The subject of this paper is a small work entitled Qahr al-wujūh al-‘ābisa bi-dhikr nasab umarā’ al-Jarākisa wa-ttisālihi bi-Quraysh,2 which might be rendered, ‘A cogent demonstration of the lineage of the amīrs of the Circassians and its connexion with Quraysh’. Manuscripts exist in the John Rylands Library in Manchester and in the British Museum. The Rylands copy, com-pleted on 21 Rajab 1092/6 August 1681, states that the original work was finished on 1 Rajab 1041/23 January 1632. The British Museum copy is dated in the colophon 21 Hijja 1258/23 January 1843.3 The work is anonymous but the style and language suggest that its author was an 'ālim who enjoyed the patronage of a Mamluk amīr, Ridwān Bey.

Vasumitra in his famous work‘Origin and doctrines of early Indián Buddhist schools’ (Samaya-bhedoparacanacakra)1 enumerates the following four doctrines as characteristic of the Sautrāntika school: '(i) The skandhas transmigrate from one world to the other: hence the name Saṃkrānti-vāda; (ii) There are mulāntika-skandhas and eka-rasa-skandhas; (iii) An average person (prthagjana) also possesses the potentiality of becoming a Buddha (lit. in the statě of average man there are also divine things, drya-dharmas); (iv) There are paramārtha-pudgalas '.2

Since Karlgren's ‘Word families’ first drew attention to the existence of large groups of cognate words in classical Chinese, efforts have been made to define more closely the principal phonetic contrasts involved, and to find semantic relationships that would correspond regularly to the phonetic contrasts. Karlgren himself came to the conclusion that in general it was impossible to find any regular semantic or grammatical correlations with the phonetic correspondence, and that Archaic Chinese showed only the last vestiges of a former inflectional system.

Yang Ju is one of the Chinese philosophers of whom we know least. In the fourth century B. C. his doctrines and those of Mohtzyy were the two most successful rivals of Confucianism.1 In the literature of the next century his school is rarely mentioned, perhaps because it had been absorbed into Taoism.2 The most familiar summary of his teaching is that of Mencius:

The first publication of an inscription in the alphabet by a European scholar was made about 120 years ago by H. C. von der Gabelentz in the Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (Halle), n, 1, 1839. Books and articles relating to the subject have been appearing intermittently ever since, but finality has not yet been reached on the exact shape and phonetic value of some letters in the alphabet.

The present article is based on photographs of nineteenth-century Arabic official letters, made by the author while carrying out conservation work on manuscript material for the Nigerian Department of Antiquities at the Northern Nigerian centres of Sokoto and Bauchi. Thanks to conscientious local custody, and the moisture-free atmosphere which these districts enjoy for most of the year, the greater number of these papers were still in remarkably good condition. At the same; time, progressive embrittlement of the fibres was making direct handling of the sheets undesirable, and some protection was felt necessary, The custodians of these collections had therefore been in touch with the Department of Antiquities, and it was decided as a first step to mount the most delicate and valuable specimens between sheets of glass, to be sealed at the edges with passe-partout and enclosed in light wooden frames.2 Since photo-graphy was likely to be more difficult after the completion of this work, the documents selected for treatment were first recorded upon 35 mm. film.

In his article ‘Caucasica’ Professor H. W. Bailey drew attention to an interesting article by A. Shanidze, ‘The newly-discovered alphabet of the Caucasian Albanians and its significance for science’, in a sadly inaccessible periodical. ‘The discovery of the lost alphabet was made by I. Abuladze in an Armenian manuscript of the fifteenth century containing a miscellany of alphabets, Greek, Syriac, Latin, Georgian, Coptic, Arabic, and Albanian.’