In the Egyptian medical papyri, as well as in certain other texts, there occurs a substance called didi which for many years was understood to mean the fruits of the mandragora or mandrake. This equation didi = mandrake arose out of the opinion stated in his dictionary by Brugsch that the word didi was akin to the Hebrew doudaim “mandrake”. Brugsch, some years after the publication of the supplement to his dictionary (vol. vii, 1882), reaffirmed his opinion in a special article with the title “Die Alraune als altägyptishe Zauberpflanze”, which appeared in 1891. From that time the identification was accepted without question until in 1904 M. Henri Gauthier published an important article in which he showed quite conclusively that didi was not the mandrake, nor even a plant at all, but a mineral. It does not in the least detract from the importance and value of M. Gauthier's paper that it is now necessary to go over the ground once again, because further evidence has become available since its publication. We will first, therefore, enumerate the texts in which the word didi occurs.

This was found at Ur during last season's excavation by the British Museum and University Museum of Pennsylvania Joint Expedition. I thank Mr. Woolley, the Director of the Joint Expedition, for leave to use the Expedition's photograph and for permission to publish.

It is, I believe, familiar knowledge that the work on Rhetoric called Kāvya-prakāśa was composed by two authors, Mammaṭa and Alaka or Alaṭa. The traditional verse quoted by Rājānaka Ānanda, in his commentary entitled Kāvya-prakāśa-nidarśanā—

informs us that Mammaṭa wrote the work as far as Parikara, and the rest was completed by Alaka. Sanskrit scholars therefore inferred that “about a third of the last chapter on Figures of Speech, or roughly speaking a tenth of the whole work, was written by Alaka, i.e. from the second half of the 118th, verse onwards”. But the reference to the joint authorship of the seventh Ullāsa by Arjunavarmadeva has given rise to the question whether “Alaka had a hand not only in the tenth, but also in the seventh chapter”. An attempt is made in the present article to examine the question and to arrive, if possible, at some definite conclusion in the matter.

The two following inscriptions were found last season by the British Museum and University Museum of Pennsylvania Expedition to Ur. My thanks are due to the Joint Expedition, and to Mr. Woolley acting on its behalf, for permission to publish them.

In this article I have collected a certain number of documents where of the subject matter has at least some special connexion with the Śa-cu district. A good portion of the matter contained in the previous article (“I: The Ḫa-za,” supra, pp. 51–85) may be regarded as no less apposite here, and the reader, comparing the two papers, may find on the whole little dissimilarity in the contents, except that in the former case we have adhered closely to the Ḫa-za people. In order to show some system in the papers, the references in which I am naturally not in a position to restrict, I have grouped them under four heads, representing the chief purpose of their selection, namely (A) Places, (B) Clans and Nomenclature, (0) Paper and Copying of MSS., (D) Monasteries and a Historic Foundation.

A. Linin's article (“K voprosam formalnogo izucheniya poezii turetskikh narodov” in the Izvestiya Vostochnogo Fakulteta Azerbaidžanskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, t. i, Baku, 1926, pp. 139–201), criticizing the work of T. Kowalski (Ze studjów nad formą poezji ludów turechich, 1922) on Turkish popular prosody, deals with some new details connected in one way or another with prosody. Among them the author draws attention on p. 180 to the soft pronunciation of the Turkish r, at the same time he refers to analogous results in one of the previous treatises of Messrs. Kowalski and Bergsträsser (ibid.). This fact is so interesting that it can be examined without reference to its influence upon the character of the rhymes and can properly be made the subject of a separate article.

Nabataean sepulchral inscriptions from El-Ḥejra in the El-Ḥejraejaz, 40 miles south of Teima and 300 miles S.S.E. of Petra, frequently mention the Nabateaans and Shalamians. The Aramaic-Nabataean inscriptions may be found in Professor Cooke's North Semitic Inscriptions, Nos. 78–109, and Professor Lidbarski's Nordsemitische Epigraphik, pp. 448–457. In them occur the names of the old Arabic deities, Dūsharā of Petra, Manūthu, a goddess of Qudaid in the southern Ḥejaz south of Medīna, Qaishā, Allat, principal goddess of the Arabians, and Hubalu of Mekka. According to Hommel, Grundriss, 715, n. 1, Allat may have been the principal deity of the Shalamians, but this is uncertain, and the exact location of this tribe is unknown. The “Shalamians” occur in three tomb inscriptions from El-Ḥejra, Cooke, ibid., 79 (1 b.c.), No. 81 (a.d. 4), No. 86 (a.d. 26).

I Copied this fragment in 1919, and discovered that it is the text erroneously cited by Delitzsch in his Assyrisches Handwörterbuch as DT. 59. It contains so many important contributions to Sumerian and Accadian lexicography, that its publication in extenso is desirable. Its contents are similar to the Shurpu series, and I suggest that it is the still missing first tablet of that series. Zimmern, who is the editor of the Shurpu series, suggested in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, vol. 30, 187, that either CT. 17, 34–5 (restored by him in ZA. 28, 75–80) or Craig, Religious Texts, 56–9, is the missing first tablet. Clearly DT. 57 has more claim to that distinction by reason of its similarity with the other tablets of the Shurpu series.