain the term raqami with certainty. Its meaning here is of importance in the history of land revenue assessment, and various guesses had been made to explain it. Jarrett (Ain., trs., ii, p. 88) thought it meant “estimated”, while Beveridge (Akbarnama, trs., ii, p. 402, n. 2) suggested that it might refer (a) to the system of arithmetical notation known in India as raqam or siyāq which is based on contractions of Arabic names of numbers, or (b) to assessment depending on the kind of produce, raqam being used in the sense of description.