This article is primarily intended as a “follow-up” of two previous ones on the historical records of Portuguese India, thus serving to remind historians of the importance of these documents. The articles to which I refer are “A preliminary report on the historical records at Goa”, by Surendra Nath Sen (88 pp., Calcutta, 1925, reprinted in his Studies in Indian History (1930)), and “Portuguese India and its historical records”, by the late J. LeRoy Christian (Hispanic-American Historical Review, vol. xxv, pp. 140–151, February, 1945). These two articles are all that I have been able to find in English about the Goa archives, and they are complemented by the recently published “Roteiro do Cartório Geral do Estado da India”, by Panduranga Pissurlencar, reprinted from No. 309 of the Boletim Geral das Colónias (Lisboa, 1951). This fourteen-page summary catalogue of the Goa archives by their scholarly director advantageously replaces the ostensibly fuller “Index alfabetico, chronologico e remissive”, published serially by Tovar de Albuquerque in the Oriente Portuguez (first series, 1910–1918), which is so riddled with mistakes, and compiled with such lack of system, as to be worse than useless as a guide to the material in the archives. In so far as possible, I have avoided repeating what is already recorded in the previous articles of Nath Sen and LeRoy Christian, confining myself to amplifying or correcting their statements where necessary. I have also limited myself to describing the codices which I studied during my stay at Goa in September–October, 1951. As will be seen from a comparison of the codices described hereunder with those listed in Dr. Pissurlencar's Roteiro, I was only able to study a relatively small proportion of the whole; nor was a thorough examination of all of those which I did see possible in the month at my disposal. Since virtually everything dated prior to 1600 which still exists in the archives has already been published by Cunha Rivara and others, I confined my own investigations to the period 1600–1740, the later date being taken as marking the end of effective Portuguese power in India with the loss of the “provincia do Norte” to the Marāthās after the disastrous if hard-fought Bassein campaign of 1737–1739. My own interests being chiefly concerned with the Far East, I naturally concentrated on Macao and Timor; but I trust that I have noted sufficient material dealing with East Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, Ceylon, and Malacca, to show the variety and richness of this little-used archive. It may be added that much of the material relating to India proper has been printed in the two series of the Archivo Portuguez Oriental, in the two series of O Oriente Portuguez, and in the Boletim do Institute Vasco da Gama, as explained in the final note to this article.

TheChronological Tables of Officials of ike Present Dynasty (Kuo-ch'ao Lieh-ch'ing Nien-piao), by Lei Li, is an important source for the study of the Ming administrative system. The work is rare and little known. Fortunately, the copy in the Peking National Library was among the books sent by the Chinese government during the anti-Japanese war to the United States for safe-keeping, where it was microfilmed with the rest of the collection of rare books (manuscripts and printed works antedating the beginning of the Manchu dynasty) by the Library of Congress. It is in this form now accessible to students.

The Ming History compiled by Chang T'ing-yü and his colleagues and completed in 1736 is the first of the Standard Histories (īE Chêng Shih) to include among its tables a Ch'i Ch'ing Nien Piao or Chronological Table of the Seven High Officials. This table, which occupies two chapters of the Ming Shih (111 and 112; 12 and 13 of the section Piao), lists all the officials who successively held office as Presidents of the Six Boards (Liu Pu Shang-shu) and Censors of the Left and Eight (T so Yu Tu-yu-shih).

During the current year 1952, corresponding to the Hijra years 1371–2, two gatherings have been planned to celebrate, a little belatedly, the millenary of the birth of Ibn Sīnā in Ṣafar 370 (August, 980). The first, under the general patronage of the Arab League and the direction of a special Committee in Iraq, was held in Baghdad from 20th to 28th March. The second, under the direction of a Persian Committee, is provisionally scheduled to be held in Teheran and Hamadan later in the year. The two celebrations, far from being mutually exclusive, are intended to be complementary. Strong Persian and Turkish delegations attended the Baghdad meeting, in addition to delegations from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya, and representatives of Unesco and Western orientalism; and similar delegations are expected to attend the meeting in Persia.

Thetsyr are a comparatively late development in the history of Chinese poetry and less well known in the West than the shy, of which many translations exist. It may be interesting to look at a few examples of tsyr and a few elementary rules of their composition so as to be able to distinguish them from shy and to appreciate their special qualities.

Perhaps the most exotic among the many strange kings and rulers mentioned in the inscription of Paikuli is the Khagan of the Aq-Aqatärān or ‘White Khazars’. This is the meaning which the late E. Herzfeld, in his edition of that inscription, attributed to a group of words in the Middle Persian version which he read as ḥ'k'n ZY 'kka'n. As the inscription dates from the last decade of the 3rd century (probably from A.d. 293), his interpretation seems to involve a double anachronism: in the title, and in the national name.

No written literature of an Indonesian people has been so brilliantly and completely described as that of the Achehnese in the north of Sumatra. This description was the work of Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje. Before it appeared in 1894 as one of the seven chapters of his work De Atjèhers, all that was known to the outside world about this literature consisted of a few specimina, printed (under Snouck Hurgronje's supervision) in K. F. H. van Langen's manual of the Achehnese language (The Hague, 1889). After some preparatory work in Holland and a stay of only seven months in Kutaraja (in wartime, cut off from intercourse with the country by the then prevailing system of a concentrated line surrounding the capital), Snouck Hurgronje was able to reveal the existence of a rich epic, romantic, and relïgious Achehnese literature, to give summaries of all its works of any importance and to deal elaborately with its chief masterpieces, to investigate the prosody of the poetry in which nearly all these texts are written as well as the origin of the foreign elements found in many tales and treatises. In the second edition of his work, which was published in English (The Achehnese) in 1906, only a few additions had to be made. The catalogue of the manuscripts, collected by Snouck Hurgronje himself and by some pupils and friends inspired by his example, will show some more, but they do not alter the general picture drawn in the first edition.

The two texts which are analysed in the present paper were gathered during a period of fourteen months' lingu stic work in Fiji in 1948 and 1949. As a result of recent developments in linguistics, notably the perceptiblechange of emphasis from comparativeto descriptive work,1 more especially in the study of preliterate languages, the modern field-worker applies himself to gather a large number of texts.He takes down certain utterances and he establishes his text by means of well-defined techniques. Having as alinguist handled the material, both oral and written, to his provisional satisfaction, he can then state his findings in a grammar, under the headings of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. When the grammatical system has been stated it would seem that it is.

The discovery that a number of classical particles originated by the fusion of other, generally better understood, words, has already contributed a great deal to the understanding of eariy Chinese literature. The examples of such contraction which can already be taken as reasonably certain are:—

Contemporary accounts of the events which led up to the Afghan conquest of Persia in 1722 ascribe some importance to the role played by the Georgians in this catastrophe. The well-known narrative of Jonas Hanway and reports of Catholic missionaries, European travellers, and Consular agents, together with the published documents from Russian archives, indicate that the deterioration of relations between the Shah and the King of K'art'li was among the factors which assisted Mīr Maḥmūd's enterprise. In the present brief study, the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, as well as Georgian sources, have been drawn on to sketch the history of Georgian relations with the government of Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn, and follow up some suggestive indications contained in Professor Minorsky's own writings.

The pronunciation here described is that of Mr. Keng Vannsak, a young Cambodian born at Kompong Chhnang.

The words quoted in illustration of the text are shown both in Cambodian script and in a simplified phonetic transcription based on that of the International Phonetic Association. Where it has been considered useful, a more detailed transcription in general phonetic terms has been given in square brackets. All examples have been checked with a second Cambodian, Mr. Keo Mongkry, and where his usage differs from that of Mr. Keng, this has been noted.

Au début de ses 'Išārāt, Avicenne a défini l'objet de la logique en ces termes: “Le but de la logique, c'est qu'il y ait chez l'homme un instrument servant de règle, dont l'observation l'empêche d'errer dans sa pensée. J'entends là par pensée ce qui accompagne la préparation de l'homme à passer de choses présentes dans son esprit, —sous forme de concept ou de jugement, comportant un assentiment fondé sur la science ou l'opinion ou sur le postulat et l'admission,—à des choses qui n'y sont pas présentes.”

Parodies of oriental speech and writing often consist merely of truisms, half-truths, and platitudes strung together in a fashion which appears to western ideas to reflect, with only a little conscious distortion, the working of the eastern mind. The grain of truth among the chaff is the fact that there undoubtedly exists a large body of proverbial wisdom that has for centuries been current amongst the peoples inhabiting the lands stretching between the Indus and the Atlantic, if not also amongst those living further to the east. Specimens of this gnomic currency occur as early as in ancient Egyptian, as well, of course, as in Biblical literature, while a distinct family group is to be found in the writings of Muslim peoples.

Had Ihn al-Ṭiqṭaqā direct access to the Ta'rīkh-i-Jahān-Gushāy ? He twice quotes it by name and there are two other passages for which it must have been his source; but the question is whether he made use of Juvaynī's work at first hand. That he knew Persian is evident from his twice quoting Persian verses. Of these the following are also in Juvaynī:

“O king, what will come of (drinking) strong wine ?

And what will come of continual drunkenness ?

The king drunk, the world in rums and enemies before and behind— It is plain to see what will come of this! ”

These verses were, according to Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā, addressed to Jalāl al-Dīn Khwārazmshāh by his court poet, whereas all that Juvaynī says is that they were composed by some unspecified person à propos of Jalāl al-Dīn's conduct. But the discrepancy is not an important one, and it seems not unreasonable to suppose that Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā copied these verses from Juvaynī and that, in consequence, he examined the latter's work in the original.

In a recent article on Ya'qūb Pasha, the Jewish physician of Sultan Meḥmed II, Professor F. Babinger cites two passages from the brief account of the career of Ya'qūb given by A. Galanté in his Médecins Juifs au service de la Turquie. The first tells of the arrival of Ya'ūb in Edirne during the reign of Murād II, of his service with Murād and Meḥmed II, and gives the text of an alleged ferman exempting Ya'qūb and his descendants from all taxation in perpetuity, granted by Meḥmed II at Boghaz-kesen in Rabī' II 856/Apr.-May 1452. The second alleges that in 1571 the descendants of Ya'qūb applied to the Rabbinate in Constantinople for exemption from Jewish communal taxes on the basis of this ferman. As Babinger points out, Galanté refers the first statement simply to ‘un auteur hébraïque’, without further specification, while for the second statement he cites no authority at all.

As Professor B. Lewis remarks, the mention of the Bĕnê Iṭaliya constitutes a serious hitch to his demonstration that the chapter of the “Prayer” where they occur reflects events of the tenth century: the Fatimids' appearance in Egypt and Palestine and the subsequent struggles between them, the Carmathians, the Turk Alptekin, the Byzantines, and the Ṭayy Bedouin. Since the “Italians” are the only obstacle to an otherwise flawless argumentation Professor Lewis is fully justified in trying to explain them away. He suspects that Iṭaliya is due to a misguided “correction” of Ṭayya, which in Syriac and Rabbinic Hebrew denotes the Ṭayy, and by extension the Arabs in general, but was probably no longer familiar to the copyist.

Thanks to the kindness of Dr. Andreas Tietze I have at my disposal the illustrated catalogue recently issued by the Istanbul antique dealer Nurettin Yatman (“Eski Istanbul”, Meşrutiyet cadd. 185, Beyoǧlu). It shows among others, in a reproduction just readable by a practised and self-sacrificing eye, an Ottoman document (wrongly ascribed to the fifteenth century) with a richly decorated, wonderfully executed ṭurā(apparently in various colours) of Murad III (1574–1595). An “imperial cypher” of such splendour may, indeed, be expected in an “imperial letter” (nāme-i Tumāyūn) to a foreign sovereign, for such is this document of March 1580, addressed to the Doge of Venice. On the other hand, the eleven lines of the text are written in ordinary dīvānī without calligraphic pretensions; this may be due to the fact that the letter was, as we shall see, to be presented not by a messenger of the sultan but by an agent of the person in whose favour it was issued.

Being rather inconspicuous among the many beautiful and important exhibits of the Benaki Museum in Athens, the small bowl described in the present paper has so far received but scant attention and has not been published before.

Abū Dāwūd Sulaimān b. al-Ash'ath al-Sijistānī (202–275/817–889) was the author of the Sunan which has come to be recognized as one of the six authoritative books of tradition accepted by Sunnīs. Ibn Dāsa is frequently quoted as authority for the statement that Abū Dāwūd selected the 4,800 traditions in this work from a mass of 500,000 traditions which he had collected, those given a place in his book being ‘sound traditions, those which seem to be so, and those which are nearly so’. But he adds that only four traditions are necessary for one's religious guidance: (1) Deeds are judged by intentions; (2) To abstain from what does not concern him is a part of a man's good observance of Islam; (3) A believer is not a believer till he likes for his brother what he likes for himself; (4) What is lawful is clear and what is unlawful is clear, but in between are dubious matters.