The influence of English law upon Indian history and politics has been considerable and merits further examination. One approach to this lies through a study of the nineteenth century Law Members, of the Viceroy's Council, who held a distinctive position among the high officials of Indian government. They were not normally professional administrators or Indian residents; coming out from England, they brought to bear upon Indian affairs a point of view which-reflected current English conditions far more closely than that of their colleagues. Among the eminent men who held the office were T. B. Macaulay, H. S. Maine, and C. P. Ilbert. Another important figure whose work as Legal Member deserves reassessment is J. F. Stephen, whose short tenure (1869–72) marks an important stage in the completion of the Indian codes. When he was appointed in 1869 he was a man of forty. After Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he had become a moderately successful barrister, who had written on the history and principles of the criminal law. He had also made a considerable reputation as a journalist, and had been a leading light, both of the Saturday Review and of the Pall MallGazette. His stay in India was cut short by financial worries and family responsibilities, but, after he went home, he maintained a great interest in Indian affairs. He wrote on them in newspapers and periodicals, and his attack on English Liberalism, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), was primarily inspired by his Indian experiences. He was the friend and confidential correspondent of Lord Lytton (Viceroy, 1876–80).

The identity of the Chevalier de Lalée, known to Indians as Rustum Jung, has given rise to much speculation. Owing to its fancied similarity with that of Count Lally, he had been called “the younger Lally” till the late Sir Evan Cotton pointed out that he had no connection with that ill-fated general, though a nephew of the General, Michel de Lally, Brigadier des armées du Roi, came to India in the “Regiment de Lally”, but he never made any figure in the history of the French in India.

Arabic authors are fond of recording the help that al-Walīd received from the Byzantine Emperor when he was building the Mosque of Madīna and the Great Mosque of Damascus.

Let us take Madīna first. Balādhurī (c. 868) merely states that “al-Walīd wrote to 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz, his Governor at Madīna, ordering him to demolish the mosque and reconstruct it. He had money, mosaics and marble sent to him and eighty Rūmī and Coptic craftsmen, inhabitants of Syria and Egypt… ”

Writers on the early history of South-East Asia have frequently referred to a country known to the Chinese as (Tun-sun), but so far no one has collated all the available texts to furnish the fullest possible description of this shadowy state. The following notes are an attempt to show that their assembly provides one of the earliest extant accounts of the Malay Peninsula.

Yaḥyā b. 'adī played an important role in the history of Aristotelian studies in Islam. By his extensive activity as translator, as textual critic, and as interpreter, he gave a new impetus to the study of Aristotle. He can clearly be recognized as the head of a distinct school of philosophers, and his influence remained discernible for several generations, especially in the school's tradition of Aristotelian interpretation.

The South-Arabian inscriptions Hamilton 3–13, as well as a few small sculptures, were found by Major the Hon. R. A. B. Hamilton in Šabwat (Ḥaḍramawt) in 1938 and given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in 1952. Both sculptures and texts were published recently in this journal (April, 1954, pp. 43–63) by W. L. Brown and A. F. L. Beeston in a very interesting article on “Sculptures and Inscriptions from Shabwat”.

The important rôle which the Kārimī merchants played in Oriental trade at the end of the Middle Ages has been touched upon by some outstanding orientalists. The last to treat the subject exhaustively was W. J. Fischel in his paper “Über die Gruppe der Kārimī-Kaufleute”, published in 1937 in the series Analecta Orientalia (of the Pontifical Bible Institute) no. 14. The Arabic historical works of the later Middle Ages contain, however, additional material, which partly corroborates and partly modifies Fischel's conclusions. A good many of the notices on the Kārimīs to be quoted in this paper are taken from the hitherto unpublished chronicle Inbā' al-ghumr bi-abnā al-'umr of Ibn Ḥajar al-'Asqalānī (d. 1449), MS. Constantinople, Yeni Cami 814 and the Who's Who of the fifteenth century composed by al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) and called ad-Ḍau' al-lāmi' fī a'yān al-qarn al-tāsi' (Cairo, 1353–55).

It has long been known that the ancient Arab philologists not infrequently misinterpreted difficult words and that, consequently, Arabic lexicons contain a number of unwarranted explanations. The principal reason for such errors was that rare words were often interpreted by mere guess, when the fault lay with the professional philologists. In other instances, certain words were misunderstood and wrongly applied before Arabic philology came into existence and the philologists had no choice but to assign them the meanings attributed by tradition or actually found in oral or literary usage, although when checked by literary evidence, the explanations were often wrong. Words of foreign origin in particular underwent that process on being accepted into the Arabic language but doubtless, indigenous words, too, became so affected.

We are at present witnessing a timely revival of interest in Arabic lexicography. The completion of Lane's Dictionary is planned by the International Congress of Orientalists. A small part of Noldecke's projected dictionary has been printed. J. Kraemer has drawn attention to Fischer's voluminous notes for a new dictionary of classical Arabic. All this fills a real need, but it contributes only incidentally to the study of Arabic lexicography. Indeed, the tendency is now to obtain material for dictionaries from Arabic literature direct, rather than from the old philological works. On the other hand, there are signs that the study of Arabic lexicography as an end in itself, rather than as a source of vocabulary, is gaining ground. There is the new Beirouth edition of the Lisān al 'Arab. Moreover, two theses on Arabic lexicography have recently been presented for higher degrees—that of L. Kopf to Jerusalem, and that of A. Darwish (dealing especially with al Khalīl ibn Aḥmad and the Kitāb al ‘Ain) to London. Still, there is a pressing need for more work in this field, which presents fascinating problems. For example, whence did the Arabs derive their lexicographical technique? What influence had Greek and Sanskrit models? What does European lexicography—a comparatively late growth—owe to the Arabs. These questions are not yet answered and they are not likely to be answered so long as Semiticists and Indo-European philologists work in isolation. Moreover, lexicography is hardly taken seriously as a science even now and little has been written on European lexicography.

Kitāb al-Nafs al-mansūb li Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, published by Dr. Aḥmad Fu'ād al-Ahwāni along with the Talkhīṣ Kitāb al-Nafs of Ibn Rushd (Imprimerie Misr S.A.E., Cairo, 1950), appears to be the earliest extant Arabic commentary of the De Anima of Aristotle. The edition is based on the only known manuscript, in the Escorial Library of Madrid. Though the opening words of the text clearly indicate that it is the translation of Aristotle's De Anima, it is in fact a commentary and not a translation. Hartwig Derenbourg, the cataloguer of the Escorial Library, was misled by the opening words of the manuscript and has, therefore, ascribed it to Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn. Casiri, an earlier cataloguer, was equally wrong when he ascribes the work to Ibn Rushd. Terms and expressions clearly demonstrate that the work is either a maiden attempt of Isḥāq, or done by somebody who preceded him and was not associated with his school. Terms such as (form), (matter), (the final cause) and (the common sense), and the like which occur in the work were represented by Isḥāq and his school by expressions such as , and respectively. It is, therefore, difficult to accept the ascription of the work to Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn.

Turcologists will all be extremely grateful to Mr. Sinor for his paper on Qapqan in JRAS., Pts. 3 and 4, 1954. It is most important that “delousing” operations of this kind should be performed before delusions get too firm a grip on the public mind. With his general thesis that the word is purely Turkish and not Iranian I wholeheartedly agree, but, with respect, I do not agree with his suggested etymology, and I should be grateful for an opportunity to make some supplementary observations.

“The tendencies of Apabhraṃśa in phonetics and grammar help to bridge the gap between typical Prakrit and the modern languages.” A. Woolner expressed this view in 1928 when comparatively few Apabhraṃśa texts had been published and the remarkable continuity of the Indo-Aryan languages was accepted as a fact. Since then their general pattern of development, which appeared with simple clarity to Woolner, has often been obscured by the wealth of linguistic material of the Middle Indo-Aryan period that has come to light.

Homonymy in verbal roots in Sanskrit is a recognized phenomenon. Well-known examples of this are found in such cases as the following: ūh- ‘to remove’, ūh2 ‘to consider’; kṛt-1 ‘to cut’, Kṛt-2 ‘to spin’; gā-1 ‘to go’, gā-2 ‘to sing’; ci-1 ‘to gather’, ci-2 ‘to observe’; dhā-1 ‘to place’, dhā-2 ‘to suck’; bhuj-1 ‘to bend’, bhuj-2 ‘to enjoy’; vṛ-1 ‘to cover’, vṛ-2 ‘to choose’. In the case of vas- we find three homonymous roots (vas-1 ‘to shine’, vas-2 ‘to clothe’, vas-3 ‘to dwell’), and in the case of dā- no less than four (dā-1 ‘to give’, dā-2 ‘to divide’, dā-3 ‘to bind’, dā-4 ‘to clear’). In such cases the various meanings are so distinct from each other that the separation into two or more roots is done without any difficulty, and there is no doubt that we have here different roots, although they are identical in form. In practice, of course, the homonymy is considerably restricted by variation in inflection and derivation (vásati, váste, uccháti, etc.).

In a previous article in this journal the writer gave an account of the forming in the Library of the University College, Ibadan, of a collection of manuscripts representative of the indigenous Arabic literature of the Western Sudan, and from this collection and other sources compiled a list of the Arabic writings of Shehu Usumanu ḍan Fodio, the Reformer, founder of the Fulani empire. From the same sources it has been possible to list by title most of the Arabic writings of Usumanu's brother, Waziri Abdullahi ḍan Fodio.

Edgerton's identification of a reference to Rome in the Mahābhārata deserves fresh attention in view of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's discovery in 1945 of traces of an Indo-Roman trading station at Arakamedu, near Pondicherry, with its train of consequential archæological implications. The passage in the Mahābhārata occurs as part of the “Digvijaya” of Sahadeva in the Sabhāparva (Mah. ii, 28/47–9, B.O.R.I. ed):—

“By means of envoys he brought under control and made to pay tribute the one-footed people, the Kēvalas who live in the forest, the city of Sañjayanti—the Pānḍyas Draviḍas together with the Chodras and Keralas, the Andhras and Talavanas and Kalingas. By means of envoys he made to pay tribute and brought under control Antioch and Rome and the city of the Yavanas,”

In 1953 I was able to purchase an interesting late sixteenth-century Armenian manuscript written extensively on paper and beautifully illuminated and adorned with fine miniatures in colour and gold. This manuscript, now incorporated in my collection of Armenian manuscripts, contains a rare Armenian glossary with a wealth of linguistic and grammatical information and the most complete extant text of the arithmetical tables prepared originally by the great seventh-century Armenian scientist, Anania of Shirak. The part that interests us here, however, is that which depicts a number of different alphabets with the name of each letter transliterated into Armenian script. This part contains among others the alphabet of the Ałuank', the Caucasian Albanians, which, according to Koriwn, was invented by St. Mesrop, the inventor of the present Armenian and Georgian alphabets. For fifteen hundred years the information given by Koriwn remained totally uncorroborated, for not a single character was found on stone, metal, vellum, or paper that could be recognized for sure as Caucasian Albanian.