For many years it was vaguely known that the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai possessed a large collection of documents concerning its own affairs and written in Arabic and Turkish, and more especially that this collection also included a number of decrees issued by various Fāṭimid caliphs; but it was only recently that detailed information became available. It will be convenient to preface the edition of one of these Fāṭimid documents by a review of what has been written about the Sinai documents up to now.

Autobiography is a genre not frequently encountered in Ottoman literature. In recent years two works have been published which fall into this category—the autobiography of ‘Omān Āghā who was a prisoner of war in Austria towards the close of the seventeenth century, and the memoirs of Ma'jūnjuzāde Muṣṭafa Efendi describing his experiences after his capture by the Knights of Malta in 1597.

The two principal obstacles to the study of the older forms of Marathi language and literature are the shortage of definitive texts of early works and the dearth of critical bibliographies from which one might discover what texts are available and in what form they exist. Date's Marāṭhī-grantha-sūc¯ is of course invaluable for anything published before 1937, but even this work is not exhaustive and the idiosyncrasies of its arrangement according to subject-matter make it sometimes difficult to discover how many of the works of any particular early writer exist in printed form. For an unpublished work, unless one is fortunate enough to find it in the British Museum or India Office Library catalogues of Marathi MSS, one can only consult the index of a general history of Marathi literature such as V. L. Bhave's Mahārāṣṭstra-sārasvata. There one may well find numerous references to and quotations from the work in question, but only exceptionally will there be any indication of the source of these quotations. One is left to conjecture whether they are from a MS belonging to the author or from some early printed pothī that has escaped the attention of Date. On occasions the same quotation is repeated in a different part of the book with substantial variations in its text, and when a work is described but not quoted one can never be sure whether it is in fact extant or whether description and perhaps even short quotations are not taken from some intermediate secondary source or commentary.

The study of fortification in the Indian subcontinent is a discipline not only of intrinsic merit but also of considerable extrinsic value, for the material it may be expected to yield is of relevance to the archæologist, antiquarian, and historian, taking these terms in the broadest sense; indeed, it is these, in somewhat narrower terms perhaps, who have helped to amass the not inconsiderable body of material which is at present available on the fortified sites in the subcontinent, most of which have long been known to archæologists and art-historians. The old series of Archæological Survey of India Reports (1862–84), largely reports of tours by Cunningham and his associates, contain much material on the major fortified sites of the subcontinent, although some of this is merely incidental to the main purposes of the reports; the New Imperial Series of the Archæological Survey, including the regional surveys, presents more precise and detailed description of individual sites, and this is supplemented by the Archæological Survey of India Annual Reports, from 1902 onwards, and the reports of various states with autonomous departments of archæology, most notably the Nizām's Dominions whose sometime Director, Dr. Ghulam Yazdani, has in addition to considerable work on the Deccan sites published in those reports produced two valuable monographs. These works have supplemented the evidence of the sites themselves with the available historical material, documentary and epigraphic, and further epigraphic material is available in the volumes of Epigraphia indica and Epigraphia indo-moslemica, as well as in some of the Memoirs of the A.S.I. Less reliable technically, but always useful and often suggestive, is the information available in the gazetteers of the various provincial governments and states. The journals of learned societies with an Indian interest add more to this material, as do the catalogues and journals of Indian museums.

I have in the following notes expressed occasional disagreement with Pelliot, Haenisch, Mostaert, and Cleaves. This does not mean that in general I underrate their immense services to Mongol studies.

The study of the language and civilization of the Mongols was for long a preserve of Russian scholars and of foreigners working in Russia. The publications of Schmidt, Kowalewski, Pozdneev and others, who built in the nineteenth century to some extent on the pioneer work of P. S. Pallas and his interpreter Jaehrig in the eighteenth, remain in full use even to-day. Only at the turn of the present century, with Ramstedt's studies of the Khalkha dialect, did isolated schools of Mongol scholarship begin to grow up elsewhere in Europe, notably in Helsinki and in Warsaw. In Germany and France, under such scholars as Professor Haenisch and the late Professor Pelliot, the study of Mongol remained a subordinate field of another discipline, sinology, while in England, apart from some interest at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Mongol remained an almost unknown subject until the arrival in Cambridge in 1948 of Mr. Denis Sinor. Nowadays studies continue in the U.S.S.R.—notably in Leningrad under Pučkovskii, and in Moscow under Sanjeev and Dylykov. But the post-war years have seen a general growth of interest in Mongol studies elsewhere as an independent discipline. Thus in Budapest, a group of young scholars, pupils of Professor Ligeti, have recently been publishing the results of field-work carried out in Mongolia itself. In Western Europe the material foundation for the extension of Mongol studies was undoubtedly laid by the late Professor Kaare Granbech, who assembled in Copenhagen a large and comprehensive collection of Mongol manuscripts. His work has been enthusiastically continued by Professor Heissig of Bonn, whose researches, based on the Copenhagen material and the collections in German libraries and in his own possession, have shown the great possibilities for literary and historical research in this field. Not the least of Heissig's services has been the founding and almost single-handed nursing of the series ‘Göttinger Asiatische Forschungen’ (now ‘Asiatische Forschungen’) which, though not restricted to Mongol studies, contains several text editions and studies in this field. In the United States of America, apart from the philological work being directed by Professor Poppe in Seattle, the enterprise of the Reverend Antoine Mostaert and Professor F. W. Cleaves, combined with the generosity of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, has resulted in the publication of three beautiful sets of volumes of texts in facsimile reproduction in the series ‘Scripta Mongolica’. The present article will deal with the latest volumes of the Bonn and Harvard series.

The Palaungs, called by themselves Ta-ang, are an ethnic group speaking a language of Northern Mon-Khmer type, distributed widely in the Shan State of Burma and the adjacent border regions of Yunnan, and having its greatest concentration in the former state of Tawngpeng in the northwestern part of the Shan State, where Palaungs are a majority in the population. Occupied chiefly in growing and trading in tea, they are at the same time the most prosperous of the minor hill races of Burma and the only one to have adopted Buddhism. Their language, which is not written—Shan being used as a written language by educated Palaungs—shows the influence of both Shan and Burmese; Shan loans are particularly frequent in the formal language of songs. A grammar and dictionary were published by Mrs. Leslie Milne in 1921 and 1931 respectively.

The K. al-farq bayn wilāyāt ahi al-islām wa bayn wilāyāt ahi al-kufr is one of the minor works attributed to the Shehu ‘Umān dan Fodio. The work is not among those mentioned by Sultan Bello in the Infāq al-maysūr, nor is it listed by Whitting or Vajda. It is listed by Kensdale, and Smith notes a MS among the De Gironcourt papers which bears an almost identical title. The writer has been assured by Malam Junaidu, Wazirin Sokoto that the work is well known to be by the Shehu ‘Umān. Malam Abubakar Gumi of the School for Arabic Studies, Kano, and a Sokoto scholar deeply versed in the Fulani Arabic literature, also confirms that the work has been known to him from his youth as that of the Shehu. Finally the author identifies himself in the preamble as ‘Umān b. Fūdī.