In reconstructing the sound system of old Chinese— the script being ideographic, the old pronunciation cannot simply be read off—we have been able, thanks to rich materials of various kinds, to determine with tolerable certainty, even in detail, the system of what we call Ancient Chinese, the language of the sixth century a.d., embodied in the dictionary Ts'ie yün. When the inquiry turns to older epochs, the materials are much more meagre and unsatisfactory, and at present, at least, it does not seem feasible to reconstruct in detail the language which we may call Archaic Chinese, the language of the Chou dynasty, the language of the classics. But we are not entirely at a loss. Important conclusions can be drawn regarding this stage of Chinese, and that by four different means. Perhaps the most important of all will be a comparative study of the sinitic family of languages; but for such researches time can hardly be said to be ripe as yet. The T'ai languages and the Tibeto-Burman languages will have to be thoroughly investigated and their most ancient forms established by comparative methods, before there is any use of comparing them with Chinese. But the three remaining sources are ready at hand even now, and some examples will be given here to show how they can be used for reaching new and interesting results about the sound system of Archaic Chinese.

A modern student of Buddhism, unfamiliar with Buddhist art, and accustomed to think of the Buddha only as a human and historical figure, would naturally expect to find the Śākya sage represented in art like any other Buddhist friar, with a shaven (muṇḍa) head; and to suppose that such representations could only have existed as memorials, and not as objects of a cult. As a matter of fact, however, the Buddha is always represented, although not in royal garb, as a deity, with a nimbus, lotus or lion throne, and certain physical peculiarities proper to the conception of a MahāPuruṣa and Cakravartin or King of the World. But crowned and otherwise ornamented Buddhas are not unknown, and again, the earliest Indian type differs in several respects from the established formula of the Gupta and later periods. Thus the Buddha iconography presents a number of difficult problems; and amongst these are those referred to in the title of this paper.

In Cuneiform Texts of the British Museum, vol. xvi, 46, 183–204, occurs, in the body of the text of a long incantation, including a legend of the Fire God, Gibil, and the seven devils, the well-known legend of the plant kiškānû, which is otherwise unknown in medical and magical texts. The bilingual text in six long columns has been admirably pieced together by Dr. R. C. Thompson, who also gave an edition in Devils and Evil Spirits, vol. i, 184–201. It had been previously edited in both editions of iv, Rawlinson, pl. 15, but without several duplicates and joins latterly made by Thompson. The lines concerning the giš-kìn = kiškānu plant occur in the middle of Rev. I. A great many editions of this legend have been made; for the literature on earlier editions, see Dhorme's translation in his Choix de Textes Religieux, 98; Ebeling in Gressmann's Altorientalische Texte zum Alten Testament, 328. All editions suffered from one defect; they were based upon the Accadian text, which is not original and is often an incorrect version of the Sumerian. That the legend is originally of Sumerian origin is clear from the Sumerian tablet from Susa published by Dr. Leon Legrain in Délegation en Perse, xiv, 125, No. 9, and photograph, pi. xi. By comparing the two texts the similarity of phrases and style is at once evident. In contrast to these editions, Mr. C. J. Gadd gave an edition of CT. xvi, 46, in his Sumerian Reading Book, 165, which he correctly based upon the Sumerian text.

The nature and the religious meaning of the construction called a gigunu have long been disputed. Its close association with the ziqqurrat or temple tower has led one scholar to assume the identity of the two as probable, its association with graves has led another to suppose that the ziqqurrat was a gigunu as being the tomb of the god, while yet a third denies that gigunu signifies “place of burial”, and translates simply “sanctuary”.

I do not propose on this occasion to initiate a general discussion concerning the authenticity of the plays discovered and edited by the late Mahāmahopādhyāya Gaṇapati Śāstrī and by him attributed to Bhāsa. Hitherto the matter has run rather a normal course, first enthusiastic acceptance, then opposition, then suggestions of a via media. The debate has evoked some treatises which will retain their value even after a consensus is reached. The various questions are, we may assume, familiar to all scholars here, the question of the formal characteristics of the dramas, of their titles, of the Prakrit and the Sanskrit, of imitations in or by other literary works, of references and citations in anthologies and works on poetics, of the history of the stage in the Kerala country.