The engraved gem which forms the subject of this note (plate I, Al, A2, and fig. 1) is part of the collection of Mr. Richard Falkiner of London. I am grateful to him for allowing me to publish it here, and for placing at my disposal the notes which result from his own inquiries. What is known of the history and provenance of the object may be stated in a few words. It was bought by its present owner from a London dealer who had obtained it at auction.

It is customary to describe the Ṛavedic dialogue of Purūravas and Urvaśī (ṚV 10.95, referred to hereafter as D) either as the source ‘from which all the different versions have originated … an exaltation of a popular fairy-tale’ (H. D. Velankar, The Vikramorvaśīya, New Delhi, 1961, xxxxiii) or as ‘ein einheitliches festgefügtes Kunstwerk’ based on the fairy-tale narrated ‘im alten schlichten Märchenstil’ in Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 11.5.1 (K. F. Geldner).

It is generally accepted that the system of social relations obtaining in Outer Mongolia during the period of Manchu domination (1691–1911) is best described as feudalistic, and that no substantial change was made in this system during the period of autonomy which followed (1911–19). Indeed, in some ways, particularly in the granting of secular titles of nobility to high lamas, and the allotment to them of the appropriate retainers, the system was reinforced during those years. Society was divided basically into two classes, the nobility, and the commoners, or albat, those liable to corvée.

One of the most striking phonetic characteristics of languages of the Austroasiatic family such as Mon, Khmer, and Vietnamese is the great variety of vowel qualities that appear to be kept apart by native speakers despite the fact that some of them differ from each other so slightly that it is hard for the foreign observer to believe that they can be functionally distinct in practice. Accompanying these minute quality distinctions there are frequently puzzling and seemingly non-systematic variations in the length of vowels and in their distribution.

‘Tone’, at least in the literature dealing with Far Eastern languages, is commonly used in several ways: for instance, in ‘the tones of the language’, or ‘Cantonese has seven tones’, reference is made to the tones as membersof a system, while in ‘such-and-such a word has tone X’ the reference is tothe assignment of an item to one of the members of the system. The differencein reference is made quite clear by the context, and no ambiguity ensues; theconcept of ‘tone’ remains precise, and difficulties arise only when no distinctionis made between ‘tone’ as used above and the realization of tones in particularenvironments. Far different is the use of expressions denoting ‘changes intone’, for which there is no agreed terminology. In diachronic work, ‘change’ usually refers to changes through time in the overall system of basic tones, and secondarily to changes in the assignment of items to members of this system, as, for instance, when it is said that in Standard Chinese, items with voicedplosive initials changed from the shăng tone to the qù tone by the Sung dynasty.

‘Les livres historiques sont rares en pays annamite: le climat et les guerres ont concouru a les de truire.’ When he wrote those words in 1904 Pelliot no doubt hoped that they would be true only of the past; but the troubled history of Việt-Nam in the middle decades of the twentieth century has made them also prophetic. Before modern methods for combating the climate could be brought to bear on the problem of archive preservation further wars occurred to destroy even more of the country's historical remains, as well as to disperse many of those which survived.

In 1963 I was given leave by the School to make a preliminary study of Bachama, a language spoken in the east of Northern Nigeria, and in parts ofthe adjacent territory of the Cameroons Republic. In general the topics onwhich people were most willing to talk freely to me, and to record, were storiesabout the folk-lore and their history. Besides being good language material, some of these accounts may be of interest to historians and others working inthe Nigerian field. The text given below is from a tape recording made at Lamurde on 3 May of that year, by Nikodimu Sondo Bukumdi, a local manof some 50 years or more. Lamurde, or Bácámá as the Bachama call it, is thenormal home of the chief of the tribe, and is one of their most important cultural centres. It is here that a new chief is elected, and given instruction in his duties. It is here that many of the objects connected with the religious festival of Nzeanzo at Farei are kept during the rest of the year. Recently, the chiefhas found it more convenient for his administrative duties to live at Numan, and he is now seldom at Lamurde. In his absence on the occasion of my visit, the head of the town assembled a number of elders in the open air who sataround and talked together of the remembered history of their people.

The scholars who are descendants of Muhammad Aqīt b. ‘Umar b. ‘Alī b. Yahyā al-Ṣanhājī, and who include Aḥmad Baba al-Tinbuktī, are rightly regarded as being among the greatest in the medieval Sudan. Yet, in part due to the fact that the mosque and quarter of Sankuray were the focal point of their scholastic endeavours and in part due to the vague use of the geographical expression Takrūr, which included, as an appendage, areas northwards to the Mauritanian Adrar as well as the Sudanese Sāhil, the essentially ḥanh¯jī and Saharan origin and background of these scholars is sometimes underrated.

The Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1902 was designed to determine the frontier between the Sudan and Ethiopia. In an annex to this treaty the British, Italian, and Ethiopian Governments embodied a number of agreed modifications to the frontier between the Sudan and Eritrea (Italy's colonia primogenita) as well as to that between Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the latter survived until the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–6 (and was re-established, in substance, by the British Military Administration in 1941 subsisting until the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation in 1952), the Sudan-Ethiopian frontier has remained substantially unchanged to the present day. The treaty was the culmination of protracted negotiations between the Emperor Menelik and the British Agent in Ethiopia, Lt.-Col. J. L. Harrington.

The present article may perhaps be regarded as supplementary to Professor Klingenheben's article, ‘Die Präfix- und die Suffixkonjugationen des Hamitosemitischen’, MIO, IV, 2, 1956, 210–77, in much the same way as that article followed on the article ‘Verbalbau und Verbalflexion in den semitohamitischen Sprachen’ by Dr. Otto Rössler, ZDMG, C, 2, 1950, (pub.) 1951, 461–514.

Two short lampoons ostensibly directed against al-'Awwām, father of the more illustrious al-Zubair b. al-'Awwām, of the tribe of Asad, a branch of Quraish, follow an unusual method of achieving their object. Apart from general abuse, the chief characteristic of both poems is the deliberate attempt, unparalleled in the poems attributed to Ḥassān b. Thābit, to play on the term al-'awwdm ‘floater or swimmer’. From the idea of floating or swimming, the poet conjures up fish, and crocodiles, which obviously bring to his mind by a feat of the imagination the Nile (though it is not mentioned by name) and hence the Copts and the Egyptian town Qahqā'.