The silver libation-bowl (phialē) to be described in this note was purchased in London about five years ago by the Hon. Robert Erskine, and now forms part of his collection. To the owner's most generous co-operation we owe this opportunity to publish the piece, and the excellent photograph which appears on plate I. At the time of the purchase, no information was available as to the place and circumstances in which the bowl was found. The only conclusions to be reached are therefore those based on internal evidence.

Among the numerous Islamic documents preserved in the Venetian State Archives are a few which come from the chancery of Mamluk Egypt. One of the most interesting of these is a letter from Sultan Qaitbay to the Doge Nicolo Trono, dated 10 Sha'bān 877/10 January 1473, which is to be presented here in its original Arabic together with a contemporary Italian translation found in the enormous diplomatic register known as the Libri Commemoriali.

The period of nearly three centuries which lies between Selīm I's overthrow of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, and Bonaparte's landing at Alexandria in 1798 is one of the most obscure in the history of Muslim Egypt. For the latter part of the period, from the early twelfth/eighteenth century, there are ample materials for the reconstruction of the political history in the famous chronicle by Jabartī. The Ottoman invasion, and the years which immediately succeeded it have also received some attention, thanks to the detailed information provided by the chronicler Ibn Iyās. In contrast, there has been virtually no investigation of the last seventy-five years of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth.

The dialect material set out in this article was collected mainly from two informants of the Dōsiri (pl. Duwāsir < > Dawāsir) tribe living in Kuwait. Although the dialect is described as Dōsiri, there is no doubt that the informants had been influenced by the local form of ‘Ajmi, a dialect of high social prestige. This influence was particularly noticeable when the informants were conversing with one another.

I PROPOSE in this paper to discuss only pure Turkish words, that is I specifically exclude all words which were borrowed from some other language at one time or another, and what I shall try to establish is one segment of the phonetic make-up of the oldest form of the Turkish language which we can reconstruct, that is the Turkish spoken appreciably earlier than the eighth century A.D., the date of the earliest substantial specimens of the language which still exist.

In the Saṅgītaratnākara, a thirteenth-century musical text by Śārṅgadeva, listed under svaraprastāra (lit. extension of notes) is a complete enumeration of all the possible combinations of the 7 notes of the Indian musical scale. This enumeration begins with the single note (ārcika) and is followed by all the possible combinations of two notes (gāthika), three notes (sāmika), four notes (svarāntara), five notes (auḍuva), six notes (ṣāḍava), and seven notes (pūrṇa). Each of these series of kūṭatānas (series of notes in which the continuity of the sequence is broken) develop in the same logical order based on the precedence of the ascending line over the descending line. In Śārṅgadeva's arrangement the first of the 7 note series is the straight ascending line, sa ri ga ma pa dha ni, which, for easy comprehension will be rendered as l 2 3 4 5 6 7 in this paper; and the last of the 7 note series is the straight descending line, ni dha pa ma ga ri sa, rendered 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 here. The changes in the order of the notes take place from the beginning of the series, at first involving only the first two notes, then the first three notes, then the first four notes, and so on. In fact, the progression for the 7 note series includes the progressions for all the smaller series within it. Thus the 7th note of the 7 note series remains constant until the progressions of one, two, three, four, five, and six notes have been exhausted. Only then is the 7th note replaced by the 6th. The chart on p. 308 is an abbreviation showing the nature of the progression. The 2 and 3 note series involving the first 2 and 3 notes respectively are complete. Beginning from the 4 note series, the chart is abbreviated as follows. The 4 note series is divided into four groups determined by the terminal note, each involves change in the first 3 notes, and each of these groups corresponds to the previous 3 note series, which is in fact the first group of the 4 note series. Of the remaining groups only the first and last sequences are given with an indication as to the number of sequences comprising that group. Similar abbreviations are used in the longer series that follow. Commas have been placed to indicate that the preceding numbers now replace the original ascending sequence (mūlakrama) and that the progressions which follow in that group involve change in only these preceding numbers. For example, if one wishes to determine the complete series from 1 2 4,3 5 6 7 to the end of its particular group 4 2 1 3 5 6 7 the comma after 4 indicates that only the first three numbers change.

The name of ‘Swan Maiden story’ is given to tales of three kinds, of which only one is of direct concern in this inquiry.

I. There are stories of bird-maidens who may appear as a single element, sometimes as birds, sometimes as maidens, according to the laws of their being.

II. There is a story woven from several motifs in which a man forces a bird-maiden to become his wife by stealing her feather-robe while she is bathing, thus preventing her from flying off. The pair have children, and one day the bird-woman recovers her feather-robe and flies away with them. As a sequel, the man may pursue her to the other place to which she has returned.

III. The winning of a bird-maiden by stealing her feather-robe may appear as but one element of a long and intricate story.