Unless the past can be correlated with the present, it is dead and the present suffers from want of a tradition. Hence the need for the critic to define in the language of his age the value of bygone art for his generation. The Society therefore is fortunate when a contemporary artist of distinction has consented to select and comment on a series of Oriental masterpieces to be reproduced in this Journal.

The Greco-Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara has for a long time been of singular attraction for students of Indian art. These sculptures of greyish-blue schist found in such quantities in the inaccessible valleys of the Indo-Afghan frontier, have from the outset been noted for their classical affinities, and many were brought to Europe by art-loving dilettanti. The particular qualities distinguishing them from all other Indian sculpture were duly extolled; they came to be recognized as the earliest examples of new ideas which changed the whole development of Indian art and propagated Western influence throughout the Buddhist world. But the rôle so enthusiastically assigned to them has not remained unchallenged. A younger generation, more eager to discover the truly national qualities of the arts of Asia, maintained that the only reason for this admiration was that on account of their Greek affinities the Gandhara sculptures were less strange to Europeans than Asiatic art proper. They considered Greco-Buddhist sculpture a weak and provincial offshoot of Western art, without much influence in the East, and for the most part of a quality which could not compete with the broad current of the Indian tradition. Even those iconographical innovations with which the sculptors of Gandhara had generally been credited, such as the creation of the Buddha image, were attributed by these scholars to other and more “national” schools. To this day no satisfactory solution of the problem has come forward.

It is unfortunate that I have no copy of this interesting book that is complete or in good condition. I possess a broken remnant (D.C. 45 of my collection of MSS.), blotted, dog-eared, and often illegible, and a book of excerpts copied by a priest in Baghdad. The latter (D.C. 46) is extremely incorrect. Besides these, I have borrowed and transliterated pages from another fragmentary loose-leaved copy, brittle with age. All these manuscripts were illiterate and corrupt, each talisman displayed variations due to miscopying or miscomprehension, so that originally identical texts showed considerable differences. A dictionary-maker, however, may neglect no text, however corrupt, and although the illiteracy of scribes has led me on many a wildgoose chase, the labour has been amply compensated.

In recent years the advances made in the study of nomad history have done much to dispel the popular misconception of Chinghiz Khan. Carried away by the great conqueror's feats of arms, writers have frequently treated him as a political phenomenon, unique and apart from the current of history to which he properly belongs. In reality his career constitutes the most outstanding chapter in the history of the nomads of Northern Asia. Surpassing the most famous of his predecessors, he outstripped the greatest of the Hsiung-nu and Turkish rulers and left behind a name that is a household word from China to the Danube. Of all his exploits, none has impressed the Occident so much as his invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire. This, with its tremendous consequences for the world of Islam and Eastern Europe, has tended to draw attention away from his wars in China. Also it is only since the labours of M. Pelliot and other distinguished Sinologists that many valuable Chinese documents on Chinghiz Khan have become known.

The only Pai. quotation connected directly with the Bṛh. is given by Mārkaṇḍeya (seventeenth century): Bṛhatkathāyām kupaci pisāḷam (Grierson, EPG., 134). Keith, HSL., p. 269, observes, “We really cannot be sure that we have a single relic of the Bṝhatkathā, still less that so late a grammarian as Mārkaṇḍeya actually had the text before him.” Pisālaṃ, moreover, is a neo-Indian form, which normally would not occur before the twelfth century, for the words in AMg pisalla (PG 595) and in Pkt. pisalla (Hem., i, 193) are normal Mid-Indian as contrasted with Mar. pisāḷeṇ “madness”.

Considerable obscurity surrounds the introduction into Islamic thought of the orthodox doctrine that it is God who “creates” the acts of man, whereas man merely “acquires” them (kasaba, iktasaba). The doctrine is sometimes attributed to al-Ash'arī, but in his Maqālāt al-Islamīyīn he himself frequently uses the term in his accounts of the views of other writers. This paper examines the various uses of kasaba and iktasaba in that work to see what light is thrown on the origin and development of the conception.

In Baghdad of al-Ma'mūn's time there appears to have been a degree of intellectual enterprise, especially in the field of natural science, scarcely attained at any other period of Islam. The names of Muḥammad b. Mūsā al-Khwārizmī and Muḥammad b. Mūsā b. Shākir are well known among those which made the Caliphate of al-Ma'mūn, from this point of view, so celebrated in later times. Recently, while investigating the history of the Khazars, I was interested to see that al-Khwārizmī is credited by al-Muqaddasī (ed. de Goeje, p. 362) with a visit to Khazaria, and following this up to find that Suter (“Mathematiker, Nachträge,” p. 159, in Abhandl. zur Gesch. der math. Wissensch., vol. 14, 1902) thought that Muḥammad b. Mūsā b. Shākir must be meant. Elsewhere also Suter found confusion between the two names. It occurred to me that both names stood for one person, and in what follows various considerations are raised and some new material cited bearing on this possibility. It is not claimed that the identification is made out, but that it is worth considering.

I am not clear as to what Professor Driver's exact position is. On the last page of his criticism of my paper on this subject, he says that “the majority of additional passages [in the O.T.] in which witchcraft is suspected are almost, if not quite, all susceptible of alternative explanations”; while on p. 6 he is good enough to say that some of my suggestions “seem eminently convincing”. As they all had to do with magical terms I cannot reconcile his statements.

The romance of the calendar is the history of 3,000 years of human effort to fix definitely the equinoxes and to harness the solar year to the lunar months. Our European calendar has fixed the equinoxes, but has abandoned wholly the lunar months in the struggle. India, however, has lunar months and a solar cycle. She also has a fifteen-day fortnight as well as a seven-day week. Let us first examine India's week.

In chapter 15 of the Ain-i-Akbari (translation, ii, p. 88), Abul Fazl says that when Khwaja Abdul Majid Asaf Khan was Vazir the jama-i-witayat was raqami. The late Mr. Moreland in The Agrarian System of Moslem India (App. E, pp. 238 sqq.) came to the conclusion that jama-i-witayat meant the valuation of land revenue, but he was unable to explain the term raqami with certainty. Its meaning here is of importance in the history of land revenue assessment, and various guesses had been made to explain it. Jarrett (Ain., trs., ii, p. 88) thought it meant “estimated”, while Beveridge (Akbarnama, trs., ii, p. 402, n. 2) suggested that it might refer (a) to the system of arithmetical notation known in India as raqam or siyāq which is based on contractions of Arabic names of numbers, or (b) to assessment depending on the kind of produce, raqam being used in the sense of description.