This small head is one of the world's supreme masterpieces, A exhibiting all the qualities of the greatest sculpture.

The face is wistful. A faint smile plays almost imperceptibly round the curves of the mouth, the nostrils, and the languid eyes. So sensitive is the modelling that the very flesh appears to vibrate under the skin, and the eyes seem liquid and alive. The technique is detailed enough to bring out the profound individuality of the Egyptian queen, but it does not mar the bland unity of the whole, planes flowing one into another with unbroken continuity.

This Ṛg-vedic word, for which Grassmann's Wörterbuch proffers the meanings—

1. “noble,” “of high origin (Abkunft)”;

2. (of goods, possessions) “fine”, “excellent”

recurs in the Sāma-veda and in the Kāṣhaka-saṃhitā and Maitrāyaṅī- s. of the Black Yajur-veda, but only in two passages taken verbatim from the Rv., viz. Vi.42.4 = Sv. II.6.3.2.4, and V, 1, 5 = Ks. XVI, 3, XIX, 4, Ms. II.7.3. In the other Vedic texts, in the Nirukta, in Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyi and its commentaries, in the Gaṇa-pāṭha, the Uṇādi lists and in the whole subsequent independent literature it seems to be uninstanced. The Ṛg-veda commentaries, which could not fail to interpret it, propound meanings for the most part different from those adopted by Grassmann.

A Version of the story of Sītā is related during the performance of the “Kohoābā Yakkama” or the “Kohoābā Kankāriya”, popularly called “Kankāriya”, one of the most interesting of ceremonies extant among the Sinhalese. The rite is supposed to have been first performed during the reign of Pṇḍduvāsadeva, the second Sinhalese king of Ceylon (circa fifth century B.C.).

Although Tibet is a large country, over 900 miles in its greatest length and over 800 miles in its greatest width, with a frontier of over 2,000 miles, very little was known about it before Sir Francis Younghusband's Expedition in 1903–4. The reason for this is its frontiers of high mountain ranges, some of them the highest in the world.

There are few aspects of Vedic civilization and history more neglected by modern scholars than the organization of ancient Brahmanical society in exogamous clans. It is, of course, recognized that from the time of the Sūtras to the present day the rule has always been that, as well as marrying within his caste, a Brahman must marry outside his own gotra; but further than this few have cared to inquire. The reason for this neglect is no doubt in part the extraordinary state of textual corruption in which our chief sources, the Pravara-adhyāyas of the Śrauta Sūtras, have come down to us, as well as the suspicion, not altogether justified, that the material contained in them is not truly “historical”, or at least has suffered a considerable amount of “künstliche Behandlung”.

In 1922 a collection of four Bhāṇas was published from South Indian Manuscripts under the title of Caturbhāṇī by M. Ramakrishna Kavi and S. K. Ramanatha Sastri. In a short introduction the editors discussed the age and authorship of these works and assigned them varying degrees of antiquity. As the type of dramatic composition in Sanskrit known as bhāṇa, although ancient in origin, had hitherto been represented only by very modern examples, it was naturally a matter of considerable interest and importance for literary history, if the plays should turn out to belong to an early period as the editors claimed.

Japan's gradual interest in Korea and the expansion on this peninsula goes back to the third century A.D. The establishment of the Japanese sphere of influence in Korea, and the domination of Mimana in Southern Korea, were dictated by economic, cultural, and military reasons of Ancient Japan, or the Yamato country. This in the middle of the fourth century A.D. became the strongest and most powerful of many clan (uji) rivals in the central Sovereign, Tennō in the Japanese archipelago.

From the close of the eighth century A.H. till the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in A.H. 922 the Mamlûk army underwent a slow but steady decline. There were three main causes:—

(a) Economic: the exhaustion of Egypt's rich resources due to the predatory economic system of the Mamlûks.

(b) Military: deterioration of discipline in the army; its excessive occupation with politics; the corrupt practice in one section of the army to obtain, for payment, exemption from participation in military expeditions; neglect of the traditional military training (based mainly on the furûsiyya games); the insufficient use of new methods of warfare arising from the introduction of firearms.

(c) Reduced manpower: the continuous decrease of the population in the native countries of the Mamlûks (especially the steppes of Southern Russia and the Caucasus); the outbreaks of plague in Egypt.

To examine a piece of literature bearing a great name and find that it has been wrongly ascribed may be profitable if the work is interesting. Unfortunately, the collection of letters described in Professor Browne's Literary History of Persia (vol. iii, pp. 80 ff.) and the Catalogue of Oriental MSS. belonging to E. G. Browne (pp. 146 f.) would only have had interest and significance if they had indeed been a transcript of the vizier Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl-Allah's own correspondence or despatches.

My article in the Journal (1942,111–121) has evoked two repliesfrom Professor Driver: the first I answered (1943, 251–254) under twelve heads; Professor Driver has dealt with four only in his second article. If this interchange is to go on I hope that it will follow the precedent set by Professor Driver's controversy with Professor Rowley in the Z.D.M.G. Professor Driver had put forward the theory that the Hebrew preposition was a dual form and not a plural and that it was originally the noun “buttocks”. He stated his case and his opponent wrote his reply to each point of the argument. The advantages of this method are that the disputant has to rebut or concede his opponent's points, and the reader does not have to wait six months or more to read a reply to a halfforgotten controversy.

These verses have been a stumbling block to successive generations of editors. One of the latest of these, for example, Dr. W. 0. E. Oesterley, has courageously faced the difficulties but, for reasons which will be stated in the course of this note, got himself tied up rather badly. He saw clearly enough that must refer to God's attitude to the Psalmist's enemy. But the difficulties began for him when he took to refer to the wicked man. In the first place Oesterley did not sufficiently reahze that the possibility of the wicked man repenting of his evil ways rarely occupied the mind of the Psalmist. It is in the Prophets that we get constant appeals to the wicked to repent, not in the Psalms. By the time of the Psalmists society had largely become stratified. The cleavage between the and the was complete. To the or the was irretrievably lost. God's clemency was only sought on behalf of the straying from the path of righteousness. I would therefore suggest that referred to God, at the same time altering to . The rendering would then be: “God is wroth every day; yea, he will not turn back.”

Since the publication of my article (JRAS., 1945, pp. 165 ff.) Dr. A. A. Hekmat has kindly sent me a copy of his book Jāmī, published at Teheran in 1941 (A.H. 1320). In view of Ṣāfīs evidence, he there (pp. 185 f.) dates the first daftar of the Silsilat al-dhahab between A.H. 873 (accession of Sulṭān Huṣayn) and A.H. 877 (Jāmi's pilgrimage). He also calls attention to a relevant passage in the poem itself, strangely overlooked by Ethé and by all other scholars. The important line, which will be found on p. 214 of the lithograph of the Nafaḥāt al-unsand Silsilat al-dhahab published at Cawnpore in 1874, runs as follows:—