Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73) wrote Meghanādbadhkāvya‘ The death of Meghanād’, a nine-canto epic, in 1861. Being a Rāma story, the poem naturally owes much of its substance to the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, which is represented in Sanskrit by Vālmīki's mahākāvya and in Bengali by Krittibās's work; but it differs from that tradition, widely and in a most original way, in the characterization of the persons, the selection and presentation of the episodes, and above all in sentiment and sympathy. This divergence was the result of deliberate choice. ‘I despise Ram and his rabble (i.e. the monkeys); but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination’ Datta wrote to R. N. Basu. In other letters he gave further indications of his thinking about the approach to his subject. ‘I mean to give free scope to my Inventing powers and to borrow as little as I can from Vahniki’; and,' If the father of our poetry (i.e. Vāhmīki) had given Ram human companions I could have made a regular Iliad of the death of Meghanad.

Ever since the Ta hsüeh was extracted from the Li chi to form part of the ‘Four books’, the term ke wu which appears in the sentence in the opening passage: ‘The furtherance of knowledge lies in ke wu’, has exercised the ingenuity of commentators. I do not propose here to review the vast literature on the subject, but before going on to deal with the meaning of the term a brief look at the two best-known commentaries may prove instructive. Cheng Hsiian £ comments as follows

In 1963 I was given leave by the School to make a preliminary study of Bachama, a language spoken in the east of Northern Nigeria, and in parts ofthe adjacent territory of the Cameroons Republic. In general the topics onwhich people were most willing to talk freely to me, and to record, were storiesabout the folk-lore and their history. Besides being good language material, some of these accounts may be of interest to historians and others working inthe Nigerian field. The text given below is from a tape recording made at Lamurde on 3 May of that year, by Nikodimu Sondo Bukumdi, a local manof some 50 years or more. Lamurde, or Bácámá as the Bachama call it, is thenormal home of the chief of the tribe, and is one of their most important cultural centres. It is here that a new chief is elected, and given instruction in his duties. It is here that many of the objects connected with the religious festival of Nzeanzo at Farei are kept during the rest of the year. Recently, the chiefhas found it more convenient for his administrative duties to live at Numan, and he is now seldom at Lamurde. In his absence on the occasion of my visit, the head of the town assembled a number of elders in the open air who sataround and talked together of the remembered history of their people.

This article is a review of V. S. Vorob'ev-Desjatovskij and M. I. Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja's Skazanie o Bxadre (novye listy sakskoj rukopisi E).1 This recent publication of what is in large part a facsimile volume of Old Khotanese is greatly to be welcomed. We now have at last facsimiles of all the 192 folios (actually 191, see below) in Leningrad that constitute the major part of a Buddhist miscellany written in the oldest type of Khotanese. 173 of the Leningrad folios were seen by E. Leumann and described in detail in 1912.2 18 of these folios (33640, 34254), together with two (334, 335) from the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, were edited and translated by E. Leumann in 1919.3 These formed all the extant part of what on Leumann's calculation was ch. 23 of the surviving portion of the MS, which he had christened E after the signature he allotted to the first folios he saw, 269 and 335 from Calcutta. All the folios known to Leumann were edited and translated by him in 19336 in Das nordarische {sakische) Lehrgedicht des Buddhismus. This included all the 173 Leningrad folios, of which he had taken photographs.Only a few of these were published in facsimile (256v, 257r, 258v, 259r, 303v, 304r, the right halves of 257v, 258r, and the left halves of 259v, 260r) by his son M. Leumann in a private publication, Sakische Handschriftproben, Zrich, 1934. These photographs are excellent, but the folios chosen were particularly favourable for reproduction, and nothing is lost except an insignificant amount of clarity in the facsimiles of the same folios in the present volume.

The scholars who are descendants of Muhammad Aqīt b. ‘Umar b. ‘Alī b. Yahyā al-Ṣanhājī, and who include Aḥmad Baba al-Tinbuktī, are rightly regarded as being among the greatest in the medieval Sudan. Yet, in part due to the fact that the mosque and quarter of Sankuray were the focal point of their scholastic endeavours and in part due to the vague use of the geographical expression Takrūr, which included, as an appendage, areas northwards to the Mauritanian Adrar as well as the Sudanese Sāhil, the essentially ḥanh¯jī and Saharan origin and background of these scholars is sometimes underrated.

Among the five essays ascribed to the sophist Kung-sun Lung (c. 300 B.C.) is an ‘Essay on hard and white’ () which argues that a hard white stone is two things, the white stone which one sees and the hard stone which one touches. In an earlier paper I offered evidence that the last three essays in Kung-sun Lung tzŭ (including the ‘Essay on hard and white’) were written between A.D. 300 and 600, but did not question the apparently self-evident facts that many pre-Han and Han writers mention a sophism of Kung-sun Lung about the separation of hard and white and that in the third century B.C. the common-sense position that hardness and whiteness are mutually pervasive was defended against the sophists in the Mohist Canons. The purpose of the present inquiry is to look again at the whole of the early evidence with fresh eyes.

Though the linguistic interest for Indo-Iranian predominates in the study of the texts from Gostana-dea (Khotan), the contents offer also considerable materials for closer understanding of pre-Muslim Chinese Turkistan in Central Asia.

The Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1902 was designed to determine the frontier between the Sudan and Ethiopia. In an annex to this treaty the British, Italian, and Ethiopian Governments embodied a number of agreed modifications to the frontier between the Sudan and Eritrea (Italy's colonia primogenita) as well as to that between Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the latter survived until the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–6 (and was re-established, in substance, by the British Military Administration in 1941 subsisting until the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation in 1952), the Sudan-Ethiopian frontier has remained substantially unchanged to the present day. The treaty was the culmination of protracted negotiations between the Emperor Menelik and the British Agent in Ethiopia, Lt.-Col. J. L. Harrington.

L'Ekottarāgama, ou ‘Corpus des enseignements gradués’, est un recueil de textes bouddhiques, parallèle á 1'Anguttaranikāya du Canon pali. II n'est connuen sa totalité que par une unique traduction chinoise: le Tseng-i a-han ching.

Le moine tokharien Dharmanandin qui connaissait par coeur le Madhyama et l'Ekottarāgama arriva è Ch'angan en 384 p.-C. et, sur l'invitation du magistrat local Chao Cheng, entreprit de publier ces deux ceuvres indiennes en chinois. La traduction de l'Ekottara commenca le 7 mai 384 et se termina en novembrede la même année ou au printemps de l'année suivante. Dharmanandin ‘récita oralement le texte indigène’, c'est-è-dire l'original indien; les śramaṇes chinois Hui-sung, Chu Fo-nien, et d'autres ‘reçurent au pinceau’.

The study of codified law under the T'ang dynasty is greatly complicated by the fact that, of the four main categories of laws only the penal Code (lü ) is preserved in full. The chief secondary category of law, the administrative Statutes (ling) have been painstakingly reconstructed on the basis of their Japanese adaptations, by reassembling the very large number of quotations which are preserved in T'ang sources, and we have a tolerably complete picture of their form and content. The other two categories of centrally codified law, the Regulations (ko) which codified the major amendments to and supplements to the Code and Statutes which had been promulgated from time to time in imperial Edicts, and the Ordinances (shih) which provided detailed rules for the local implementation of the other categories of law, have disappeared almost completely, and virtually the sole substantial surviving fragments are included among the Tunhuang manuscripts.

The present article may perhaps be regarded as supplementary to Professor Klingenheben's article, ‘Die Präfix- und die Suffixkonjugationen des Hamitosemitischen’, MIO, IV, 2, 1956, 210–77, in much the same way as that article followed on the article ‘Verbalbau und Verbalflexion in den semitohamitischen Sprachen’ by Dr. Otto Rössler, ZDMG, C, 2, 1950, (pub.) 1951, 461–514.

Much of the recent work done in Japan on the political and social background to the Meiji Restoration has concentrated on analysing the manifestations of unrest in Japanese society, which arose from its failure to adjust quickly enough to economic change. Writers point to the growing wealth of merchants, accompanied by the impoverishment of samurai, to the increasing differentiation between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ farmers in the village; and they relate the consequent discontent to samurai reform movements within the great domains (han) and to the rising incidence of peasant revolt. These factors in turn are fitted into general—and often widely differing—explanations of the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the nature of Meiji political institutions.

The Tibetan particle re occurs at the end of sentences, where it is either preceded by a or followed by skan (sometimes spelled kan). When preceded by a it has coalesced with it to a final particle which has so far only been observed after verb forms ending in a consonant (including da-drag) which is then repeated before the a (da-re, sa-re, ta-re, etc.).

Two short lampoons ostensibly directed against al-'Awwām, father of the more illustrious al-Zubair b. al-'Awwām, of the tribe of Asad, a branch of Quraish, follow an unusual method of achieving their object. Apart from general abuse, the chief characteristic of both poems is the deliberate attempt, unparalleled in the poems attributed to Ḥassān b. Thābit, to play on the term al-'awwdm ‘floater or swimmer’. From the idea of floating or swimming, the poet conjures up fish, and crocodiles, which obviously bring to his mind by a feat of the imagination the Nile (though it is not mentioned by name) and hence the Copts and the Egyptian town Qahqā'.

Traditionally, in Thailand, theatrical performances and ancillary entertainments, feats, and games had an important ceremonial function. The generic term that is applied to them is mahōrasop. The context in which they are found in their most highly developed form is that of court ceremonial, though, since ceremonies in the country were often analogues of those held at court, performances of this kind had a wide distribution beyond the walls of the royal and princely palaces of the capitals. To-day, the tradition, even though progressively devitalized as a result of a century of cultural change, remains a living one.

In the literature which has grown up around the Burmese tradition of the 37 nats two omissions have been generally conspicuous. Much has been placed on record regarding the cults of individual members of this pantheon; yet what constitutes the corporate cult of the 37 remains obscure. In casting around for a unifying principle, writers on the subject have made much of the secular status of the persons who became nats and the manner of their deaths. It has escaped comment that most of the details recorded belong not so much tomythology as to hagiography, and concern the earthly careers of those who were deified rather than their nature and powers as gods.1

Awld Jbir, the sons of Jbir, were eminent religious teachers in the Nilotic Sudan during the later part of the sixteenth century. Apart from their own importance, they and their kinsmen by blood and marriage formed a complex group of religious families. Information concerning numerous members of this clan is provided by the collection of biographies of Sudanese holy men known as the Ṭabaqtof Wad Ḍayfallh, which is the main source used in the present article. Two uncritical editions were published in Cairo in 1930.1