With this article are presented the inscriptions upon nine fragments of tablets belonging to the royal library of the Assyrian kings which was found at Nineveh, its remains being now in the British Museum (and the writer is indebted to the Trustees for permission to publish these specimens). He had already taken the liberty to quote from them in the course of his Inaugural Lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and it is therefore appropriate to include them in a volume in honour of Professor Sir Ralph Turner, Director of the School, whose great services will be more fittingly celebrated by others, but the present writer gladly uses this opportunity to testify his gratitude for many acts of personal kindness, of which the Director's presence and publicly-expressed approval on the aforesaid occasion were not the least appreciated.

Cowell in his Tagore Law Lectures in 1872 said: ‘Constitutional history in this country has nothing to do with steady spontaneous growth of national activities. It is a record of experiment made by foreign rulers to govern alien races in a strange land, to adapt European institutions to Oriental habits of life, and to make definite laws supreme among peoples who had always associated government with arbitrary and uncontrolled authority.’

Rankin in 1946 wrote: ‘The influence of the common law in India is due not so much to a “reception” … as to a process of codification … not merely with a view to putting into form a system which was already in force, but to lay down a rule of decision where there seemed to be none, or where different rules were competing for the same ground.’

The frequent Vedic construction exemplified by ṚV 5, 31, 4 indram … arkaír évardhayann éhaye héntav u ‘they strengthened Indra with hymns to slay the serpent’ has since Delbriick's days been the subject of some discussion and difference of opinion. Whitney expressed the view that the frequent use of the dative beside a so-called infinitive dative to denote the subject or the object of the action constitutes a case of attraction: in the above sentence one would, in accordance with the implication of this term, expect the accusative ahint, whereas in ṚV 1, 24, 8 cakira sryāya pánthām ánvetav u ‘he made a track for the sun to follow’, the dative of the noun denoting the being on whose behalf the path is made is understandable at first sight. Hence no doubt the comment made by Whitney before quoting the latter line: the construction is in part a perfectly simple one, but is stretched beyond its natural boundaries by a kind of attraction.

Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Kurānī al-Shahrazūrī al-Shahrānī belonged to the Shāfi‘ī madhhab and was a ṣūfī in the Naqshabandī order. Muḥammad Khalīl al-Murādī in his Silk al-Durarft a‘yān al-Qarn al-thānī ‘ashar (Bulaq 1301/1883, I, 5 f.), states that he was born in 1025/1616 and died in 1101/1697 in Medina. He studied under the best scholars of his day in Damascus, Cairo, and Medina where he finally settled down. His fame spread and pupils came to him from distant lands to attend his lectures in the prophet's mosque. He was the author of more than 100 books and treatises. The Garrett Collection of the Library of Princeton University contains manuscripts of several of them, one being an autograph. The names of many of these will be found in the Silk loc. cit., Brockelmann, GAL, G. n, 505 and S. II, 520, and Ismā‘īl Pasha al- Baghdādī's Dhayl to Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Istanbul, 1951, I, 35 f.

This intriguing document, unsigned, but in Burney's handwriting, is in the Royal Empire Society's collection of Burney Papers. After two years of arduous labours at the Burmese capital Burney had gone to Rangoon in April 1832 to recoup his health, leaving the Residency under the charge of his assistant, E. A. Blundell. In the following September Bhmdell was relieved by Captain H. Macfarquhar, for whom presumably these notes were written.

Since the publication in 1871 of an extensive English translation of Ḍivā al-dīn Baranl's in Vol. in of Elliot and Dowson's History of India as told by its own historians, the modern study of the reigns of the sultans of Delhi from Balban to the sixth year of has been mainly, though not exclusively, founded upon this , whether in translation or in the Bibliotheca Indica text edited by Sayyid Aḥmad in 1862.

It is over 100 years since Brian Houghton Hodgson was persuaded by what he described as ‘great peculiarities in the use of the pronouns’ in certain of the languages of the southern Himalayan region to ‘divide the Himalayan races primarily into two groups, distinguished by the respective use of simple or non-pronomenalised [sic], and of complex or pronomenalised languages’. This method of classification was taken over by Sten Konow in the third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India and has been widely accepted by linguists since that time. ‘Pronominalization’ has been taken to mean pronominal usage of a certain kind, particularly within the verbal complex, and has on the whole been regarded as a non-typical feature of Tibeto-Burman languages, probably to be accounted for by alien influences, and restricted, within the Tibeto-Burman family, to the languages grouped together by Konow under the name ‘Himalayan’.

The following two problems, though different in other respects, have this in common—that they at first glance invite an easy, though phonologically unsatisfactory, explanation, whereas their solution is to be sought in other directions. My attention was called to them through my studies of some Himachali1 dialects.

Although your scholarly fame, Sir Ralph, rests principally on your achievements as a comparative linguist, your work on certain Asoka inscriptions has shown that you are no less at home in the field of epigraphy. I gratefully recall how generously you helped me when, some years ago, I struggled with a particularly difficult inscription (also attributable to Asoka) from the Indo-Iranian borderland. This interest in matters of epigraphy encourages me to hope that you will not disdain, as a modest tribute, the following notes on some new inscriptions, discovered at a place not far beyond the confines of ancient India.

The lithic inscriptions of Burma from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century are interspersed with poetry. They are the earliest Burmese poems extant. The motif in the inscriptions is regal-religious; yet the verses are not devoid of expressions of personal emotions. Nature and love, as themes of Burmese poetry, did not emerge into prominence until the fifteenth century when ‘book literature’ written on palm-leaf superseded the lithic inscriptions.

The book literature of Burma originated under the auspices of Buddhist monarchs and flourished in manuscript from the fifteenth century till after printing became widespread in Burma in the second half of the nineteenth century. The authors were Buddhist monks or men who had spent many years in the monastery, and some talented Court-ladies.

The mahākāvya Rāvanavadha by Bhaṭṭi, known as the Bhaṭṭikāvya, differs from the other mahākāvyas by its ‘flowers’ embroidered on the underlying theme of the Rāmāyana: the main purpose of the poem is to illustrate examples from Sanskrit grammar, and halfway through it the poet/grammarian, now becoming a poet/, devotes some sargas to a systematic disquisition on poetics: (anuprāsa and yamaka), (circa 40 of them), and some guṇa and rasa (mādhurya and bhāvikatva).

1. Both among the Navāiyat community who speak a dialect of as well as among other speech communities the common word corresponding to the learned caste appellation Navāiyat is either Nāito or Nāityāṁčo (i.e. ‘belonging to the Nāitā community’). The Navāiyats (= ‘new-comers’ according to the Bombay Gazetteer, vol. xv, on Kanara) are chiefly concentrated around Bhatkal, but are also to be found as far south as South Kanara, in connexion with their mercantile interest in cloth trading.

The study of Muslim institutions in Persia is made difficult by a lack of documents, nor is this lack due wholly to the destruction of those that once existed. Many of the legal contracts and procedures, especially those relating to customary as opposed to shar‘ī law, were unwritten. Moreover so far as local matters were concerned the process of recording was a laborious one in Persia as elsewhere; and it must have seemed unnecessary to record what every village elder knew. Another difficulty which faces us in the study of Muslim institutions in Persia is the fact that the sources often use terms imprecisely. Some are used in both a general and a technical sense. The same term may be used to denote a number of different institutions and the meaning of any term may vary according to both time and place.

In a volume dedicated to Sir Ralph Turner, it can scarcely be inappropriate to devote an essay to a text which bears every sign of being the first Christian adaptation of that legend of the Buddha which, migrating from the cultural environment of the Lalita-vistara and the Buddha-carita, finally evolved into the story of the Christian worthies Barlaam and Ioasaph.

Since the German Turfan expeditions of half a century ago, it has become increasingly clear that an early stage in the story's development may be sited in those areas of Central Asia where Buddhism and Manichseism, the former using Sanskrit, the latter Iranian and Old Turkish as literary media, for a time overlapped. Thus, among the Turkish Manichaean fragments recovered at Turfan are two extracts from a prototype (or two separate sources) of the Barlaam legend: firstly, the episode of the meeting of the Bodisav (Bodhisattva) prince with the decrepit old man; and secondly, an unsavoury tale, later incorporated in the Arabic version by Ibn Babuya, concerning a drunken prince who mistakes a corpse for a desirable maiden.

I suppose that most textbooks of European history or of world history—which in European textbooks is much the same thing—contain a chapter called ‘The Age of the Discoveries’, or something of the kind, which deals with the period from the fifteenth century onwards when Western Europe set about discovering the rest of the world. My subject to-day is another and earlier discovery, in which the West European was not the explorer going forth to discover the barbarian, but the barbarian discovered by the explorer—the Muslim explorer. My purpose is to outline, very briefly, the sources, nature, and stages of growth of Muslim knowledge concerning Western Europe, first in the obscure centuries before the Crusades, then during that great offensive of Western Christendom against Islam, of which the expeditions to Palestine were the easternmost expression.

When Jules Bloch wrote his pioneer work La formation de la langue marathe 40 years ago, there were fewer specimens of early Marathi literature available than to-day. The Bhavārtha-dīpikā of Jñānadeva (A.D. 1296) was well-known, but R. G. Panse–s index of words contained in that work was not to appear until 1953 in his Linguistic peculiarities of Jñāneśvarī. The works of Mukundarāja (c. 1190) had often been published, but had undergone modernization and the works of the Mānabhāva or Mahānubhavā sect written in various ciphers largely remained unpublished. Much has been written on these sources since by Marathi scholars, but in Marathi and so not readily accessible to the West.

The contents of the document which forms the main subject of the present article are somewhat slender and cannot be appreciated outside the context of the struggles between the Ottomans and the Safavids for the incorporation of the Turkman tribes settled in the territories separating their states. Many points of the situation await further investigation and our summary will be as brief as the complicated subject admits.

The home of the Ottoman dynasty was in the north-western corner of Anatolia, but, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the Turks had crossed over to the northern side of the Straits and the Balkan territories became the nursery of the Ottoman empire.

In their learned and sumptuously illustrated work Mushrooms, Russia and history, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and K. Gordon Wasson have given a comprehensive and fascinating survey of mushroom lore. All kinds of traditions and conceits connected with fungi have here been discussed, together with the often picturesque and fanciful, sometimes unsavoury names denoting them in many diverse languages. The etymologies are frequently quite clear, and give a good clue to the understanding of the strikingly parallel reactions evoked everywhere by ‘the rich world of mushrooms and toadstools’. Other words are of uncertain origin, and in some cases we come across resemblances between words from unrelated and unconnected languages, which the philologist may be inclined to ascribe to ‘mirages linguistiques’.

§ 1. No doubt the coincidence (except for a long initial syllable) of the classical Sanskrit metre vasanta-tilaka with the first period of Pindar's sixth Pythian is fortuitous:

Aucune notion dans le Ṛgveda n'a été davantage reprise et sans cesse répétée que celle de ‘donner’. En dépit des fortes tendances formulaires qui caractérisent la Samhitā, les auteurs se sont ingéniés à. en varier l'expression. La racine dā- fournit le lot de formes le plus important, et sur cette racine, un éventail de noms d'action, dont nous allons tenter de preciser les emplois et les limites respectives.