It is usually taken for granted that Marāṭhī literature begins with Mukund Rāj, Jñāneśvar and Nāmdev. These are likely to continue to hold their position as the real inaugurators of the intellectual awakening in Mahārāshṭrā which broke away from Sanscrit and made use of the vernaculars as the literary medium. The recent research which has revealed the fact that these outstanding personalities were not alone in this new departure, has yet to be fully investigated, and the value of the earlier literature which has emerged has to be determined. That the Mānbhāū sect with which this newly discovered literature is associated had a very long and curious history has been known for a good many years, and Sir Eamkrishna Bhandarkar and others had become interested in it, but it is to the late Mr. Vinayak Lakshman Bhave that we owe the discovery that this sect were the guardians from the twelfth century at least of what he calls “an unknown chamber in the palace of Marāṭhī literature”. Of the 500 hitherto unknown authors whose names, he tells us, he has catalogued, and whose works number five or six thousand it is not likely that many will take high literary rank. But to the followers of the Mānbhāū sect who wrote or translated these Gitās and Bhāgavatas so long ago, and who carried the Marāṭhī tongue and their books in old Marāṭhī to Peshawar and beyond, so that to-day in these far-off Maṭhs one can talk to their inmates in that language—to them Mahārāshṭrā owes a real debt. The members of this remarkable sect did more, it would appear, than anyone has hitherto dreamed of to shape the language for literary expression and to make it the channel to its followers of the ancient Sanscrit lore.

The button-shaped seal communicated in this paper was kindly shown to me by Professor A. B. Cook, of Cambridge, who purchased it from a London dealer. The object was seen by the Cambridge professor among a lot of “Assyrian cone seals, etc.”, but the dealer had no recollection of its provenance. Babylonian press seals of the small coneshaped variety are constantly appearing in the hands of dealers in antiquities, and seals of the Indus Valley type, actually found in Mesopotamia, have been acquired through dealers in Paris. There is no evidence that any of the seals found in the hands of dealers have come from India, and the additional circumstance that the London dealer had it among Babylonian seals leads one to believe that this object was found in lower Mesopotamia. The photograph is made from a cast. There is the usual pierced boss on the reverse. The inscription reads:—

Reading right to left, the first sign seems to be intended for the ordinary sign , which does occur in some texts as the first sign. See No. 266 of my Sign List, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, p. 451. The second sign is apparently a variant of No. 113, but I have never seen any variant like it. No. 113 does follow 266 on two seals. To No. 113 I assigned the value ta. The third sign is No. 154, with accent A ('). The fourth sign is the common fish sign, No. 175.

Last season M. Watelin discovered a number of Sumerian tablets at Hursagkalamma in the spur of the great mound north of the temple of Ninlil. These were found in trench C 15, 1 metre below the surface, 3 metres above plain level, and in the Hammurabi stratum. Several fragments have been joined at Oxford, so that the lower half of a large two-column tablet has been completed. The tablet is 5 inches wide (125 mm.) and 5 inches long, originally 10 inches long. This tablet contains that part of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamish which relates to the Humbaba episode. Now it is clear that the lower half of a large tablet published by Zimmern, Sumerische Kultlieder (all from the same period as the Kish tablet) belongs to the same series. This tablet, No. 196, VAT. 6281, has also two columns, and is obviously the first tablet of the series. Zimmern wrote that a dealer sold VAT. 6281, claiming that it came from Dilbat. That tablet is only 105 mm. wide, or ¾ in. narrower than the Kish tablet. The two tablets, therefore, represent local peculiarities observable in local editions of other series.

The question of the Arabian influence on the music of Western Europe has been considerably stressed of recent years. In the practical art, the minstrel class of the Middle Ages not only adopted the actual instruments of the Arabs, such as the lute ('ūd), rebec (rāb), guitar (kaithār), and others, but also the actual musical devices of the performers on them. In the theoretical art, clues in the Mediaeval Latin treatises on music enable us to follow a track which leads us to the conclusion that the teachings and writings of Arabian or/and Mozarabian theorists of music also had some influence on the theory of music of Western Europe.

In 1927 an inscription of the Vannic King Rusas I was discovered by the Armenian Archæological Commission at Nor-Bajazet on Lake Gotcha. Its decipherment has been attempted by several Armenian and Russian Vannic scholars and it has been made the subject of an interesting article by one of our leading Hittite decipherers, Professor Friedrich (Archiv Orientálni, iii, 2, p. 257). Unfortunately the younger decipherers do not always show themselves acquainted with the older work on the subject or with the script and character of other forms of cuneiform. Nor do they always remember that common-sense is a necessary preliminary to any attempt at the decipherment of ancient texts.

[It was well known to his friends that the late Professor A. A. Macdonell had long contemplated the making of a complete English translation of the Ṛgveda. Indeed, he would sometimes point out that a great deal of his work, the edition of the Bṛhaddevatā, the Vedic Mythology, the Vedic Grammar, and the Vedic Index, could be regarded as necessary preliminaries to that undertaking. This was the task he hoped to complete in some five years or so on retiring from the Boden Chair. Unhappily his strength failed him too soon for this to be possible.

Sir John Marshall'S excavations have again brought important results. A new Kharoṣṭhī inscription has been found, which throws new light on the difficult question of the eras used in a series of Indian Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions belonging to the Pahlava and Kuṣāṇa periods. In May last Sir John was good enough to let me have excellent photographs of the new epigraph, for the purpose of editing it in the Epigraphia Indica. In consideration of its great importance, he has, moreover, kindly allowed me to publish a preliminary account in this Journal.

It is at a relatively late date that the writing of history begins in the Arabic literature. The Arabs of the earliest period of Islām seem to lack all historical sense, and their theologians proved entirely hostile to historical studies. The impetus towards such investigations was not given until the second half of the second century A.H., when, under the ‘Abbāsides, the Arabs came into close touch with the Sāsānides, whose political ideas and civilization were accepted by the caliphs of Baghdād. Persian customs, Persian knowledge pervaded the empire and brought forth one of the most remarkable phenomena of history: the subjugation of the conqueror by the conquered, possessed of higher intellectual gifts.

During the past ten winter seasons the Field Museum – Oxford University Joint Expedition has been conducting archæological excavations on the site of the ancient city of Kish, which according to the texts, was “the first city founded after the Flood”.

THE following notes, which are the result of a fresh study of the Aramaic documents from Egypt in Cowley's admirable edition, are here published in the hope that they may do something towards resolving some of the difficulties Which still await a solution in these important texts.

In vol. xxix of the Abhandlungen der königlichen sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Professor F. H. Weissbach published a number of the inscriptions which appear above the figures supporting the throne of Darius the Great on his rock-hewn tomb at Naqsh-i-Rustam, nine or ten miles northwest of Persepolis. Three other tombs of the Achaemenian kings exist at Naqsh-i-Rustam, but they are unfortunately uninscribed. Three similar Achaemenian tombs are found at Persepolis itself, two in the mountain face immediately behind the palace platform and one, unfinished, a little way off towards the south. These tombs, being quite easy of access, have often been visited and described. They have always been believed to be lacking inscriptions. Two, the North Tomb and the Unfinished Tomb, have in fact no inscription, but the South Tomb has a well-preserved trilingual inscription which so far as the writer is aware has hitherto completely escaped notice. The inscription is found above the heads of the figures supporting the throne of the Great King, exactly as in the tomb-inscription of Darius the Great, but in a far better state of preservation.

The formula “Ch'ên is of the Dragon kind”, , ch'ên shu lung, applies to one of the , or Twelve Affinities, according to which each of the Cycle of Twelve Branches has an affinity to one of Twelve Animals. When this Cycle of Twelve Beasts was first known to the Chinese may be uncertain, but pure chance can hardly be responsible for the association in the list of ch'ên with lung, which must, at least, be the expression of a long tradition of affinity. That “Ch'ên is of the Dragon kind”, then, is the text on which this paper is based, and the implications of which are further developed.

Jules Rouanet, the well-known writer on the music of the Maghrib, lamented not long ago that none of the mediaeval treatises of the Western Arabian musical system had survived. This he said, was all the more regrettable because to-day not a solitary practitioner in the Maghrib had the slightest acquaintance with musical theory. The ṭubū' or modes were confused in the various parts of the country. The ṭab' known in Algiers as mazmūm is called dīl in Tlemcen, whilst the mazmūm of Tlemcen is the dīl or māya of Algiers.

The title maḫḫû has been entered in the lexicons as “prophet”, and the Persian-Greek μγος has been derived from it, a derivation now generally abandoned. In the first place maḫḫû = galu-gub-ba, is placed after kalû, psalmist, galamaḫḫu, chief psalmist, munambû = i-lu-di, wailer, lallaru, wailer, CT. 19, 41, K. 4328 A 14–20 = Meissner, Suppl. 21, Rm. 338 Rev. ii, 1–5 = VAT. 10216, iv, 1–5, Meissner, Beiträge 83, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Assyr. Studies, i, 1. VAT. 9558, ii, 32 ff. has three ideograms for maḫḫu (all broken away), and maḫḫûtu, Meissner, ibid., 86 n. 123.

The following are the texts of the four Maghribī MSS. the translations of which appeared in April, 1931. Further, a few mistakes crept into my last article. On page 354, line 14, the last letter under should obviously have been Ḥ and not J, whilst the doubtful word given in the footnote 2 ought to have been . Finally, I regret that a line was omitted from verse 23, on page 364.