By gracious permission of His Royal Highness, these four plates are reproduced from the volume reviewed on pp. 209–212. The captions and the following notes are derived from this work.

IX. This is Plate 1 in the volume. The frieze encircling the middle of the vessel “consists of three horizontally broadened t'ao-t'ie masks, each composed of two elongated animals facing one another. The frieze is bordered on either side by a single row of rings. The sunken lines of the relief were filled with a substance which now shows black. In places where this filling has disappeared the bottom is yellow in colour from some shiny pale golden substance. There is no inscription”.

This neglected subject received a notable contribution lately from Professor Gustav Ecke in Peking. His Chinese Domestic Furniture is, I believe, the first attempt at an organized treatise (9). Existing literature was scanty. From Chinese sources there were sundry entries in encyclopædias, and chance allusions and woodcuts to be found in unexpected places. Specialized Western publications comprised only three portfolios of plates (3, 8, and 27), and several magazine articles (10, 11, 13, and 28), not counting the somewhat fanciful descriptions by eighteenth-century writers, such as Chambers, Chippendale, and the Halfpennys (4, 6, and 15). Last year a book by George N. Kates appeared, which covers much the same ground as Ecke's pioneer work, but is designed more for the general reader (22).

In a recent lecture before the Royal Asiatic Society I drew attention to a curious misunderstanding by Édouard Biot of a passage in the Chou li, as revealed in his French translation of that work. The mistake was repeated by Berthold Laufer, and by later writers; and since it has perplexed many antiquaries and collectors, it should, I think, be noted and corrected.

I should like to present some ideas on what, I think, is necessary revaluation of Islamic traditions in the light of our present knowledge; but am at a loss whether to call my conclusions something new and unprecedented, or something old and well known. No one could have been more surprised than I was by the results which the evidence of the texts has forced upon me during the last ten years or so; but looking back I cannot see what other result could possibly be consistent with the very foundations of our historical and critical study of the first two or three centuries of Islam. One of these foundations, I may take it for granted, Goldziher's discovery that the traditions from the Prophet and from his Companions do not contain more or less authentic information on the earliest period of Islam to which they claim to belong, but reflect opinions held during the first two and a half centuries after the hijra.

There are a number of journeys made, or alleged to have been made, in Arabia between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century of which there is no mention, or at least no adequate account, in Hogarth's Penetration of Arabia or in R. H. Kiernan's Unveiling of Arabia. Many of these omissions are due to the little use they made of the Portuguese historians.

THE origin and history of the pandore and lute in the Near and Middle East is a perennial attraction to musicologists. Especially interesting is its emergence in Greece, where its Oriental origin is ackowledged. It has been surmised that the word πανδορα is derived from the Sumerian pandur or pantur (“little bow”), and it may be perfectly true that in primeval times the pandore would have evolved from a “musical bow”. Still, no such words have come down to us in Sumerian which actually indicate an instrument of music. On the other hand, a somewhat similar class of instrument is to be found to-day in the Ạrmenian pandir, the Georgian panturi, and the Ossetic fandur. Strange to say Nicomachus (a.d. second century) actually wrote ϕανδονρα The pandore itself is delineated in eastern art remains much earlier than in Greece. It occurs on a Nippur plaque (c. 1700), on Egyptian wall paintings (c. 1570), and in later Susian, Cappadocian, Hittite, and Assyrian Art remains. The earliest examples from Greece have been those of the fourth century b.c., as shown in the art remains from Mantineia and Tanagra, both possessing, seemingly, a narrow periform sound-chest and a long neck. A century later, the name πανδορα occurs in Euphorion, who spent most of his life in Syria.

For many years the official folk-lore of British India has included a story that Lord William Bentinck once contemplated the demolition of the Taj Mahal in order to sell its marble. The point of the story has varied with the mental climate of the time: at first it was an illustration of Bentinck's supposed meanness; the arch “clipper” would even lay hands on the Taj in order to make money. Later it became evidence of the supposed vandalism of the British in early nineteenth-century India; even Bentinck, the otherwise praiseworthy economical reformer, saw nothing in the Taj worthy of preservation. For many years, after the circumstances of its origin and its early expressions had been forgotten, the story lived on in the realm of verbal folk-lore, but more recently it has been revived in print and its truth largely taken for granted. The story, if true, would be a serious reflection on Bentinck according to the standards of any civilized age, and it is therefore worth asking with some particularity upon what basis of fact it rests.

The title of this short essay is not the outcome of any foible on my part towards a chance euphonious coupling of two not ill-suited concepts. The phrase indeed, being short, simple, and succinct, should convey accurately the motive and method which have together dictated the form of this study. Restricted as it had to be, the field of research is still wide, and the flowers that grow therein are not only time-worn, but their types show many and often baffling variations. Among these a choice had to be made, and I have made it, mainly in each case for the contrastive effect aimed at and displayed in the symbols of Then and Now.