It is unfortunate that almost all investigators of the origin and development of the Nights have been, more or less, under the spell of that quite modern recension which Zotenberg first identified and called “la redaction égyptienne” (hereafter ZER). In the numerous Egyptian prints derived from the I Būlāq edition (Būlāq, a.h. 1252=a.d. 1835), in the Calcutta edition of the same recension (II Calcutta, a.d. 1839–42), in at least two Beyrout editions (Salhani and Adabīya Press), this recension has attained to the dignity of a Vulgate, and of it most people, even most Arabists, think when they refer to the Arabian Nights. This almost subconscious assumption was the great obscuring element in Lane's mind and with De Goeje in his Britannica article on the Nights. From this point of view it is especially unfortunate that Zotenberg did not publish any further researches; he was evidently on his way to complete freedom of attitude.

60. (a) Shina palatal š corresponds to Sanskrit palatal š () in the following:—

The publication of vol. viii, pt. ii of Sir George Grierson's monumental work, The Linguistic Survey of India, which contains a section on the Shina () language, and the appearance of a short but valuable critique of it by Dr. the Rev. T. Grahame Bailey in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of July, 1921, are immediately responsible for the present essay on Shina phonetics.

The large Chinese Bronze (Plate I) which the kindness of its owner, Mr. George Eumorfopoulos, has enabled the members of our Section to inspect and examine at our leisure, is a specimen in more than one respect of exceptional importance. And being a quite recent acquisition, and not derived from any other European, American, or Japanese collection, it has been judged a very appropriate occasion to introduce it to the notice, and, I will add, to the critical scrutiny, of the sinologic world here represented.

One of the striking differences between the phonetic systems of Indo-Aryan and its parent Indo-European is the existence in the former of the cerebral series of sounds as well as the dental. These appear among the stops, the nasals, the sibilants, and later among the liquids also. Thus opposed to Indo-European t th d dh, n, s z, l r we find in the various Indo-Aryan languages the two series—

t th d dh, n, s *z, l r

ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh, ṇ, ṣ *ẓ, ḷ ṛ ṛh.

Of these, *z *ẓ belong to the prehistoric and ṛ ṛh to the modern period.

This is the title of an article which I have just submitted for publication in the Epigraphia Indica. As the controversy about the various problems connected with the Kushana period of the Indian History has been carried on chiefly in the pages of this Journal, I venture to present a brief note on the new details furnished by the three inscriptions concerned. All the three records were discovered by Rai Bahadur Pandit Radha Krishna, Honorary Curator of the Museum of Archæology at Mathurā (vulgo Muttra). Inscriptions Nos. 1 and 2 were brought to light in the year 1918–19 and 1920–1 respectively, and have been briefly noticed in the Annual Report of the Archæological Survey of India, Northern Circle, Hindu and Buddhist Monuments for those years. The contents of the third inscription were summarized by Dr. Vogel in the Annual Report of the Director-General of Archæology in India, part ii, for 1911–12, p. 125. In this note I propose to publish a complete transliteration of the existing portion of the record and to draw attention to one or two points which escaped Dr. Vogel's notice.

The problem of reconciling man's free will with God's omnipotent will and prescience has exercised the minds of the theologians of those religions which claim to present an almighty and a moral god to their votaries. In the following pages my aim is to show how the Muhammadan dogma of Determinism, despite the revolt of the most vigorous thinkers of the early Muslim church, was developed and consolidated; to indicate in more detail than earlier writers how dependent that reaction was on Byzantine Christianity; and how completely has been put to flight by in the traditions universally accepted as authentic.

All those acquainted with Chinese art and literature are familiar with two fabulous birds, known in Chinese as Fêng-huang and Luan and in Japanese as Ho-ow and Luan respectively. Not very appropriately the name Phœnix has been given to the former in Western nomenclature.

The discovery made in Chinese Turkistan, at the beginning of this century, of a mass of Manichæan fragments, in part remnants of Mānī's long-lost bible, lent a keen zest to the study of that old-time heresy which struggled for world supremacy in religion during the early Christian centuries. As a would-be rival to Christianity and Zoroastrianism Mānī's syncretic creed was anathematized by Church Fathers and Zoroastrian priests alike. The story of how these fragments of the missing Manichæan literature were found at Turfan and elsewhere in Eastern Turkistan is well known to scholars, while those who are interested in the subject are familiar with the work since done on them by specialists.

The Siamese is the southernmost outlier of the great family of the Chinese dialects. Its kinship with them is shown, first, by its monosyllabic vocabulary; and second, by the peculiar use it makes of tonal inflections of the voice, not as a part of its rhetorical apparatus, but as essential elements of individual words, quite as indispensable for their right enunciation and interpretation as are the consonants and vowels that make up their framework. Their kinship is further shown by a singular feature of the content and use of words in both—a quality which is often called their abstractness. To me, however, that term seems wholly inappropriate, for it apparently denies what is one of the most conspicuous features of both languages, namely, their concreteness. The fact apparently is this: In both languages the words are symbols of concepts per se, being wholly devoid of inflectional apparatus to express and define their relations with other words in the sentence. They are, therefore, free to function in any syntactical relation not incompatible with their essential meaning. The very same thing has to a notable degree become not only possible but even common in modern English, as a result of the disappearance of the inflectional and derivational apparatus that formerly prevented nouns from taking on the functions of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and vice versa.

In presenting another instalment of these papers, and after reading the proofs, I am reminded (without being cheered) of the quatrain of an alleged competitor in the Newdigate prize poem on “Nebuchadnezzar”:

“Nebuchadnezzar, when put out to grass,

Like stallèd oxen, or the patient ass,

Said, as he munched the unaccustomed food,

‘It may be eaten, but it is not good.’”

Travancore and Tinnevelly, which form the southernmost end of India, have been very little affected by Islam, and hence have preserved traits of Hindu culture and civilization which are not found anywhere else. The dramatic representations can be divided into three classes :— (1) Indigenous, as the kūttu, āṭṭam, etc., including (a) those acted in temples, and (b) those acted in public places other than temples ; (2) Imported, yātrās ; and (3) Devil-dances and propitiatory dances, such as the Fire-dance, Bhadrakálí-dance, etc.

According to Strabo, xi, 8, 4, the Sakai, a Sythian tribe, built a temple to the Persian deities Anaitis, Omanus, and Onadatus, and celebrated yearly the festival τ⋯ Σάκαια, which the people who inhabited Zêla celebrated even in his own day. The passage affords evidence for the celebration of a festival at Zêla in Pontus as late as the beginning of our era. For some reason Zêla, far removed from the old home of these Persian deities, had long been the seat of these Persian cults, from which fact alone it had any importance at all. Anaitis, or the old Persian Anâhita, “the undefiled,” was a river goddess, and probably identical with the Elamitic goddess Nahunti. This old Iranian deity, Anâhita, was also a goddess of love and beauty, the Venus or Artemis of Persian religion, and consequently an identification with the Babylonian Ishtar, “queen of heaven,” was at once made, as soon as the cults of Babylonia became known to the Persians in the sixth century, and perhaps even earlier. But Strabo, who obviously believed that this Persian festival was connected with the Sacae or Sythians both historically and philologically, gives another explanation of its origin. Cyrus, he says, was defeated by the Sacae and devised this ruse to overcome them. He hastily retreated, leaving behind his camp and all his equipment.

In the month of Rajab, a.h. 987 (September, 1579), the ‘Ulamā of the Mual Empire issued a joint fatwa (maḥẓar), by which, according to Vincent Smith, “Akbar was solemnly recognized as being superior in his capacity of Imām-i-‘Ādil to any other interpreter of Muslim law, and practically was invested with the attributes of infallibility.” He therefore calls it the “Infallibility Decree”, and he interprets it as the turning-point of Akbar's religious life. He regards it as the “momentous innovation which should extend the autocracy of Akbar from the temporal to the spiritual side, and make him Pope as well as King”. By this step he rendered impossible all opposition to any future developments of his religious policy. This limited interpretation of the maḥẓar, however, in the light of the Dīn Ilāhī, seems to obscure the real policy of Akbar.

Although this was one of the first hymns to Ninurta which attracted attention, it seems never to have been published fully. Strassmaier, AV. 7357+8575+6971+7129+8536+7586+8431, provides the text of obv. 1–12; 7303 gives obv. 19. Jensen, from two copies by Bezold, gave in Kosmologie, 470 ff, transcription and translation of obv. 1–13 only (cf. also Jastrow, Religion, i, 149). I have been able to copy the full text through the kindness of Sir Ernest Wallis Budge. I am greatly indebted to Professor Langdon for help of all kinds in editing it. References and other matter in the notes which I owe to him have been marked [L.].

No genuine collection of Rūdakī's poems is known to exist to-day, and in the following article I have attempted to indicate how much of the poetry of Rūdakī has been preserved and how much has been wrongly attributed to him in the Persian Anthologies. Although one of the founders of modern Persian poetry, and the author of a poetic version of Kalīla wa Dimna, Rūdakī's works seem unaccountably to have disappeared at an early date. For although Asadī the Younger in his Lughat-i-Furs quotes more lines from Rūdakī than from any other poet, and although the Persian Farhangs abound in citations of single lines, the anthologists of the sixteenth century already complain that Rūdakī's poems are hard to come by.

The tablet of which I here give a text and translation was given by Col. Stevenson, of the Ordnance in Mesopotamia; to Professor Langdon, to whom I am indebted for much help in its decipherment. It was found at Wannah wa-Ṣadûm, a group of mounds in S. Babylonia, situated on the Euphrates, to the west of Nippur, and a little to the south-west of Daghara, where other isolated inscriptions of the reigns of Narâm-Sin and Nebuchadrezzar II concerning Marad have already been found.

The secret language of the Ḍoms, as of other Indian “Gipsy” tribes, is very unsatisfactorily known. I have made some remarks on it in vol. xi of Sir George Grierson's Linguistic Survey, where I have also given references to such other papers about the subject as I have come across. But very much remains to be done, and we must be thankful for the new materials which are now made available. The compiler of the list says about them:—

“The following is a collection of words and sentences in use by the Magahiyā Ḍoms, who have made Benares their centre or fixed abode. The language is known to wandering Ḍoms in the Panjāb, and also to those who live in the United Provinces. It was apparently unknown to village Ḍoms in Bengal, though the town and city dwellers in some parts of the Province were familiar with it. Most of the words and sentences were obtained from gipsy Ḍoms who visited Benares in 1914, and then settled in the city, where they came under the influence of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, of which the present writer was superintendent. The sedentary Ḍoms of Benares city and the village Ḍoms of the district are acquainted with this argot.

Firita records that Yūsuf ‘Ādil āh of Bījāpūr, the founder of the ‘Ādil āhī dynasty, on learning that āh Ismā‘īl I, Ṣafavī (1502–24), had established the ī‘ah religion in Persia, caused the call to prayer and the ubah to be recited, in the month of Ẕi-’l. Ḥijjah, a.h. 908 (June–July, 1502), in the ī‘ah form, and attempted to establish that faith as the state religion of Bījāpūr. He adds that Yūsuf was the first sovereign in India to make such an attempt. This does not necessarily mean that he was the first ī‘ah monarch in India. All that it means is that he was the first monarch of that religion who attempted to force his people to conform to his own faith.