In 1443 Zangi advanced with, his army to the neighbourhood of Edessa and besieged a fort to the east of the town which the Franks had surprised from an Arab, Mani' son of ‘utair. Zangi took the fort of Shann, marched close to Edessa, sent an ambassador to the townsmen, and said that he did not wish to fight the Franks but to be at peace with them. They sent him gifts and presents from the town, food and drink, and he passed on to Aleppo.

21. M.I., vii, 59 bis (wood, c. 18 × 2.5 cm., complete ; hole for string at r.; Il. 2 recto + 3 verso of cursive dbu-can script).

[A 1] | : | blon . Gtshug . bzanṅ . la | ya . lad . stod . | gsum ‖ blon . [A 2] Phya (Dgra ?). bzer . la . ya . lad . stod . gñis | stag . Gtshug . bzan . la [B 1] ya . lad . stod . gñis ‖ Gun . Rgya . legs . la | ya . lad . st[o]d . gñis | [B 2] blon . Stag . sgra .la . g−1ya . lad . stod . gchig ‖ stag . Stag . rtsan . la | ya . lad . stod . gchig | Dpal. bzer . la . ya . lad . stod . gchig ‖

In 1668 Francis Bernier was on his way back to Europe after a residence of eight years at the Court of the Great Mughal. At Surat he met M. Carron, who had been sent by Colbert, the great Finance Minister of Louis XIV, to lay the foundations of trade between France and India on behalf of the French East India Company (la Compagnie des Indes Orientales) which had been founded in 1664. It was at Carron's request that Bernier wrote the Memoir which is here published in an English translation.

Nearly six years ago, G. E. Driver published a paper in the Journal of Biblical Literature, in which he examined some of the arguments dealing with the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel, which had been presented by Charles Boutflower in his work In and Around the Booh of Daniel. Three years later, in the course of an examination of the relation of Biblical Aramaic to other early Aramaic dialects, I took the opportunity of replying to a number of inaccurate or misleading statements and untenable hypotheses on the subject of the Aramaic of Daniel which appeared in the writings of certam defenders of the traditional date and place of origin of that book, including Boutflower. A rejoinder has now appeared from Boutflower's pen, dealing with a limited area of the field, in the form of a brief monograph, published under the title, Dadda-'idri, or The Aramaic of the Booh of Daniel. In this little book Boutflower replies to Driver and myself, and presents what he feels to be new light on the subject. A superficial reading might leave the impression that there was some ground for his theory, but a little examination reveals such omissions and assumptions and such misuse of evidence as to vitiate the argument. Indeed, the real issue is that of the validity of the evidence we possess, for fundamentally Boutflower seeks to set aside the evidence that has survived in favour of the evidence he assumes to have perished.

Tarikh-i-Muhammad Arif Qandahari is often cited as an authority in many extant works of Mughal history. Sir Henry Elliot, however, failed to secure even a fragment of the work and had to content himself with a note based on the citations in other histories. Nor did his editor Professor Dowson succeed any better. Thus the History of India as told by her own historians (vol. vi) contains a very brief note on the very sketchy information available at the time.

Besides De scientiis, there is another treatise attributed to Al-Fārābī known in Latin which contains references to music. This is De ortu scientiarum. At the same time it must be pointed out that, unlike De scientiis, we do not possess irrefutable proof of authorship, as we shall see. In its Latin dress, however, it appears to have been widely disseminated throughout the great culture centres of Medieval Europe, and for that reason it attracts more than passing interest.

Father Ronzevalle has now published the text of the important stela from Sudschîn, 14 miles south-east of Aleppo, Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph, xv, 235–260 (1931). On face Aa Bar-ga'yā, king of K-T-K, and Mati‘el, king of Arpad, engage in a treaty before certain gods, most of whom are Babylonian with the exception of the Aramaic Sun-god and ('Elyōn) “the most high”, a title of the same Aramaic deity, the 'Elioun of Sanchounyathōn. In line 10 occur the deities N-K-E and K-D-'-H which may be Aramaic transcriptions of Babylonian, eventually Sumerian deities. Dussaud, Comptes Rendus, 1931, 315, identified these gods with the two titles of Tammuz, Nagar, and KA-DI, which occur together regularly in the Tammuz hymns. The readings of and which Dussaud took from Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, ii, 168, as Nagar and Kadi, were read Lamga and Kasa in my edition. Lamga is only a phonetic variant of Nagar > Lagar > Lamga(r), and there is no reason why the classical form Nagar should not be preferred to the dialectic Lamga. Also Zimmern, Sumerisch-Babylonische Tamuzlieder, Berichten der Phil. Hist.Klasse der Königl. Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften lix, 212, preferred the classical form Nagar, and so does Witzel, RA. 10, 173; 16; 176, 7, etc. Zimmern does not commit himself on the reading Ka-di, which I read Ka-sá, but transcribes KA-DI. Witzel like Meissner reads Ka-di.

If we describe as bankers persons whose profession it is to administer, procure, and supply money, then we are indeed entitled to count Joseph b. Phineas and Aaron b. Amram as bankers in a quite modern sense, and in view of their almost exclusive dealings with the Court and its officials, as Court Bankers in fact as well as in name.

The Pand-Nāmah or the “Counsel” of Subuktigīn to his son Maḥmūd is the earliest work of its kind in the Persian language. It not only formulates some important principles of administration, but also furnishes valuable information about an obscure period of history, viz. the early life of Subuktigīn and the origin of his family.

Besides the Osmanli Turks dispersed in North and South Bulgaria and the Pomaks or Bulgar Mohammedans of the Ehodope Mountains, there are the less known Yuruks, an interesting shepherd race. Traces of them are found in the Rhodope Mountains, where for centuries they were neighbours of the Karakachans or Aromunian nomad shepherds. The place-names Village-of-Yuruks and Tomb-of-Yuruks occur frequently here.

In JRAS., 1932, pp. 789–814, the time of the comprehensive collection of Indian medical sciences is established approximately in the middle of the first millennium A.D. and later. In this connection a sketch of the local origin of the precepts chiefly current in the oldest Saṃhitās, which bear the names of Caraka and Suśruta (abbreviated: CaS and SuS), may be of interest. In the introduction (pp. 7–8) to his celebrated inquiry into Indian osteology, Hoernle answers this question: According to the tradition preserved in the Buddhist Jātakas, in the age of Buddha there were two great universities, Kāśi or Benares in the East, and the still more famous Takṣaśilā [the Taxila of the Greeks] on the Jhelam River in the West. Ātreya, whose doctrines are propagated in the CaS, lived at Takṣaśilā; the king of Kāśī instructed Suśruta in surgery. This would place the origin of surgery, as a science, in the Bast of India. Furthermore, Nemi, the lord of Videha (or Tirhut in the eastern province of Bihar) is regarded as the author of ophthalmic surgery.

It is inevitable that efforts should constantly be made to arrive at results regarding the origin of the gods who appear in developed form in the Vedic literature and the A vesta. It is true that for many purposes inquiries of this kind are unimportant. It matters comparatively little for the understanding of the religion of a people to be able to trace its evolution, for what is essential is to know what views the worshippers of a defined period had of their gods, and these may be very different from the opinions to which they should logically have advanced. But it is always possible that a new theory of origins may cast some light on features of religion which remain obscure, and the many divine epithets of the Veda which are still unexplained encourage efforts at further elucidation. It is therefore not unsatisfactory that Professor Rudolph Otto should have worked in detail at his effort to clear up the picture of the Vedic pantheon by endeavouring to apply to it the speculations on the origin of religion which have attracted of late years considerable attention in their attractive presentation in Das Heilige and Das Gefühl des Überweltlichen.

LE service que M. Reichelt a rendu aux études sogdiennes par sa publication des textes du British Museum ne peut être pleinement apprécié que de ceux qui, pour avoir assumé une t'ache analogue, en connaissent les difficultés. Mais ceux-là savent aussi que tous les obstacles ne cèdent pas à un premier déchiffrement, même sagace. La nouveauté des documents, le nombre considérable de mots inédits, surtout de termes abstraits, et, quand il s'agit de traductions, l'absence des originaux, laissent souvent le chercheur démuni.

It will one day be considered curious—the prejudiced and partial way in which the Pali Suttas, up to the present time, have been exploited. Buddhists, for instance, both Hīnayānists in their way and Mahāyānists in their way, had let it be known, that for them both the reality of the “man”, as an entity over and above body and mind, was illusory. He was but a name for a complex of fleeting dhammā. European writers on Buddhism, taking this assertion at its face-value, and not at its historical value, selected passages from the Suttas endorsing it. They made no search for passages which seemed to throw doubt, at least at some period, on the dogma. These passages remained overlooked by adherents and by external commentators alike. When are we going to develop a better historic flair ?

In the JRAS. of January, 1931, I offered some “Suggestions for the Use of Latin Character in the Writing of Kurdish”. A certain number of changes in these first proposals subsequently appeared desirable in the light of criticism and of further experiment and experience. In the meantime Tewfiq Wehbi Beg, on whose modified Arabic alphabet my suggestions had been based, finding that his new system made little appeal to his compatriots, decided to abandon it, for the purposes of his future work, in favour of Latin. European students of Iranian philology will welcome the appearance in Latin character of the work of an accomplished native Kurdish scholar ; how far the books now in the press and under preparation will appeal to other Kurds remains to be seen.

At the end of their edition of K's Brhatkathā-mañjarī (Kāvyamālā 69) Śivadatta and Parab print an appendix of 78 ślokas, which purports to be the twenty-fourth story of the Vetālapañcavimśati. It was not found in their MSS. but was supplied to them by T. S. KuppūsvāmĪ from a Tanjore MS. Speyer in his “Studies about the Kathāsaritsāgara” (Verh. d. K. Ak. v. Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afd. Lett., N.R. viii, 5, p. 14, n. 1) says that he has “a strong presumption that this portion does not belong to the work of K”. That such is the case can be proved conclusively.

IN the year 1405 (a.d. 1098, a.h. 472), fifty-one years after the Turks had conquered these lands, when Alexius was emperor in Constantinople, the Turk Yághí-Siyán (Aksin) had been made governor of Antioch by Abu 'l Fatḥ, the Egyptian Afḍal was in Jerusalem, which he had taken from the Turks Suqmán and his brothers, the sons of Ortuk, two years before, and all the sea-coast was subject to the Egyptians, Theodore Kurbalát the son of Hátim was in Edessa, which he had saved from the Turks, expecting to hand it over to the emperor. At this time many kings and chiefs of the Franks with a big army and workmen of all sorts, thousands and tens of thousands without end, got ready. There were four kings, leaders of armies, Bohemund, Godfrey (Gufra, Gundafra), Saint Gilles, and Tancred (Tangri) with many bishops and monks. They set their faces to go by land through Greek territory, and to cross by the Hellespont, where is Constantinople, and the two seas are joined by a narrow strait. They sent ambassadors to Alexius to prepare and go out with them, to get ready what was needful, and to arrange throughout his land stores of food and fodder for the use of the army. Alexius promised to help them in all they needed.

In 1930 the joint archæological expedition of Oxford University and the Field Museum, Chicago, examined the extensive ruins now known as Abu Sudaira, three miles south-east of the central mound at Kish. Mr. Reitlinger excavated this site at his own expense. A large city was discovered, which, although it contained no traces of Accadian culture, is of interest as being in the style of the Īlkhānī rulers of Persia and Mesopotamia. This attribution is entirely confirmed by the coins found on the site, which have been placed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. They number altogether 100 (and some fragments), of which two are silver and the rest copper. Unfortunately they are in a bad state of preservation, and only about a third can be ascribed to definite rulers with some certainty. The earliest is (1) a small copper coin of the Khalīfas (wt. 32 grains, ·75″), but neither the mint nor the date can be read. Next in order is (2) a copper coin which Mr. Thorburn, who has examined part of the find, suggests may be a coin of the Seljūq ruler Kaiqubad (a.h. 616–634) (wt. 33 grains, ·85″), and the attribution, though not certain, is approximately correct so far as period is concerned.

In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1930 Professor Langdon illustrates (Pl. IX, Fig. 4) a curious pottery stand found at Hursagkalamma, Kish. This, he states, is only found below the flood stratum down to waterlevel, i.e. prior to 3,200 B.C., according to his dating; and it may possibly be the niḳnaḳḳu of Babylonian ritual which was in common use, according to the texts, right down to the Persian Period. During my work at Kish I found a similar stand—now in the Field Museum, Chicago—in the same area of the site. These stands which average 2½ feet in height are shaped rather like an hour-glass, and are open throughout at the topand base. Moreover, they are ornamented with triangular incisions which sometimes pierce the side entirely, sometimes only partially so.