The two family archives from the Elephantine Jewish Community contain respectively four (C 5, 6, 8, 9) and six documents (K 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12) dealing with a single house each. One of the questions which arises is the occurrence, once in each of the archives (C 8:2; K 12:5), of the designation mhḥsn, translated either as “holding property” or as “military colonist”. Is the term of general meaning and its occurrence in each of the passages coincidence or is it a technical term with legal significance?

Ethnical and geographical names are found in Iranian from a base mak- with three suffixes, -a-, -u-, -i-, in maka- (Old Persian maka-, , with possibly maku- in makurastān, makurān, and before -i-, mači- in Old Pers. mačiya- These names are widely separated in three regions in ancient Iran.

In the last century the Vedic pantheon served as the best illustration of the theory that the gods of primitive and archaic religions were personifications of natural phenomena. The gods of the Vedas were seen as more recognisably such than, for example, the Greek gods, who had acquired more elaborate anthropomorphic features through Homer's poetic skill, so that their supposed natuie-substratum was hardly or not at all detectable. In India the matter seemed clear. Thus Oldenberg believed that the Vedic gods were predominantly deified Naturwesen, agents behind the great happenings and processes of nature. Moreover, he maintained that different gods in the Vedas had reached different stages of anthropomorphism and independence from their nature basis and he made much of the job of determining this degree in individual cases.

“Parliament”, complained John Bright two years after the transfer of Indian government to the Crown, “cares about India little more than the Cabinet”. Indian affairs continued to attract little attention at Westminster until the advent to power in 1874 of a Conservative administration committed, under Disraeli's leadership, to a vigorous defence of Britain's imperial pre-eminence. The subsequent emergence of India as the focal point of the Prime Minister's imperial ambitions aroused bitter Liberal criticism and ensured a break with the tradition that sought to insulate India from party politics in Britain. It is with the response to these developments of the House of Commons, an integral part of the machinery of Indian government, that this paper is primarily concerned. Following a preliminary examination of the reasons which lay behind Parliament's habitual neglect of India it takes as its particular focus the manner in which the House of Commons fulfilled its responsibility to India at a time when the conduct of Indian affairs became a major political issue.

After over a century and a half of increasingly superfluous translations of the Tao-te ching one might be pardoned for thinking that there was no further need for sinologists to devote attention to this text. Nothing could be further from the truth. The publication in 1974 of two manuscripts from the tomb at Ma-wang-tui dating to the early years of the 2nd century B.C., together with some previously unknown works of the same period, constituted as sensational an advance in our knowledge as could possibly be imagined, short of an autograph copy revealing the identity of Lao-tzu himself. Quite apart from answering (and raising) a host of textual questions, these finds have afforded us a startling glimpse of the significance assigned to the Tao-te ching during the early Han. This in turn has served to remind us that the continuous transmission of the text has involved marked discontinuities in the construction placed upon it, discontinuities which Western sinology has in the past been all too remiss in tracing.