The inlaid bronze basin in the Musée du Louvre known as the “ Baptistère de St. Louis ” is generally recognized as a masterpiece of Islamic metalwork. So far, published photographs and drawings have failed to do it justice. Almost the whole surface of the vessel, both outside and inside, is engraved with court-scenes, battles and hunting expeditions set out in harmoniously composed panels and medallions, framed by narrower friezes of beasts of the chase, and enriched with delicately chased silver inlay and gold leaf, in such manner as to allow the bronze to appear only in narrow contours, brought into relief by the use of a black bituminous inlay (Pl. 5).

The basin is signed in several places, and one signature, in calligraphic Mamlī, reads “ Work of the Master (al-mu'allim) Muhammad ibn al-Zain ”, but nowhere is the name of the owner of this magnificent vessel to be discovered. Nor is the owner's name given on the only other signed work of the same artist which has come down to us. Neither of these pieces bears the laudatory or benedictory inscriptions so common on Islamic metalwork.

Arab biographers rarely regarded outstanding artists, other than calligraphers, as worthy of inclusion in their biographical dictionaries. Their works yield no information about Muhammad ibn al-Zain and therefore none which might lead us to identify his patron. We must adopt a different method if we wish to discover for whom this princely vessel was originally made.

The earliest European reference to this basin appears to be an entry in Piganiol de la Force's Description de Paris, published in 1742.

The reign of Erekle II over the united kingdoms of Kakhet‘i and K‘art‘li, which lasted from 1762 until 1798, may be regarded as the swan-song of the Georgian monarchy. Through the king's personal ability and the enfeebled state of Persia, Georgia was enabled to enjoy a period of somewhat precarious political independence before being absorbed by Russia as soon as Erekle's death removed the only force capable of maintaining any semblance of Georgian unity, and committed the responsibilities of government to his moribund heir, George XII.

THIS paper is the outcome of a short study of the pronunciation of an Ossete born in Dzaeusegi-hseu (Wladikavkaz). The Digoron dialect of Ossetic is my informant's mother tongue, but as he left his homeland more than twenty years ago and has in the interval probably had more occasion to speak Kussian and Polish than his own language, the possibility that his pronunciation has been thereby affected cannot be discounted. At the suggestion of Professor H. W. Bailey a short investigation of his pronunciation of Ossetic was undertaken. Some of the material used was taken from notes put at my disposal by Professor Bailey, to whom I am greatly indebted for his generous help and for much invaluable information and criticism. Other material was found in a collection of folk-stories, the Pamyatniki narodnogo tvorchestva Osetin, or was supplied by my informant himself. The tentative nature of any linguistic analysis based on a short study of the pronunciation of one speaker is obvious, and it will be understood that the findings are only valid within these limitations.

The typographical conventions adopted in this paper are as follows:—

Italic type is used to show the roman spelling of Digoron as used in the Pamyatniki or by my informant.

Heavy type is used for the phonetic transcription of my informant's pronunciation.

Heavy type in single quotes is used to indicate the units of what may be called “unuttered speech”.

The use of all three conventions is demonstrated by the following statement:— “nivәrun niværun is the realization of the junction of ‘ni’ and әvәrun’”.

The structure of the gâthâs is at first sight far from obvious. It has even been contended that the sequences of stanzas preserved in the Avesta under the titles Yasna 28, 29, etc., were in nearly all cases mere haphazard collections.

Several years before the war a photograph of a stone inscription in Aramaic letters was published in the Persian language periodical Kabul (vol. ii, 1932, p. 413). The following note (in Persian), printed below the photograph, constitutes the whole of our information on the material, history, and provenance of the inscription:ߞ

“A historical inscribed stone: A few years ago a broken stone tablet (lauhe) with ancient Sanskrit writing was procured in the neighbourhood of Pul-i Darunta, Laghmān, and entrusted to Kabul Museum. So far its contents have not been read and understood. The original of the above (depicted) stone is in Kabul Museum.”

Laghmān, older Lamyān (from Lambayān<*Lampakāna), is the name of a district on the left (northern) bank of the Kabul river, a little above Jalalabad; it comprises the valleys of the Lower Alingār and Ališang. This district, whose name is familiar to Sanskritists as Lampāka (also Lambāka), was traditionally regarded as part of the Indian borderlands, the ultima Thule of Jambuduīpa. Cf. Mémoires de Hiouen-thsang, i, 55, “en partant de ce royaume ( = Kāpiśī), il… franchit les montagnes noires, entra dans les frontières de l'lnde du nord, et arriva au royaume de Lan-po”. Cf. also Lampāka in the Yaksa catalogue of the Mahāmāyūrī, and further H. Lüders, SbPAW., 1930, 43, 48, 51, 63. One may presume that the traditional view reflects the conditions prevailing under the Maurya dynasty.

The inscription was made known in Europe by Professor Morgenstierne, who, on finding that the alphabet was Aramaic, asked H. Birkeland to publish it.

Photographs of unpublished Parthian and Sogdian manuscripts were taken recently in Berlin by Captain J. A. Dabbs, of the University of Austin, Texas, and sent by him to Professor Henning, who kindly allowed me to look through the Parthian material at once. One fragment, M 741, proved to be of considerable interest. It contains portions of two hymns, which are alphabetic and may therefore be presumed to be original work in Parthian. The device of beginning every verse with a letter of the alphabet limits each hymn to some twenty-four verses; but in this case the two hymns are connected in their subject-matter and possibly formed part of a sequence. Several hymn-cycles have been identified in Parthian and Middle Persian, but the alphabetic device is not used in any of them. The hymns in M 741 have as their subject two myths of the creation, following chronologically one upon the other. The narrative would be difficult to follow, however, without some previous knowledge of the mythology, for the handling is poetic and allusive. Words and phrases occur which can be found in other similar texts, having been taken presumably from the prose scriptures which were the authority for all later renderings of the Manichsean myths. The author could assume a general familiarity with these scriptures, and so allow himself some freedom in his retelling of the stories.

The first hymn, which contains a new Parthian name for a divinity, has for its subject the seduction of the Archontes and the descent of active evil to the earth.

The purpose of the following word-list is to serve as a glossary to “A Phonetic Study of Western Ossetic (Digoron)”, the entries being words cited as examples in that article. Since my Ossetic informant and I had no common language in which we both felt at ease, I had at the time of writing the “Phonetic Study” reluctantly decided not to assign English meanings to these examples, as I doubted my ability to do so without risk of serious inaccuracy. The majority of the Digoron words in the article were therefore identified not by meaning but by reference to romanized orthographic forms. Professor H. W. Bailey, however, after reading the proofs, expressed the opinion that the usefulness of the “Phonetic Study” for Ossetologues and others would be increased if English meanings could be given, and he most generously offered to criticize my tentative translations, which were based upon notes taken at the time of the investigation and upon Wsewolod Miller's Ossetisch-Russisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch.

The study of the Pahlavi poetry, so spiritedly initiated by M. Benveniste twenty years ago, seems to have come to a dead end. That certain Pahlavi texts, as the Ayādgār-ī Zarērān or the Draxt-ī Asūrīg (the Dispute of the date-palm with the goat), are poems, is conceded on all sides; but the formal problems, the problems of rhythm, metre, and rhyme, remain in the dark. It seems doubtful whether the material at hand is capable of leading us to definite conclusions. There are two main obstacles. Firstly, the notorious sloppiness of the copyists leaves too much room for conjecture; the mere addition or omission, at the editors’ discretion, of the word for “and” and the harf-i idāfet is sufficient to disturb the rhythmical balance. Secondly, as a rule we do not know the dates of composition, and therefore cannot tell how the words were pronounced by the authors; it makes a considerable difference to the metre (whatever it was) whether we put down paδak or paig, mazdayasn or mazdēsn, rōšn or rōšan, aδaκ or aig, šικanj or šκanj, giyān or gyān, yazat or yazd, awiš or ōš, druyist or drīst or drust or durust, hačaδar or azēr.

One thing is clear: a biased approach will not lead to convincing results. On the strength of the preconceived notion, carried forward from the study of the Avesta (where matters are equally dubious), that the metre is a purely syllabic one, the Pahlavi poems were made to suffer a great deal of emendation; where the usual procedure of omitting inconvenient words produced lines too short to fit into the scheme, either words were added or their pronunciation distorted.

1. śāra-

IN BSOAS 13. 130–1 I pointed out the Indian manaraǵa- ‘ boy ‘, attested only by the plural manare in Niya Kharoṣṭhī, as a bye-form of the Indian māṇava- (with -ka)‘ Brahman boy ’. I noted too that the Kharoṣṭhī word gave the explanation of the Agnean manark ‘ Brahman boy ’, of which the meaning made an Indian origin plausible. I pointed also to Niya kaṣara, corresponding to Central Indian kaṣāya- ‘ yellow robe ‘, whose connexion with Agnean kāṣār is now well-known.

That recognition of the Middle Indian influence in Central Asia is most important can, I think, be shown also in connexion with another word, familiar in just such Buddhist texts as were brought into Central Asia by Buddhist communities. It is decidedly necessary to search out all such intrusive Indian material before the vocabularies of Central Asian languages can be used for wider purposes, historīcal or linguistic in Indo-European comparative grammar. And such material is itself of great importance for the history of Indian culture in Central Asia. Naturally it is in cultural, specifically Buddhist, terms that the Indian element is most prominent.

The word I propose to consider here is attested in Sanskrit śāṭa-s, śāṭaka-s, -m, śāṭtī, śāṭīkā ‘ piece of cloth, garment’, snāna-śāṭaka- ‘ bathing robe ’,śiraḥśāṭaka- ‘ head-cloth ’, well known in Central Indian literature. Beside the Brahmanical literature we have in Jaina books, Ovavāiya-sutta 54 s¯ṭiya-; Antagaṭa-dasāo (translation L. D. Barnett, p. 67) sāṭaa-; and Ratnachandraji gives in his Ardḥamāgadhī Dictionary sāṭa- ‘ garment’, sāṭaga-, sāṭaa- ‘ upper garment’, sāṭī ‘ garment’, sāṭiyā ‘ upper garment worn by ladies ’, sāṭilla- ‘ silken garment’, sāṭollaya-‘ upper garment’.

In the Journal Asiatique for 1941–2 my friend the late Professor Sten Konow published an article entitled Une nouvelle forme aberrante de khotanais. This new type of Iranian is contained in the document P 410 brought back by the late Paul Pelliot from Tumšq, a ruined site near the modern Maralbashi.

For the study of the history of this region all the materials, unfortunately often fragmentary, which the various expeditions have recovered for us have proved and are still proving of great importance. The present Tumšuq fragment is a notable addition to this material.

Sten Konow gave with his study a facsimile of the MS. fragment, a transliteration (in which he had enjoyed the assistance of J. Filliozat) and a tentative translation, together with a glossary of the words according to his readings. Six years later he turned again to the document and in the Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 14 (1947), pp. 156 ff., he published a second study of the document. It is a pleasure to recognize the merit of these pioneer studies, but neither could be considered as providing a clear interpretation. In one point, the reading of ai, the incorrect at is kept in the second study, although in the glossary to the first study J. Filliozat had pointed out that the sign was properly au.

The document is vitally important for Iranian dialectical studies. Hence a new treatment is well justified. The recognition that the document contains a type of Buddhist ordination service changed the whole problem of its interpretation.

Dans les Mémoires du Comité des Orientalistes, F. A. Rosenberg a publié une coupe sassanide inédite, entrée il n'y a pas longtemps au Musée de l'Ermitage, et qui avait appartenu avant au Musée de l'Oural. Son décor comprend le sujet bien connu de la chasse du roi Bahrain Gor, et est semblable à, celui du plat qui appartint à 1'ancienne collection Likhatcheff et qui est conservé au Musée de Kazan.

Le plat de l'Oural porte une inscription gravée sur la partie extérieure du fond. F. A. Rosenberg publie cette inscription ainsi que deux autres qui sont gravees en pointillé, au même endroit, sur deux autres coupes sassanides. Pour simplifier la comparaison, nous les reproduisons dans l'ordre donné par Rosenberg.

1. Jayhdn¯'s Lost Work

ABŪ ‘ABDILLĀH MUḤAMMAD IBN AḤMAD AL-JAYHĀNĪ, who in 302/914 became vazir to the infant Samanid king of Bukhara, was the author of the celebrated geographical work Kitāb al-mas¯lik wal-mamālīk. According to Muqaddasi, this opus magnum was in seven volumes and in it one found incorporated “ the whole of Ibn Khurdādhbih's original work ”. Muqaddasi himself saw it in Fars in ‘Adud al-daula's library. He also saw in Khorasan an abridgment of this geography, one copy of which was attributed to I. Khurdādhbih, and the other (somewhat expanded) to Jayhānī.

Jayhānī's work has not come down to us, probably on account of its bulkiness, and we know it only through the references found in numerous authors belonging chiefly to the eastern part of the Islamic world. These quotations—both those acknowledged by the borrowers, and those which are unacknowledged—have been closely scrutinized and now it would seem about time that they should be collected in a special treatise, similar to the theses published on classical authors who are known to us only in excerpts.

In 1923, in the library attached to the sanctuary of Mashhad, A. Z. Validi found a new copy of Ibn al-Faqīh's Kitāb al-buldān, more complete than the abridgment which de Goeje published in BGA., v. The discovery in itself was highly interesting and the discoverer published a responsible account of it in 1924. Yet two years later rumors, based on mere hearsay, announced the discovery of the original Jayhani. In point of fact, the Mashhad MS. (212 ff.) proved to contain only the second, and still abridged, part of Ibn al-Faqīh (roughly corresponding to pp. 173–330 of the printed edition), and of Jayhānī the only real news was that in 309/921 Ibn Fadlān was his guest in Bukhara, as recorded in the traveller's own introduction to his journey.

Introduction

The (Kara-)Kirghiz language is spoken on the territory of the Autonomous Republic of the Kirghiz by about 650,000–700,000 individuals. My Kirghiz informant was Odajarov Abdilla (20 years old), of a village near Frunze (Purunza, 42° 50" north latitude; 75° east latitude), the capital of Kirghizistan. He and his parents had always lived in that village, where they had worked as agricultural labourers. He had been to school for four years and spoke a little Russian apart from Kirghiz. For the literary language I had a grammar at my disposal (Qьrgьz Tilinin elementardьq gramatikesi = “Elementary Grammar of the Kirghiz language”, by Şaвdan uulu Açьman and I. A. Batmanov), from which I had taken most of the examples.

1. prūva- ‘military post, fort’

Akhotanese word prū has already appeared in print in the article Gāndhārī (BSOAS 11. 765), but it could not at that time be explained. Since then a bilingual source has brought the solution.

While I preparing an edition of Matrceta's Hymn of 150 Verses (Satapañcāśatka) I learnt of the existence in the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin of a quantity of unpublished manuscript fragments of poetry identified as Mātrceta's, included among the material brought back by four successive German expeditions to Central Asia. Through the good offices of Professors H. W. Bailey and F. W. Thomas, photographed copies of these pieces eventually reached me. They proved to consist of about 120 leaves or portions of leaves, practically without exception in “Slanting Gupta” script, from at least seventeen separate MSS., ranging from almost complete folios to fragments containing only two or three legible syllables.

The collection was placed unconditionally at my disposal by the authorities of the Academy, to whom are due my most grateful acknowledgments of their generosity, the more so because a complete transcription by Dr. W. Siegling accompanied the texts. It is hardly necessary to add that this transcription is a work of the highest care and competence which could only have been carried out by an expert in the deciphering of Central Asian documents. In doubtful cases I have compared his readings with the originals and have checked several lengthy passages systematically, but additions or corrections thus introduced could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The text which follows can, therefore, be presented with a confidence which I could not have felt in a decipherment of my own; for apart from the normal difficulties of this script, blurred and mutilated characters abound.

§1

A Short account of the Kuvalayamālā was given in “An Unpublished Fragment of Paiśācī”, BSOAS., xii, p. 659 foil. It is dated A.D. 778 and is known from two MSS.—J dated A.D. 1083 and P undated, of which P 2 is a copy. The bulk of the work is written in Pāyaya-bhāsā, i.e. Jaina Maharastri. Other styles are used, one of which is Avabbhamsa, which Uddyotana, the author, describes as Sakkaya-Pāy'ubhaya-suddh'āsuddha-paya-samataramgaramgamta vaggiram “A spoken language rippling with even waves of Sanskrit and Prakrit words correct and incorrect”. It is therefore not the classical Apabhramśa of Hemacandra and others, which does not contain Sanskrit words apart from the tatsamas or words common to Sanskrit and Prakrit.

§2

The first and longest fragment is printed by L. B. Gandhi in GOS. 37 (G.), Intro., p. 109. The spelling is much less regular than in the Prakrit preceding and following it, and cannot be ascribed for the most part to clerical errors. The two MSS. do not differ widely. For reasons into which it is unnecessary to enter here it is clear that J and P were copied from the same MS. and neither is dependent upon the other. P 2, although an inferior MS., often usefully supplements J and in the present extract such aid is particularly welcome, as owing to the habit of readers putting a finger on the text where difficulties occur, much of the J palm-leaf has been smudged and would be almost unreadable without the help of P 2.

Under the traditional titles of Assimilation and Dissimilation, we are presented with two linguistic phenomena apparently involving a principle similar to that which is known in physical science as ” action at a distance ”—-regularly in the latter case, occasionally in the former (under special titles, such as “dilation”, “Fernassimilation”). The classical example of this type of assimilation is provided by the Sanskrit “cerebralization” (nati) of n, with reference to which the term “action à distance” has, in fact, been used. In connection with the physical principle, it may be of interest to recall Newton's words:—

“It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation, of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact.”

Speech-sound, of course, is not “brute matter”, and it would be a dangerous and unnecessary principle to submit linguistics to physical criteria, but Newton's uneasiness may at least serve to lead us to a reconsideration of similar postulates of our own science. Amongst these the conception of an articulation A at one point in the temporal dimension exercising a form of “gravitational influence” upon an articulation B at a distant point would appear to be one that is only tolerable faute de mieux.

The whole principle of assimilation in descriptive linguistics has already been assailed more than once, on the ground that the implied change is only metaphorical, having reference to a hypothetical “basic” form derived from the consideration of other contexts or of earlier stages of the language, and leading to such definitions as “the extension of an element of articulation out-side its proper sphere”.

Verb roots remain constant in most Sino-Tibetan languages. But in; Burmese the consonantal initial of some verb roots alternates from an unaspirated surd in the intransitive to the corresponding aspirated surd in the transitive. And in some Tibeto-Burmic languages, particularly in the Himalayas, we find verbs with a sonant initial in the intransitive and a corresponding surd in the transitive. Diversity of form reaches the extreme in Old Bodish (classical Tibetan), where no positional phoneme of the verb is necessarily constant—whether consonantal prefix, consonantal initial, medial vowel, “final” consonant, or “suffixed” consonant.

THE early history of Central Asia, the background of the Turkish expansion in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of the Mongol eruption in the thirteenth, presents a large number of problems which the slowly progressing study of documents made accessible to us in particular by the late M. Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot is bringing nearer to solution. Among these documents those from the kingdoms of Khotan and Krorayina are of outstanding importance for the early period. It seems desirable to treat of some of these problems here.

1. The vocabulary of Khotan and the Iranian words in the Krorayina documents

A large part of the vocabulary of the Khotanese language is now known, much of it already accessible in print, and it is possible to confront it with the Iranian words found in Krorayina. It is at once noticeable that in the two vocabularies, while part is identical, as in lāstana- ‘quarrel’, corresponding to Krorayina lastana, or prahona- ‘garment’ to Krorayina prahuni, yet marked differences appear which are unlikely to be due only to difference of time.

I would notice here the following ten cases.

1. In an article Recent Work in ‘Tokharian’ (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1947, 149–150), I called attention to the difference between Krorayina guśura, Kuchean Sanskrit gauśura, and the Khotan *bisīviraa-, attested in the plural bīsīvīrā of high birth ‘(Suvarnabhāsa-sūtra, Khotanese Texts I p. 248, 73 r 1), and the related bäsīvärāssai, translating Sanskrit kulaputra, a person of good family. The treatment of the initial υ- shows that here two dialects are concerned.

THERE can be few phrases more familiar to readers of Buddhist texts than the traditional opening of the sūtras:

Pali: evaṃ me sutaṃ ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā Sāvatthiyaṃ viharati.

Sanskrit: evam mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān Śrdvastyaṃ viharati sma.