This celebrated historical poem, written to sing the glories of the last Hindu emperor of India, the illustrious Pṛithvīrāja. Chauhān, records the gallant deeds of the Chauhān kings of Ajmer, and is of great importance to the history of India. Only one manuscript copy of the poem is known to be in existence. It is a birch-bark MS. in Śāradā characters and is in the Deccan College library, Poona, where it is numbered 150 in the catalogue of the collection of 1875–6. It was discovered in Kashmir in a.d. 1875 by Dr. Bühler in the course of his tour in search of Sanskrit MSS.

Mr. Gait, on pp. 71 and 72 of his History of Assam, has given the mythical origin of the Āhoms, the branch of the Shán or Tai race which invaded Assam in the thirteenth century and which held sovereignty there for centuries till A.D. 1826, when Assam became a portion of British India. Mr. Gait's authority was probably the old Āhom Buranji, or history, which with other Buranjis was translated under the orders of the Assam Administration by Srijut Golap Chandra Barua. Mr. Gait describes how Lengdan. the king of heaven, directed his son Thenkham to descend to earth and establish a kingdom there. Thenkham was unwilling to leave heaven, and so it was arranged that his two sons Khunlung and Khunlai should go instead. Lengdan presented them with an idol called Somdeo, a magic sword (or Hengdán), two drums to be used for invoking divine aid, and four cocks for telling the omens.

The Dvāviṃśatyavadānakathā is a compilation of Buddhist Birth-stories of comparatively late origin. Much of it, particularly of the prose portions, was borrowed from the Avadānaśataka at a time when the MSS. of that work were already faulty. The recension of the Avadānaśataka, from which the author of the Dvā. took his material, was that to which Speyer's MS. D belonged. The language in which it is written resembles that of most of the Northern Buddhist texts, in particular the Vicitrakarṇikāvadanā— that is to say, a kind of popularly developed Sanskrit, which shows for the most part the same line of growth as that followed by the Prākrit dialects many centuries before. The solution of the history of this dialect, and of the question whether, as is probable, it was only a written language, depends on the collection of more material. Below I give a detailed list of the points in which the Sanskrit of the Dvā. differs from classical Sanskrit both in forms, in syntax, and vocabulary. It is possible that scribal errors may be responsible for some of the forms. Few of them are invariable; most are found side by side with their classical equivalents. It will be seen that the majority of the forms and constructions can be paralleled from Pāli and the Prākrits. The figures placed in brackets after forms show the number of times they occur in the text.

The short tenth century account of the Nile in the Delta, which is published here for the first time, is an extract from a unique Arabic MS. on geography preserved at the British Museum (23379 Add.).

I propose to examine the various dialects of which specimens are given in vol. iii of the Report of the Linguistic Survey of India, to group them together according to their method of forming numerals, and then to examine the forms of the numerals used as bases for the higher numerals.

At Mr. Sewell's request the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society sent me an impression of this inscription which had been made over to the Society some years ago by Colonel Gerini. At the same time M. Finot placed at my disposal a photograph of the back of the impression, which is reproduced on the accompanying Plate.

During the later periods of the Ornmayade Caliphate, with their continual rebellions and turmoil, the centre of Arab literary activity had moved entirely to the North, and we get only very few notices of poets who lived and flourished in the central provinces of Eastern Arabia, which in earlier days had produced many celebrated names. Among the poets of this period in Central Arabia the most prominent names are those of al-Quḥaif and Yazīd b. aṭ-Ṭathrlīyya, the latter being perhaps more famous through the elegy upon his death by his sister Zainab, of which verses have found a place in many anthologies. Al-Quṭaif is not mentioned by Ibn Qutaiba, Poësis, but the Kitāb al-Aghānī devotes four pages to his biography, and its author states that only few poems of his are preserved. He receives a short mention in the Fulmlat ash-Shu'arā’ of al-Aṣma'ī, where he is said to have made poems upon women, but that his verses were neither good Arabic nor suitable for being quoted as evidence for correct speech. Among the twenty-four fragments which follow there are only four which may be called poems upon women, while the remainder deal with the troubles in Central Arabia after the murder of the Caliph al-Walīd b. Yazid. As regards the statement that the verses of al-Quḥaif cannot be quoted as evidence for correct speech, the fragments preserved are too few to enable us to judge for ourselves, though I have endeavoured in the notes to several verses to point out deviations from customary usage.