THE blet illustrated in Plate I was bought at Kûfa and the seller declared that it had been discovered in the neighbourhood, a statement that can doubtless be accepted as true, for there would have been no inducement to bring such an object from a distance for sale at a place so stagnant as Kûfa is now. As affording at least a fairly early example of Kûfic writing coming from the birthplace of the script, it appears worth recording in the absence of other specimens, notwithstanding that it is not marked with a date. Mr. Gerald Reitlinger, who acquired the tablet in 1931 when he was at Kûfa for his exploration of Ḥîra, has been so good as to supply the photograph for publication.

In the British Museum there is a gold coin issued by the Zanj rebels, hitherto inedited, and consequently of sufficient historical importance to warrant special publication. There is, so far as the present writer is aware, only one other coin (also in gold) surviving as a witness of that disastrous Slave Revolt which is estimated to have cost over 1,000,000 lives. This latter coin was published by Casanova in the Revue Numisrnatique (1893, pp. 510-516) and is now in the Paris Cabinet. By kind permission of the Conservateur I have been enabled to have it photographed. The mint, in both instances is the same, but the specimen in the British Museum is three years earlier in date, and preserves for us a more complete portion of the peculiar reverse marginal legend, that enables us to emend to a great extent the conjectural rendering suggested by Casanova in his article above mentioned.

The last few decades have seen the publication of several hitherto unedited Arab sources relative to the history of the 'Abbāsid empire in the tenth century—such as Kitāb ta'rīkh al-wuzarā' by Hilāl aṣ-Ṣābi, the volumes of Miskawaihi's Kitāb tajārib al-umam, and at-Tanūkhī's Nishwār al-muḥāḍarā—that are a veritable storehouse of information on the social, economic, and political situation of that period. These works have revealed a completely new world to us: they show us, so to speak, the back stage of tenth century 'Abbāsid administration and we see the governmental machinery with all its ramifications in action.

The language specimen here reproduced was brought in to me while in the Darjeeling neighbourhood in 1931, having been taken down in the recently revived Limbu alphabet by an educated Limbu, by name Iman Singha Chemjong, direct from the dictation of the speaker himself. Though pressure of work on other languages of the “pronominalized” group prevented my seeing the actual speaker, who Was off in another part of the hills, there is no difficulty in placing the dialect with its nearest relatives in the Linguistic Survey. It is, without doubt, a form of Rungchhēnbūng, and a near relative of Wāling. To the former the Linguistic Survey was able to devote, through lack of material, only some two pages, to the latter, for the same reason about a page and a half, no specimen being available in either case. I, therefore, give what follows as a small supplement to our knowledge of this little-known form of speech.

The fact seems strange that thirty years elapsed between the known discovery of inscribed bones and tortoise shells near An-yang and the first systematic exploration of the site. Towards the end of 1928 digging was begun by an expedition sent by the National Research Institute of History and Philology, and partly financed by the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution. The work suffered from obstruction owing to the prevailing unrest; but several times it has been resumed, and three volumes have appeared under the title Preliminary Reports of Excavations at Anyang. These give interim accounts of the varied results which provide important contributions to history and archaeology.

Von Soden, Die Akkadischen Synonymenlisten, 1, iii, 7, has lùgal-nu-giš-šar = šá-an-da-na-ku, after lùnu-giššar = nu-ka-ri-bu “gardener”. VAT. 9558 Rev. i, 23 has (ša-an-dan) = šá-an-da-na-ku, after nu-giš-šar = nukaribu. Meissner, Beiträge, i, 85, n. 77 is to be corrected. This is not šandabakku “librarian”. šá-an-da-na-ak kirî ṣi-ḫa-ti “The gardener of the garden of desires”, Ebeling, KAR. 158, p. 274, 35. So correct JRAS. 1921, 188, 35; Ebeling, Berliner Beiträge, i, 3, p. 24, 35. The early form is GAL-NI (sa-an-ta-na) = sandanaku, RA. 21, 178, ii, 15; earliest occurrence Dél-Per. 14, 121, No. 88, ii, 1, where Legrain fixed the meaning. GAL-NI, CT. 10, 49, 12247, 5–6; RA. 21, 24, No. 26, 5; YOS. i, 12, iii, 4 (early text); ZA. 29, 79; VS. 16, 85, 8–12; 118, 6; Reissner, TU. 12, iv, 6; other references, p. 10. See Dossin, RA. 21, 182. Strass, Warka, 48, 10. GAL-KAK only in late texts, YOS. vi, 10, 11; i, 45, ii, 27; JRAS. 1917, 724, 20; Strass, Nbk. 22, 12; 72, 14; Sidney Smith, Senecherib, 1. 54. KAK is, therefore, an error for NI. [See also Landsberger, ZA. 41, 189.]

THE archaic Chinese bronze, which is the subject of this article, is in the collection of Captain the Hon. E. G. Spencer-Churchill. It belongs to the class called chüeh, which, among the ritual wine vessels, has the smallest capacity. A Chinese tradition assigns the origin of the peculiar shape to the form of a bird's head, and some support for this view is derived from supposed pictograms which are accepted as having been used to write chüeh in archaic script. On the other hand, certain pottery vessels, found recently at Hsiao-t'un , in Honan, the site of a late Yin capital, suggest a more plausible explanation. The place is famous as one where the inscribed bones first came to light about 1899, and often afterwards it has been claimed as the source of many ancient objects offered for sale.

Sir Charles Bell has given in this Journal (July, p. 710) a detailed account of this important book on Tibet, which, though already edited in Italian by Puini, has remained for many years insufficiently known. It is not, therefore, my purpose to write a new review of the book.

When Griffini published an account of the latest acquisition of a “collection of South-Arabian MSS.” by the Ambrosian Library, Milan, the distinguished orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher, to whom oriental scholarship is indebted for his able researches on the doctrines and history of the Isma'īlīs, welcomed the news, for most of the information on the subject of the Ismā'īlīs he and his forerunners were able to communicate to us was derived either from inadequate sources or from the anti-Ismā'īlī polemical literature. Similarly, Professor Louis Massignon expressed the hope that modern scholars would throw further light on the history of the Ismā'īlīs and their doctrine by study of this literature.

In all ages there have been puritans who have looked upon “wine, woman, and song” as things to be avoided. In the East especially, and it was in the East that the phrase was born, the proscription of this trinity of joys was a question of serious moment. It was the cry of the old Hebrew prophets, and it was echoed by the early Christian fathers, as well as by the purists of Islām. To some extent, one can appreciate why wine and woman came to be proscribed, but that song was included is not so easily understood. Yet, when one sees how music is capable of affecting the peoples of the East, coupled with the fact that music with them has invariably been found as a concomitant with wine and woman, it will be more readily appreciated how listening to music came to be looked upon, as Burton said, as being unworthy of, if not unlawful for, those who trod the path of righteousness.

Consider the following passages from vocabularies:—

(1) CT. xiv, 3, K. 4325, iv–vi, 11. 18–25: ib. 5, K. 4368, iv–vi, 11. 8–16; and for col, iv, presumably 81–7–27, 147 (Meissner, Suppt., pl. 27):—

(2) CT. xiv, 14, K. 4396, 11. 10–13, dup. ib., S. 995, rev. 4–7:—

Under the rule of Buddhist ecclesiastics, fostered originally by foreign (Mongol) suzerains, Tibet has not been a military power. Probably no religion is more potent than Buddhism in damping the fighting spirit; of which developement Mongolia itself has in modern times afforded a signal example. The Tibetan people, though in some districts rough and turbulent, is not warlike: the brigand tribes of the northeast belong to a region which, since the overthrow (A.D. 1226) of the Tangut kingdom by Cingiz Khan, has been largely Mongolized, as even the geographical nomenclature proves, and which in native Tibetan times must have presented a quite different aspect. The Tibetan armies, when such are required, consist mainly of levies from the great monasteries; the creation of a small standing army in the most recent period has encountered prejudice.