A Few months ago I endeavoured to give to an audience in this room some account of an ancient Arabian poet, 'Abīd of Asad, whose remains, recently recovered from the oblivion of the past, are now being printed. I explained the great position which the poet occupied in old tribal Arabia: how his championship in verse was as important to the interests of the clan as the prowess in arms of its men of war; and how in the southern deserts he held a place scarcely inferior to that of the prophet in tribal Israel. It was his business to extol the deeds of the warriors, to inspire the members of the tribe with fortitude and devotion to its interests, to maintain its cause in all contentions, to strike its enemies with biting satire, and to uphold the heroic ideal of conduct to which all should aspire by praise of the worthy, and especially by consecrating the memory of the valiant dead in those noble laments which form the most beautiful and touching monuments of old Arabian verse.

In the Indian Antiquary for December, 1893 (vol. xxii), on pp. 343–5, in a paper entitled “Notes on Antiquities in Rāmaññadesa (the Talaing country of Burma)” there is a discussion by Major (now Sir) R. C. Temple on two inscriptions figured on plates ix and ixa of the series illustrating the paper. These plates represent two glazed terra-cotta tiles found in Lower Burma, each one bearing in rather high relief two female figures elaborately robed and adorned with bracelets, necklets, ear-rings, pagodaspire-shaped head-coverings, etc. The attitudes of the figures differ slightly in the two plates. Above them, in each case, is an inscription in the native character which Sir R. C. Temple has read kwan phrau mā, pa mat Iwat, with the alternative suggestion of phra instead of phrau. He has tried to make sense of this legend in Talaing, Burmese, and Shan, with a further hint that it may possibly be Siamese. As a Talaing inscription he interprets it to mean something which, as being “against epigraphic experience”, he is “loth to accept”, namely, a vague reference to a “wife who is a friend for ever”, a statement which in fact has no particular point. In the other alternative languages he makes it out to be a formal dedication (lwat) of the tiles by a nobleman with a Siamese title and a Pāli name, one kwan phra Mahāpamat to wit. At the same time he adds the caution that the legend does not appear to be correct Siamese.

Among the fragmentary tablets from Boghaz Keui which are in my possession is one with a docket attached to it in Hittite hieroglyphs (No. I). It is the first evidence yet discovered of the contemporaneity of the hieroglyphs and cuneiform, and I therefore give a facsimile of it in spite of its very fragmentary nature. The cuneiform characters were, as usual, impressed upon the clay prior to its being baked in the kiln; the docket was cut after the clay had been baked. As will be seen, the tablet is dated in the reign of Arnuwandas, the last king of the Hittite empire.

Since my publication of the Bharaut inscriptions the Indian Antiquary, vol. 21, p. 225 ff., Professor von Oldenburg has subjected the Bharaut sculptures to a careful examination in a Russian article which Professor Lanman has made generally accessible by an English translation in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 18, p. 183 ff. Professor von Oldenburg succeeded in tracing in the Pāli Jātaka book three of the Bharaut bas-reliefs which had not previously been identified. The references to four other jātakas could not be given in my first list, because at the time when it was drawn up vol. 6 of the Jātaka book had not yet been published. The same volume enabled me to restore conjecturally one of the Bharaut inscriptions, while repeated perusal of vol. 5 yielded explanations of two bas-reliefs which had remained unidentified.

In my paper on the Vedic Ākhyāna I referred briefly to Professor Ridgeway's theory of the origin of tragedy in Greece; the importance of the question and the light it throws on the value of comparative mythology and religion render it worth while to consider that theory in further detail.

In a recent number of the Ep. Ind., vol. x, p. 106 ff., Mr. R. D. Banerji has edited twenty-one Brāhmī inscriptions of the “Scythian” period, of which nine had been already published by him, under the name of R. D. Bandhyopadhyaya, in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, N.S., vol. v, pp. 243 f., 271 ff. We certainly owe a great debt of gratitude to him for making these records accessible, although the way in which he has acquitted himself of his task cannot meet with unreserved praise. I do not undervalue the difficulties which beset these inscriptions. I know that it cannot be expected that the first reading and interpretation of an inscription of this class should be always final. But what may be reasonably expected, and what, I am sorry to say, is wanting in Mr. Banerji's paper, is that carefulness and accuracy that have hitherto been a characteristic feature of the publications in the Epigraphia Indica. It would be a tedious and wearisome business to correct almost line for line mistakes that might have been easily avoided with a little more attention. The following pages will show that this complaint is not unjustified.

Harappa is a village, having a station on the North-Western Railway, in the Montgomery District, Panjāb: it is situated in lat. 30° 38′, long. 72° 52′, on the south bank of the Ravi, some fifteen miles towards the west-by-south from Montgomery. The place is now of no importance: but extensive ruins and mounds, one of which rises to the height of sixty feet, indicate that the case was otherwise in ancient times; and it has yielded thousands of coins of the “Indo-Scythians” and their successors. Amongst other objects of interest from this place, there are the three seals, full-size facsimiles of which are given in the accompanying Plate. The original seals are now in the British Museum, in the Department of British and Mediæval Antiquities in charge of Mr. Read. In all three cases, the substance of these seals seems to be a claystone, hardened by heat or some other means. In the originals, the devices and characters are sunk: the illustrations represent impressions from the originals, with the devices and characters reversed, as compared with the way in which they lie in the originals, and standing out in relief. The animal on A has been held to be a bull, but not an Indian bull, because it has no hump: another opinion, however, is that it may be a male deer of some kind. The animal on C has a tail of such a nature as to suggest that this creature cannot be a deer. On A the hind legs were not fully formed; and it is possible that a similar tail has been omitted there.

In the highly valuable collection of MSS. which Dr. M. A. Stein brought home from his remarkable expedition to East Turkestan, some are found written in the “runic” script we now know from inscriptions in Mongolia and Siberia, and of which the recent investigations in Turfan and the adjacent localities also have brought interesting specimens to light. Dr. Stein has done me the honour to request me to publish the MSS. in this kind of script found by him, and it has been a pleasure to me to do so in this preliminary paper, trusting that in a later, final paper I shall succeed in clearing up several of the mysteries and doubts which I have been obliged to leave unsolved here. It has been of great assistance to me that owing to Dr. Stein's kindness I have been able to make use of the two original MSS., here designated I and II, in one of our public libraries in Copenhagen.

In a recent paper in this Journal on “Chinese Writing in the Chou Dynasty in the light of Recent Discoveries”, I expressed the hope that I should be able shortly to publish in the Journal a list of the characters contained in the Chinese inscription of the Bushell Bowl, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with their Lesser Seal equivalents, and some additional forms besides.