Over a number of years inscriptions on Sasanian silver plates have been published by various scholars, but in spite of progress several problems have remained, especially one connected with the weight system of pre-Islamic Iran. The interpretation of one series of signs had baffled me, as it had other investigators in the field, and I had proposed at first tentatively to read the signs as MP salāk “ingot”, but with a technical meaning of a weight equal to about 215 grams.

Copies of early inscriptions from the collection of the Lama Rig-'dzin Tshe-dbang Nor-bu (RT) have been the basis of articles in JRAS, 1969 and 1972. Another of his texts, described as “from the rdo-rings at sKar-cung rgyal-sde itself”, is the inscription on a stone pillar at Ra-ma-sgang near Lhasa which I edited with some remarks on its site and history in JRASB, 1949. It was included also by Professor G. Tucci in Tombs of the Tibetan kings, Rome, 1950 (TTK), where it was brought more fully into relation with a connected edict (bka'-tshigs) of Khri lDe-srong-brtsan recorded in vol. ja of the Chos-'byung of dPa'-bo gTsug-lag Phreng-ba (PT).

Jayavarman II is the famous Khmer ruler who, in the first half of the 9th century and after a hundred years when Khmer overlordship had been in abeyance, was consecrated on Mount Mahendra “to ensure that the country of the Kambujas would no longer be dependent on Java and that there would be no more than one sovereign who was cakravartin”. His inscriptions have never been recovered, but Khmers in later times remembered his reign as the time when their ancestors, his supporters, were rewarded with estates. Historians are today tending to regard the reign as a somewhat less significant period in Khmer history than earlier generations of historians had supposed. Its conventionally accepted length (802–850) is no longer taken for granted. The king's cult, inaugurated on Mount Mahendra, may not have been as innovative as was originally believed. Even the extent of the king's temporal power has been revised. In 1952 Dupont, clarifying the king's chronology, came to the conclusion that his territorial authority had been exaggerated and that his bid for overlordship had failed.

In this article I intend to show that the overriding aim of Frederic North, Governor of the Maritime Provinces of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805, was to contract a subsidiary alliance with the independent Kingdom of Kandy modelled on those being established at the same time in India by the Governor-General, the Marquess of Wellesley. The role of the latter in this episode will also be assessed. Moreover I attempt to furnish evidence challenging the prevailing view that Pilima Talavuva, adigar of the Kingdom of Kandy, or for that matter any other of its officials, committed treachery against the King of Kandy.

The activities of the K‘eng ze čin wang, the seventeenth son of the K‘ang-hsi emperor of the Ch‘ing dynasty, as a promoter of translations of Lamaistic texts into the Mongol language, have been fairly well documented. In 1957 the present author published a brief description of a number of manuscripts associated with the name of this prince, which were then, and still are, in the possession of the University Library, Cambridge. For the sake of bibliographical completeness there follows a concise account of a small collection of manuscripts, some complete and some fragmentary, also associated with him, which have come to light in the past few months. These manuscripts belong to the University Library, Aberdeen, and were shown to me by Mr. Howard Nelson of the British Museum, to whom they had been submitted for identification.

I have two reasons for writing this paper. The first is that, while I have occasionally heard the word Nostratic, I have never had a clear idea what it meant, and I suspect that most readers of this Journal are in a similar position. The second is that I have recently received from a colleague in Moscow a book just published there entitled “An attempt to compare the Nostratic languages” (Opyt sravneniya nostraticheskikh yazykov) which defines the term, gives a history of the origin and development of the Nostratic theory, and marshals a great deal of evidence in support of it. The author, V. M. Illich-Svitych, died in 1964, and the first part of his book, which was perhaps never finished, has now been published, with an introduction, notes, and some supplementary matter, by his friend and colleague, V. A. Dybo. This was Illich-Svitych's only major work, but the bibliography (p. 74; this and similar references are to pages in the book) lists also six articles by him in various learned journals. The first feeling of any reader of the book must be utter astonishment at the amount of sheer hard detailed work which he packed into a short life of no more than 32 years.