With advancing knowledge of the Iranian language of the Sakas of Khotan, it has proved possible to establish the connections of several words hitherto misunderstood and to separate some words which have been confused.

1. I have numbered the lines in both texts for ease of reference. This inscription is undamaged except for the lower left-hand corner.

The Jewish community of Ḥabbān is no more. The Yemenite Jews have emigrated almost wholesale to Palestine, taking with them, indeed, a number of their books and documents, but they cannot now be studied in their homeland. For the further history of the Yemenite Jews Professor S. D. Goitein's article on the “Transplantation of the Yemenites” may be consulted, but my own brief and crowded six days in Ḥabbān during December, 1947, were probably one of the last visits paid by an orientalist to such a curious medieval community. In the melting-pot of the new state of Israel it is probable that the unique culture of the Yemenite Jews will not long survive the passing of the older generation.

The East India Company's accession to political and administrative responsibility in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was greatly complicated by the simultaneous development of the evangelical movement in England with its missionary agents overseas. India was one of the first areas of British expansion to feel the pressure of evangelical influence upon the conduct of its government; South Africa was to experience it soon afterwards, and in both areas the younger Charles Grant (1778–1866) played an important part, through his tenure of the offices of President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary.

Evidence to establish cultural diffusion is primarily sought in complicated material inventions, especially decorative motifs, because these give the best chance of ruling out independent origins. Since culture is usually diffused in complexes, rather than as isolated traits, we may then proceed to examine the deeper aspects of the civilizations concerned. In the case of religion, however, a difficulty that confronts us at the outset is that much of ancient religion was simple animism, too unspecialized to afford evidence of diffusion. Mountains, for example, either as homes of spirits or gods, oras being deities personified, are almost universal wherever there are mountains. Moreover, we have to bear in mind that such primitive ideas are liable to persist among peoples who are, or once were, influenced by more advanced religions.

The scantiness of Parthian inscribed material enhances the importance of any new find. The existence of inscriptions and drawings on the rock-walls of a gorge near Birjand (Southern Khorasan) had been known for some time; but their antiquity was not recognized until Mr. Jamal Rezai, a Persian student from Birjand, visited the gorge and took photographs, which he submitted to Dr. Sadiq Kiya, of the University of Tehran. Dr. Kiya at once correctly identified the writing as Parthian and, in company with Mr. Rezai, published the whole material, together with a preliminary reading of the inscriptions. Dr. Richard N. Frye also paid a visit to the site and reported on it briefly in the Persian literary monthly Mihr. Later some uninformed criticism, claiming modern origin of the remains, appeared in the same periodical; it was justly refuted by Dr. Kiya.

About the date of the Maritime Code (or more strictly Digest) of Malacca, Malay copyists have gone out of their way to create confusion. Maxwell Malay MS. 47 in the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, relates how sea-captains went to Bendahara Paduka Sri Maharaja to approach Sultan Muhammad (d. ca. A.D. 1446) to ratify maritime laws, and Raffles MSS. 33, 34, and 74 cite both Paduka Sri Maharaja, Bendahara to Sultan Mahmud (asc. 1488, d. 1530), and at the very end of the same paragraph Sri Nara 'diraja, Bendahara to Sultan Muhammad. Raffles MS. 68 ascribes both the Malacca Code and Maritime Laws to Muhammad. Most MSS. ascribe the latter to Mahnaud's reign and all of them are marked by Bugis maritime terms. There is no record of Bugis ships frequenting Malacca as early as 1446 and there seems no doubt that scholars have been right in assigning the Maritime Digest to the time of Sultan Mahmud.

In MS. 104 of the Maxwell collection of the Royal Asiatic Society is a tract entitled Nūr al-Daḳā'iḳ. It is attributed to Shamsu '1-Dīn ibn 'Abdullah, the Sumatran mystic who died in 1630. This manuscript was unknown to van Nieuwenhuijze when he wrote his thesis, but he has dealt with Arabic texts of the same title, and printed extracts from them. In Leiden Cod. Or. 1945 which he hasanalysed are three passages which correspond in part with the Arabic text and the Maxwell manuscript, although none of these run parallel to this Maxwell version in its entirety. Taken together, however, these texts provide a complete second reading of the Maxwell text, and make it possible to amend several corrupt passages. When for a few words the Arabic text has provided the better reading, it has been easy to insert the equivalent in the Malay text. By this means it has been possible to produce a tolerable Malay text, and since none of Shamsu '1-Din's Malay works have been published this may be of interest.

The collection of Mandæan religious texts known as the Ginza Rba (Rabba) or Sidra d Adam (The Great Treasure, Book of Adam) was not the first Mandæan book to reach Europe, but was the first to be translated. It was transliterated into Syriac and translated into Latin by Dr. Matthew Norberg (1815–16). In 1925, using the German Dr. Petermann's facsimile of the text (published in 1867) for reference, and with access to various copies of the sacred codex in European libraries, Mark Lidzbarski produced a fine and scholarly translation (Göttingen; Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, 1925). It had been preceded by his translations of the Draša d Ydhia (Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer: Töpelmann, 1915) and a selection from the 'niania (Mandäische Liturgien: Berlin, 1920), both with transliterations in Hebrew script.

The two objects recorded here belong to Mr. E. Ball, of Marple, Cheshire, and are on loan to the Manchester Museum. They were presented to Mr. Ball in Nuqūb (Beihān).

The formation of the future tense is often mentioned in discussions on the classification of the modern Indo-Aryan languages. An -s- type of future occurs in Gujarati, Lahnda, and Jaipuri, an -h- type of future exists side by side with participial formations in Marwari, Hindi (Braj), and Bundeli, and in Bhojpuri and Awadhi (in the third persons only), as well as in Kashmiri, where it has assumed the meaning of a past conditional. Despite this Marwari belongs to the -s- group, forms with -h- being found in those dialects of Marwari that regularly have voiceless -h- < -s-. The explanation of the Kashmiri forms is similar (ś > h and -ṣy- > -śś- > -h- in Kashmiri). Thus -s- forms in principle are found over a large part of the North-West and West of India. Attempts have been made to trace back the modern conditions to earlier stages, and S. Sen claims that the two types of future go back to different Indo-European originals: “From early times there were dialectal forms with the base-affix -ha-, which became quite dominant in Apabhraṃśa.” (This is incorrect.) “The origin seems to have been the I.E. stem affix *-so-, OIA. -sa-, occurring in the desiderative, the aorist, and as a root-determinative.” The accepted opinion is that the two types of future have the same origin, the OIA. future suffix -i-ṣya-, and that differentiation did not take place till the Middle Indo-Aryan period. As has been shown conclusively by Turner and by Bloch, the future suffix of Sanskrit could have in MIA. a special development into -h- instead of -ss- which is phonetically regular, because it was in a weak position, being a terminational element.

The list of eight seasons named in the Gezer Calendar is consecutive and complete, and there is no reason for supposing that the word in that inscription has any other than its normal meaning of “lunation, month”, or that the annual cycle at Gezer in the second half of the tenth century before the common era differed from the twelve-month year found in other parts of the North-West Semitic world as well as in Mesopotamia. It follows that some of the periods named in the Gezer list must extend over more than one month, i.e.—since there is no indication in the text of any fraction of a month—over two months at least. H. L. Ginsberg was the first to see that the solution is to be sought in the differing forms and , each of which occurs four times. Ginsberg proposed to treat the latter form as construct singular and the former as a construct dual with waw as a mater lectionis to represent -ō < -ā in the nominative dual construct.