An Act of Truth is a formal declaration of fact, accompanied by a command or resolution or prayer that the purpose of the agent shall be accomplished. For example, a hunter asks a sage how a certain nymph can be captured, and the sage replies: “Nymphs can be captured by the utterance of a truth; nor, under such circumstances, have they power to vanish from sight.” Accordingly the hunter says to the nymph he desires to capture: “You are the beautiful daughter of King Druma; if this be true, halt! you are bound fast! If it be true that you are the daughter of King Druma, and that you were reared by the king, move not a foot, O fair Mancharā!” By the utterance of this truth on the part of the hunter the nymph addressed is immediately bound fast, and is unable to vanish from sight; but all of her companions vanish into the air.

Buddhism and Christianity are essentially unlike, no two religions more so, but no other worldwide religions have so many points of superficial resemblance. Some of these resemblances are natural or accidental. For instance, Christ and Buddha taught in parables, because, as Galen says, parables are the most instructive form of teaching for simple men. Again, Buddhism and Christianity lay stress on right conduct; and although Buddhists and Christians do not mean exactly the same thing by these words, both lay hold of great ethical principles. Such coincidences are in the nature of things. But the greater number are undoubtedly due to the secular contact of the two religions in Central Asia from the second to the twelfth century a.d., and they are confined of necessity to legend and to ritual.

It is doubtful whether there has existed in our time any European who possessed so extensive and so profound a knowledge of Persia as the late Sir Albert Houtum-Schindler, who died at his house at Fenstanton, Hunts, in his 70th year, on June 16, 1916. And he was one of those generous scholars who, while seemingly taking more pleasure in the acquisition than in the publication of knowledge, waa ever ready to place at the disposal of all students the rich stores of his learning. To this generosity Lord Curzon, in the Preface to his valuable work on Persia (London, 1892, vol. i, pp. xii–xiii), bears eloquent testimony in the following words:—

“Of these coadjutors the first, alikein authority and in the extent of his assistance, has been General A. Houtum-Schindler, a gentleman who, after filling many important posts in the Persian Service, is now acting as adviser to the Imperial Bank of Persia in Teheran. To the advantage of long residence in the country he adds the erudition of a scholar and the zeal of a pioneer. He has personally revised nearly every page of these volumes, besides supplying me with much of my original information; and I tremble to think how many errors they might have contained but for his generous and never-failing cooperation. Few men so excellently qualified to write a first-rate book themselves would have lent such unselfish exertion to improve the quality of another man's work.”

The only complete manuscript of this Chronicle of the Bohemians which is known to exist is a folio paper volume written partly in the fourteenth and partly in the early fifteenth century. My efforts to see the MS. itself have so far been unsuccessful, and the following extracts are translated from the text printed by Gelasius Dobner in his Monumenta Historica, Boemiœ nusquam antehac edita, etc., 6 tom. 4to, Pragæ, 1764…85. The Chronicle is in tom, ii, 1768, pp. 79–282. It is entitled Chronicon Reverendissimi Joannis dicti de Marignolis de Florentia Ordinis Minorum Bysinianensis Episcopi …, and begins: Incipit Processus in Cronicum Boemorum, ending, on p. 282, Et sic est finis hujus Cronice Boemorum. The MS., it should be said, was formerly in thelibrary of the Church S. Crucis majoris at Prag, and is now in the University Library in that city.

In a former paper in this Journal (1913, p. 885) I set out the kṣatriya ballad, which told of the fortunes of Satyavrata Triśaṅku, prince of Ayodhyā, as affected by the two famous rishis, Vasiṣṭha, the great priest of Ayodhyā, and Viśvaratha, king of Kānyakubja, who relinquished his kṣatriya status and became a brahman with the name Viśvāmitra. This paper carries on their story in connexion with Triśaṅku's successors.

The small cosmological tract I here publish, and which is attributed to Dionysius, Bishop of Athens, I have taken from the MS. marked 7192 Rich., now Add. 7192, of the British Museum. This is a MS. in quarto on vellum, containing not more than seventy-six folios, and belongs probably, so far as we can judge from the good esṭrangĕlô character in which it is written, to the eighth century. The treatise begins on f. 57c—there are two columns of thirty-one lines on every page—and ends on f. 63b at the bottom. It is followed by another tract from the hand of the same author—the contents and the style, and especially the concluding lines which are nearly identical to the last ones of the tract we publish, at least point to the same author—that bears the following inscription:

It is an anti-astrological and anti-magical tract, as it undertakes to demonstrate that divination by means of the “stars, the zodiacal signs, the horoscopes, the fortunes, the chances, the hours, the convulsions, the auguries, the divinations, and all the deception of the Chaldæans, sons of deception” is not to be relied upon, and is contradictory to the facts that daily observation affords us.

In the year 204, exactly two centuries before the date generally accepted as that of the birth of Christ, the Roman State had passed through an experience much like that of our great Ally across the Channel in the autumn of 1914. Hannibal, the lifelong enemy of Rome, had surmounted obstacles thought to be insurmountable, had swept into Italy like a whirlwind, and in a few pitched battles had destroyed six consular armies. After one of these victories, his Moorish cavalry had raided right up to the walls of Rome, then only defended by old men and boys, and the Eternal City seemed to be at his mercy. Yet at the last moment he turned aside, as did von Kluck in our day, and pushed into the rich province which was afterwards Naples, whence it took all the nibbling strategy of Fabius to dislodge him. When Capua at last fell, he still kept his grip on the Calabrian coast, where he waited for reinforcements which never reached him, to again attack Rome. So long as he was on Italian soil, there could be no rest nor peace of mind for those Romans who, like the elder Cato, had seen the fierce African spearmen galloping through the Campagna, firing the thatched huts and driving off the cattle which formed all the wealth of the peasant farmers, then the backbone of the Republic. During all this time, too, the Roman populace behaved beautifully. Even after Cannæ they had not despaired of the Republic; they had suspended their long quarrel with the patricians; and, after a few very unsuccessful experiments with mobappointed generals, had left the conduct of the war in the more capable hands of the Senate. But when a shower of stones—probably lapilli from some volcano on the coast—fell upon the city, they were seized with one of the superstitious panics to which they were prone. They cried out that the gods were angry with them, and, as the unknown is sometimes more terrible than the known, there was more fear of their weakening before this menace than before Hannibal.

The Jews were the first in the field; and the earliest Western legends which made their way to the East are taken from the Old Testament. Josephus has told us that the Semites were settled on the Kabul River by the first century a.d.; they may have been there still earlier; and there is an ancient tradition that Jews penetrated about this time into China—a thing not improbable in itself, if it could be authenticated. Now in the year a.d. 75 a Chinese general (Keng) Kong was besieged by the Hiungnu somewhere in the neighbourhood of Kashgar. The Hiungnu cut off the water supply; and the Chinese dug a well 150 feet deep, but found no water. They were reduced to the last extremities by thirst. Kong, lifting up his eyes to Heaven, cried: “I have heard that in olden time the Erh-Shih general drew his sword, and pierced the rock, and straightway a rushing stream gushed out.” Thereupon Kong put on his garments of state, and prostrating himself beside the waterless well, prayed for the army and for himself. Presently the well brimmed over with water.

At the present moment scholars seem to be agreed about the date of Nahapāna, and some are of opinion that lie was the founder of the Śaka era. This theory was propounded by M. l'abbé Boyer in his paper entitled “Nahapāna et l'ère Śaka”. Though the theory has not met with general acceptance, eminent scholars are still to be found who maintain this opinion even at the present date. In 1913, during the great debate on the date of Kanishka, Dr. J. F. Fleet said, “I hold that the era [Śaka era] was founded by the Kshaharāta king Nahapāna, who reigned in Kāṭhiāwār and over some of the neighbouring territory as far as Ujjain from a.d. 78 to about a.d. 125, and held for a time Nāsik and other parts in the north of Bombay, and who seems to have been a Pahlava or Palhava, i.e. of Parthian extraction.” There are others who, though they do not assert that Nahapāna was the founder of the Śaka era, maintain that the dates in the inscriptions of his son-in-law Ushavadāta at Nasik and Karle, and of his minister Ayama at Junnar, are Śaka dates. Mr. V. A. Smith says, “Almost all students are agreed that the inscriptions and coins of the Chashṭana line of Satraps are dated in the Śaka era, and I see no reason for doubting that the Kshaharāta records are dated in the same way.”

It must come some time and it shall come now, this confession of error committed and published, and by this writing recanted. The error concerns the date of the many fragments of inscribed bones exhumed in 1899 in the Honan province of North China. Contrary to the opinions of two Chinese authorities, Liu T'ieh-yün and Lo Chên-yü, and of a great French scholar, E. Chavannes, I had in earlier papers attributed these relics to the period of the Chou dynasty. I now subscribe fully to the view of the above-named writers in holding them to be survivals from the previous Shang dynasty. Moreover, I am a convinced convert, and can proclaim my belief in the admirably candid words of the French politician, “Moi, je soutiens que la chose est ainsi; et ceux qui ne pensent pas comme moi, sont des sots, des brigands, et des assassins.”

One of the most famous institutions of Akbar was the 'Ibādat-khāna, or “House of Worship”, which he caused to be erected early in 1575, immediately after his return from the successful siege of Patna. The building no longer exists above ground, although it is just possible that its foundations may be still traceable, if searched for in the right locality. The two suggestions published concerning its situation, which will be noticed near the end of this paper, are both inadmissible, as will appear from perusal of the texts which I proceed to quote from Badāonī, the abaḳāt-i-Alcbarī, and the Akbarnāma, all contemporary authorities.

1. Salvation's Hail to the Nations Chief,—Prayers for the Support and Progress of the Cause—and for the Spiritual Reward.

The three tablets which follow have been selected on account of their uncommon nature, and because of the unusual words or expressions which they furnish. The collection contains other documents equally interesting, and some of these will probably be placed before scholars from time to time, should their difficulties yield satisfactorily to study and research.

The historical interest presented by Hymn x. 75 of the Ṛgveda, the famous Nadīatuti or “Song of the Rivers”, has been recognized ever since the critical study of Vedic literature began. The numerous ancient river-names of North-Western India therein mentioned furnish an indication more definite than can be found elsewhere of the area once occupied by, or familiar to, the Indo-Aryan people, to whom we owe the oldest literary remains of India as contained in the Vedic Saṁhitās.

In the autumn of 1915 I found at Buârâ a few leaves of a Persian MS. forming part of an unknown work devoted to the biography of the famous saint Shay Aḥmad-i-Jâm, surnamed Zindah-Fîl. There were only thirteen leaves, 23 by 18 and 16 by 13·5 cm., written on old Oriental paper, eighteen or nineteen lines in a page, in a comparatively elegant old character (like that of MSS. copied at Herât). This MS. was copied apparently in the tenth or eleventh century a.h. (The first page is written perhaps with a different qalam, but the hand seems to be the same as in the other parts.)

Humāyūn married Hājī, alias Bēga Bēgam, about 1527. Fourteen years later, in 1541, he married Hamīda Bāno Bēgam, who became the mother of Akbar in 1542, and was known by the honorific style of Maryam Makānī, “dwelling with Mary,” that is to say the Virgin Mary, after her death. On the face of it no confusion between the two ladies should be possible. Nevertheless, they have been frequently confounded, and the error can be traced back as early as 1612, only seven years after Akbar's death. The common error is explained by the fact that Akbar treated Hājī Bēgam, the elder lady, as a second mother, so that many people believed him to be her son.

In trying to decipher texts of which we know neither the language nor the values of the written characters it is evident that the first steps must be taken by conjecture. It is only when the conjectures corroborate one another that progress can be made. I have tried to restrict my guesses to what is in itself probable, and had not intended to publish them without further investigation. But investigation takes time, and for special reasons it seemed best to print now such of my results as appear to be fairly well justified. It is unnecessary to criticize other attempts at decipherment, as I have tried to start entirely afresh, without a prejudice for or against any previous system. Several of the identifications of Professor Sayce, the pioneer in this as in many other lines of research, have, however, been adopted without discussion, because they appeared on consideration to be certainly right. Much else may be derived unconsciously from him, for we have often discussed the problem together, and but for his encouragement I should long ago have given it up altogether. The notes relate almost entirely to texts in Messerschmidt's Corpus, and only to the more legible of those. A valuable addition to the material has been made by the publication of excellent facsimiles of inscriptions at Carchemish (Jerabis) by Hogarth, Lawrence, & Woolley, with which I hope to deal on another occasion.

In the monograph by Professor Sayce and myself, The Tablet from Yuzgat in the Liverpool Institute of Archœology (I believe the document is now in the Louvre), which forms vol. xi of the Asiatic Society Monographs (see pp. 15–19), I discussed the possibility of Kassite being a language more or less akin to Hittite. In dealing with this question, I made use of the well-known tablet discovered by the late Hormuzd Rassam in 1882, and published in transcription by Professor Fried. Delitzsch in his Die Sprache der Kossäer (Leipzig, 1884). To all appearance this important inscription has never been printed in the original character, and as its appearance is held to be desirable, I now place before the British public the copy which I made in 1882 or 1883.

This tablet, which is in Mrs. Pinches's collection, seems to have come from Jokha. It is of baked clay, and measures 44.5 mm. high by 39 mm. wide. The amount of text with which it is inscribed is 10 short lines, divided equally between the obverse and the reverse. Both sides have impressions of a cylinder-seal, by which the written characters are slightly obliterated. The principal impression appears in the space between lines 7 and 8 (reverse).

The frontispiece plate of Mr. H. G. Rawlinson's recent work, Intercourse between India and the Western-World (Cambridge, 1916), gives a very fine reproduction of two bas-reliefs, placed one above the other, from the famous Javanese stūpa of Boro-budur. The most conspicuous object shown in the lower panel is a sailing vessel, which the unknown artist has rendered with remarkable skill and vigour, whilst the remaining portion of it exhibits some six men (apparently belonging to the vessel in question) being hospitably received by another party of people whose quaint-shaped dwelling is visible in the background. The author, evidently with reference to this scene, has felt at liberty to label the illustration “A Hindu Ship arriving at Java”.