On the coast of East Africa there were, in addition to walled towns such as Gedi, Mombasa, Ungwana, etc., numerous small settlements consisting of one or two houses and a mosque, which corresponded to the villas of the late Roman Empire or the manors of contemporary Europe. One of the most interesting of these minor sites is at Kurwitu, between Takaungu and Kikambala, about twenty-five miles north of Mombasa (Fig. 1).

One of the immediate tasks in the field of Mongol studies is to take stock of the prints and manuscripts scattered in many different libraries. As a small contribution to this task there follows a list of the contents of a collection of Mongol manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge. There are thirty-four texts (plus one in Tibetan written in an ornamental Tibetan script), the majority of them ritualistic in content. There is no general title to the collection, and it gives the impression of being a detached fragment from a private library. There are 389 folios of slightly varying dimensions, the approximate measurements being 28 by 6·5 cm. Eleven of the texts, (Nos. 1–11), totalling 213 folios, are written on paper of uniform quality, and some of the remaining texts can also be sorted into groups on the basis of similarity in the quality of the paper. The folios are contained as two pothis between brocade-covered boards. When first inspected the folios were found to be rather muddled, but it was possible to re-sort them into their correct order within the individual texts, and to establish the probable completeness of the latter.

From 1764, when the British position in Bengal was established beyond challenge, until 1842, when the Treaty of Nanking gave Britain the island colony of Hong Kong, the shortest route between British and Chinese territory lay across the Himalaya mountains. Until the Gurkha War of 1814–1816, the southern slopes of the Himalayas and the states that lay along them formed a narrow buffer between British territory and Tibet. As a result of the Gurkha War, British influence was brought right up to the Tibetan border, through the annexation of Kumaon in the western Himalayas, and through the establishment of a vague protectorate over the tiny hill state of Sikkim. Tibet had been evolving into a Chinese dependency since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This process, nearly complete by 1750, reached its final stage in 1792, when Tibet became, to all intents and purposes, an integral part of the Chinese Empire. The British in India were well aware of their proximity to this outpost of the power of the Chinese Emperor. In a period when British dealings with China were confined to trade at a single port, Canton, in conditions that were far from ideal, it would have been most surprising if no attempts had been made to develop Anglo-Chinese relations across the far from impassable barrier of the Himalayas.

The Ongin inscription was discovered in 1891, the year I was born, in Outer Mongolia on the Manet mountains, near a tributary of the River Ongin, from which it takes its name, at a point a little north-east of 46° N., 102° E., that is about 100 miles south of the two great “Orkhon Inscriptions” and some 250 miles west-southwest of the inscription of Toñukuk.

In 1943, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, whilst browsing in the Historiae Hungaricae Fontes Domestici edited by M. Florianus, I came across a short notice, No. 2 of Adnotationes Historicae seculi XII et XIII, entitled: “Quos Bela rex Hungarorum, velut dominus papa, nuntios ad Thartaros direxit.” An explanatory note states: “Notitia … de electione novi imperatoris Tartarorum, et nuptiis Stephani Belae IV-i filii cum filia regis Cumanorum celebratis descripta ex codice Parisiensi Luxemb. Fol. 22. sec. XIH-i, edita fuit in opere collectitio cui nomen “Thesaurus historicus” Budapestini anno 1878.” It took me some time to establish that the “Thesaurus historicus” mentioned here was in fact the Hungarian periodical Történelmi Tár. Fortunately I had no difficulty in finding the volume referred to by Florianus, and in it I saw reproduced the same Latin text accompanied by a note to the effect that the MS referred to contained also a version of Piano Oarpini's Historia Mongalorum. There was also a reference to the “Zeitschrift für deutsche Literature, XVII”. I had been chasing this reference intermittently for years when, in 1951, Mile. Marie-Thérèse d'Alverny, conservateur adjoint at the Bibliothèque Nationale, told me that Marczali's reference was wrong, and was to be corrected to “Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum”! There I found an article by W. Studemund, in which the note mentioned by Florianus and Marczali had been published, probably for the first time.

While reviewing our report on the Excavations at Brahmapuri (Kolhapur) in JRAS., 1954, p. 90, Mr. P. S. Rawson said that “the main excavations, however, yielded little more evidence of Roman contacts”. This is true as far as the published evidence goes.

While reviewing our book—Report on the Excavations at Nasik and Jorve—Dr. Allchin has raised a very important point. He says that the “legged grinding stools” found at Nasik and ascribed by us to period II A “would have been happier in II B or even III”. The question is when an object is found in a well-stratified deposit in a lower layer, should it be dated to a later period because at some place—here Sirkap II—it has been found in a later period, or should the entire layer be dated to the later period even though well-sealed by an upper layer? In this particular case the legged quern has undoubtedly a comparatively short duration as pointed out by Sankalia much earlier; but it is very widely spread in India. This immediately cautions us to be careful in assigning a date to objects found nearly 1,500 miles apart.

In a review of the Epigraphia Zeylanica, Volume V, Part I, which appeared in the JRAS., Parts 3 and 4, 1956, pp. 237–240, an attempt was made to prove the Panākaḍuva Copper-plate a forgery.

Professor Edgerton exclaimed in 1944: “I have been so fortunate as to discover one datum of prime importance for its bearing on the date of this ‘original’ text of the Mbh…. In 2.28.49 occurs, in my opinion as a certain part of the original, the name of the city of Rome … It justifies the inference that our text cannot have been composed at any time before this city name came to the ears of the Indians. This means surely not before the first century b.c., and very likely not until a century or two later.” Upon the soundness of this inference it will suffice here to observe that the textual material upon which it is based leaves something to be desired. But when my attention was drawn for the first time to this passage of the Mahābhārata by Sir Walter Gurner's article in a recent issue of this Journal it at once struck me that, whatever may be the value of the reference to the Yavanas, the passage betrays the date of that portion of the epic by a reference of a much more concrete character.