As the Swat valley, and neighbourhood, which constitute the principal portion of the old province of Udyāna, have hitherto been inaccessible for archæological research, the following rough notes (made during the little time at my disposal as Chief Political Officer with the Chitral Relief Force, and lately as Political Officer for Dir and Swat) may induce others better qualified to devote some attention to this interesting neighbourhood. They are principally connected with the travels of the Chinese pilgrim Huan Tsiang, as given in Beal's “Buddhist Records of the Western World.”

The MS. from which the text of the Nile Service is taken, is numbered Or. 4951, and is a recent acquisition of the British Museum. It consists of 69 paper leaves, measuring about 6£ ins. by 5 ins., with mostly 15 lines to a page. The quires, 7 in number, are of 10 leaves each (the last leaf being blank). The Syriac letters by which the quires are numbered are written in the middle of the lower margin, both on the last and the first page of each quire. Thus, on fol. 10b, the letter denotes the end of the first quire, and the same letter also stands on fol. 11a; the letters etc., are similarly written on foil. 20 b and 21 a, foil. 30b and 31a, etc. The only exception is the absence of the letter on fol. 61a. The style of writing, though smaller, approaches yery nearly to that of pi. xx (representing fol. 34 of Add. 14,664) in vol. iii of Wright's “Catalogue of the Syriac MSS. in the British Museum,” which has been assigned to the twelfth or thirteenth century. The letter “rlsh” is, with very few exceptions, written (with two dots instead of one), and the “daleth” is, as a rule, not distinguished by a dot below. There are no diacritic points below the letters, and points over the text (see the first facsimile, representing fol. 38b of the MS. chosen to exemplify some of the characteristics mentioned here)are mainly employed in the following cases:

It is, I hope, never too late to acknowledge a mistake and correct a blunder. Since the appearance of my note on the Castle of Abrīḳ (see J.R.A.S. for October, 1895, p. 739), Professor De Goeje has called my attention to a passage in the “Tanbih” of Mas'ūdi, which negatives the identification of Abrīḳ with the modern Arabkir, and proves incontrovertibly that Tephrikē, of which there can be little doubt that Divrigi (or Divrik) is the present representative, must be the place which various Arab geographers describe under the name aforesaid of Abrīḳ or Abrūḳ.

The ancient kingdom of Orissa (Odra-deśa, whence Oṛeśá), strictly speaking, extended from the Kánsbáns river in the north to the Rasákuliá river near Ganjám in the south; and from the Bay of Bengal on the east far into the tangled mass of low hills in the west, in which latter direction its limits seem never to have been clearly defined. But the kings of Orissa were not satisfied with these boundaries. It is a common boast both in literature and on monuments that their kingdom stretched from the great to the little Ganges; that is to say, from the Bhágirathí (called by Europeans the Hugli or “Hooghly”) to the Godávarí. At various times different kings made good this boast by victorious campaigns, followed by temporary occupation of territory both to the north and south.

While travelling in Khorāsān, in 1874, Colonel (then Captain) the Honourable G. Napier reported having passed an inscription cut upon a rock near the village of Panj-Mana, seven or eight miles north of Kārdeh, on the road leading from Meshed to Kelāt-i-Nādiri. The rock was described as a block of crystalline limestone fallen from an overhanging cliff, while the writing it bore was said to be the record of a victory gained by “ Muhammad Shaibāni, the Usbeg conqueror of Bokhārā, over the unbelievers.” The languages in which it was cut were Arabic and Persian, and the date 916 of the Hijra, or 1510 a.d.

The inscription is an interesting one, and well deserves publication in our Journal. It records a march by Shaibānī to the Kirghiz Steppe, and a victory which he gained over the inhabitants at Kindilik in the Ulugh Tāgh country. He began his march from Merv-Shāhijān on 2 Shawwāl, 915 (13 January, 1510), and returned after four months and twenty days on 22 Safar, 916 (1 June, 1510). Mr. Elias considers that the inscription is false and that the so-called victory was a defeat, and he quotes in support of this view the Ḥabīb-as-Siyar and the Tārīkh-i-Rashīdī. But surely a contemporary inscription is better authority than two books—one by a compiler and the other by an enemy—and, moreover, the latter are not, I think, absolutely contradictory of the inscription. Shaibānī was apparently at first successful over the people of the Dasht-i-Kipchāk, though he, or at least his son, was eventually defeated by them, and I take the inscription to refer to the initial victory. That some such victory did occur, seems to be admitted by Haidar Mirza. At p. 230 (Ross's translation) we read: “In the middle of the winter, Shāhi Beg Khan was engaged in plundering on every side, but he soon returned, his object being not to remain too far from his own country.” I think this must be the expedition commemorated in the inscription. That began in the middle of winter (13 January, 1510), and was characterized by wondrous rapidity of movement, as the inscription tells us.

A copper-plate, closely similar to one existing at Calcutta, and successively published by Dr. F. Hall (J.A.S.B., xxvii, 220) and Prof. Kielhorn (Ind. Ant., xviii, 9), has recently come under my notice. It measures 1′ 4″ high by 1′ 6″ broad, and has a hole for a ring at the top and the raised rim described by Dr. Kielhorn, l.c. The plate is at present at Messrs. Terry and Co.'s, of 29, Glasshouse Street, London, W. It is for sale, and I understand from them that it has previously been in the hands of a family in the South of England for about a century.

I trust that English readers will have before them ere long a full account of the very important “Encyclopaedia of Indian Research” (Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie), at present in course of publication by K. Trübner of Strassburg, under the editorship of Dr. Bühler. A copy of the editor's own extremely weighty contribution on “Indische Palaeographie” has, together with its accompanying set of excellent plates, reached me by the author's kindness. At his request I now draw attention to an. omission in his chapter on the denotation of numerals (VI. Zahlenbezeichnung, pp. 73–83).