The object published in these pages for the first time is of major interest for the history of Iranian metalwork. This eagle in the round is the largest animal bronze of the Sassanian period known to this day. It is of the highest quality and in comparatively good condition in spite of the accident which caused its two wings to be broken at some unknown time. I should therefore like to express my warmest thanks to Dr. von Manteuffel, Director of the Sculpture Department at the Berlin Dahlem Museum, and to Dr. Ursula Schlegel for generously giving me permission to publish this outstanding work of art. My gratitude goes also to Dr. Viktor Elbern, who very kindly encouraged me in this publication.

It has always been difficult to make a diagnosis in retrospect from the sparse facts that are provided in the written records from antiquity, especially those from ancient Mesopotamia. To add to our troubles, the semantic range of meaning of individual words may permit diverse interpretations in any given sentence, and the context in which they occur then becomes important. Only too often the text may be damaged or incomplete; very rarely does a scribe give full medical details about diagnosis, although it is common to find detailed instructions concerning therapy. One of the reasons for this deficiency is that the Babylonian scribes tended to state first the problem and then the solution in their scientific texts, the intermediate steps being reached by a process apparently well known to themselves (but not to us), or by oral transmission.

Tamil literature, particularly the earliest writing, is notoriously difficult to date. The body of factors influencing a decision in the matter is complex, and the degree of parochialism of the writer is not always the least important. Age is often assumed to be a synonym of quality, and it therefore appears desirable to push the beginnings as far back in time as possible if quality is to be proved. Without such efforts, however, an objective observer can safely say that Tamil contains literary works of a high standard dating from a period much further back in time than any other Indian language apart from Sanskrit. How far back is another question.

In JRAS, 1964, I edited an eighth-century inscription from 'Phyong rgyas known only through its survival in a collection which once belonged to Rig-'dzin Tshe-dbang Nor-bu of Ka-thog monastery, a famous lama of the 18th century (hereafter referred to as RT). The present article is concerned with his copy of another inscription described as “at Srong-brtsan Bang-so”. That is the popular name not only for the tumulus called Bang-so dMar-po and known as that of Srong-brtsan sGam-po but also of the whole burial area near 'Phyong rgyas. The inscription comes from a pillar near the tumulus attributed to Khri IDe Srong brTsan, who reigned from c. 804–815. Professor Giuseppe Tucci, the first Western visitor to examine the royal burial ground, has edited it in his Tombs of the Tibetan kings (TTK), Rome, 1950; and in CAJ, June 1963,1 have added some information about the pillar and the burial ground as a whole as the result of a visit in 1949, not long after Professor Tucci. Describing the pillar in TTK, p. 36, Professor Tucci writes “the surface of the stone is nowadays much damaged and a great part of the inscription is effaced. The lower portion is completely gone and a few lines are underground.”

I. Beaucoup d'auteurs ont consacré une grande partie de leurs recherches au sujet vaste et riche qu'est la dérivation dans les langues mon-khmères. Le champ d'investigations le plus important est évidemment celui du mon et du khmer, du fait de la quantité de textes préservés jusqu'à l'heure actuelle. Les chercheurs sont arrivés à des résultats remarquables, dont l'aboutissement est l'établissement de tableaux des différentes catégories d'affixes (préfixes et infixes) et leurs fonctions grammaticales. A partir de là il ne semble plus difficile de reconstituer les families de mots. On traite les dérivés par un procédé quasi-mathématique: on “soustrait” les affixes des mots considérés et on peut retrouver assez aisément les racines qui, dans la plupart des cas, sont communes à beaucoup de langues mon-khmères.

There is no recognized English term for the peoples with which this paper deals. The Hungarians themselves call them the “keleti segédnépek”, the Germans, the “östliche Hilfsvölker”. The adjective “eastern” excludes the German or Serb “auxiliaries” who sometimes figure in Hungarian history; but the Magyars did not apply the term just to any people who happened to have entered Hungary via its eastern frontier. They never ranked a Russian, nor, indeed, any Slav immigrant as an auxiliary, nor a Vlach, nor a Jew. They reserved the term for peoples of the same sort of mores and social structure, military organization, and at least apparently kindred ethnic origin as the Magyars themselves, what may be called, roughly, nomadic or quasi-nomadic steppe peoples. They drew a fairly clear distinction between such peoples and others, treating the former at least as near-equals and easily admitting them to full equality. After this had happened, the auxiliaries usually assimilated very easily with the Magyars, so that their later history is often difficult to trace. They played, however, a considerable part—larger than is often recognized—in the national history, and indeed formed a larger component than is usually recognized of the so-called Magyar people themselves; even of the invaders who crossed the Carpathians, under Magyar leadership, at the end of the 9th century a.d.

The Book of Zambasta is not without importance in the history of Buddhist studies. We know that Khotan was a major centre of Mahāyāna studies when Fa-hsien visited it about a.d. 400 on his way to India, and it had expanded in this direction when Hsüan-tsang in the 7th century spent several months in Khotan on his way back from India to China. Khotan was, if not the cradle, at any rate the stronghold of the Mahāyānist movement. We know of its importance in the transmission of Buddhist teaching to the East. Even the well-known term Zen represents Sanskrit dhyāna “meditation” only through the intermediacy of a Prakrit form such as the Khotanese loan-word jāna. In the Chinese Tripiṭaka we have translations made by Khotanese missionaries such as Devaprajña, Śikṣānanda, and Śīladharma. In the 5th century a certain marquis of An iang hou journeyed to Khotan in his youth to study the Dhyāna. A Chinese catalogue finished in a.d. 515 tells how eight Chinese monks came to Khotan and there heard the stories that later they made into the well-known collection “The Sūtra of the Wise man and the Fool”. The famous monk Jinagupta, who taught the Turks about Buddhist doctrines in the 6th century, had studied in Khotan for many years.