As one reads through the Rigveda the āyú- stand out challenging attention. They are vīprās (8.12.13) and belong to the antiquity of the poets (9.10.6; 9.23.2 prtnasa āyávaḥ). Their activities are clearly to some extent identical with those of the kārú- officials. They even share one verse with these in RV 9.10.6 āpa dvrā matīnm pratn ṛṇvanti kārávaḥ hárasa āyávaḥ ‘the ancient kārú- officiants (and) the āyú- officiants have opened the gates of the formulae for the heat of the bull (soma)’. Both these types of officials thus assist in the production of mantras.

In the Northern Church of the Negev town whose name has been preserved by the local Arabs as Ruḥeibe, on a flagstone still in situ in the south-westernpart of the atrium, Loc. 523, the following inscription was carefully and clearly inscribed:

In a recent lecture to the Philological Society (now in the press, and to appear in the Transactions, 1947) I had occasion to quote a Central Asian ethnic name Ttaudägara–. The one passage where this name has been found is in the Khotanese manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale numbered P 2741. I had prepared this text for publication in 1942, but it remains still unprinted. I therefore print it here since a controversy may be expected over this name as a possible equivalent of Ooyápa, and it is desirable the basic evidence should be in the hands of scholars as soon as possible. A complete translation is hardly possible yet and only the relevant passage is rendered here.

Kukotay (K) and Bok Murun (BM) have epithets and formulae of greater or lesser elaborateness in common. Some of the more interesting of these will be adduced and compared, as will some of the more interesting discrepancies between K and BM on the way, since they throw light on the nature of their common source and of the Kirgiz epic tradition.

Marau Sound lies at the south-east end of the island called Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. There is no native name for the Sound as a whole, and it received its present name owing to the fact that the island which lies at the eastern entrance to the Sound is called Marau, i.e. Island. Other islands in the Sound are named Peura, Sinamairuka (Sinamailuka), Tawaihi, Marapa. The last-named island, Marapa (Malapa), is the “ home of the dead ” for the peoples of the South-East Solomons. The local native name for the hill districts above the Sound is Kera. The name which was given both to the Sound, and to the coastal districts of the mainland near, by the first white visitors in modern days, Bishops G. A. Selwyn and J. C. Patteson, is Gera, which is the name used of the Sound by the people of San Cristoval. The people of the Sound are immigrants from Wairokai, Waisisi, Wairoha, and Uhu on the west coast of Big Mala, and their language is closely allied to that of Oroha, Little Mala, and Areare, the language spoken at Wairokai, etc. It is probable that the first migration from Mala to the Sound settled at Marau, the island at the eastern entrance. There is a ghost called Huu ni nima connected with Marau Island, who is said to have led the migration. War and fighting are said to have been the reasons which led to the migration. The present Mala people were already occupying the islands in the Sound at the time of the visit of the Spanish explorers in 1568, as is shown by the fact that they acted as guides and took the Spaniards to the neighbourhood of Wairokai and Waisisi.

In a paper contributed to the Bhandarkar Commemoration Volume in 1917, Professor S. K. Belvalkar announced the discovery of a new commentary on the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Māṭhara, and identified it with the lost Sanskrit original of the commentary on that work preserved in the Chinese translation of Paramārtha (c. a.d. 550). Commenting on this suggestion in 1918, I observed that derivation of the newly discovered commentary and of Paramārtha from the same source was an alternative possibility. Professor Belvalkar has now, in a paper which was written to form part of the collection presented to Professor Hillebrandt on his 70th birthday, and is pxiblished in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Institue, adduced reasons in support of his original suggestion.

One of the fundamental innovations of the early Church was the abolition of an ancient, venerable institution—divorce, the practice of which was as widespread as marriage itself. The explicit ban on divorce found in the Gospels ran counter to legal systems of the known world, with one notable exception: among the sectarian group whose rules are enshrined in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a stance against divorce can be verified, implying that a legal innovation of early Christianity can be tracked back to its origins in Sectarian Judaism.

By the time Christianity was emerging, marriage and divorce had already co-existed for a long time; in Mesopotamia marriage contracts had for two millennia been anticipating the possibility of divorce, with litigation governing the dissolution of marriage and division of properties. The best evidence, however, for the precursors to late Hellenistic (i.e. pagan, Jewish, and Christian) legal practice derives from a group of Neo-Babylonian marriage contracts dating from the seventh to third centuries B.C.

The following paper does not set out to be a comprehensive comparison of tonal systems—it is rather an account of my own experiences with various methods, with special reference to tone-marking in dictionaries and vocabularies. For this reason a certain amount of biographical detail is inevitable.

In preparing a bibliography of the modern South Arabic languages I came across the only document of the dialect of Curia Muria. It is J. G. Hulton's article, “ Notice on the Curia Muria Island,” in the Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, 3 (1840), 183–197.2 This article, in which the author gives a detailed description of the island and its inhabitants, contains a list of 103 words in English, Arabic, and in the dialect of Curia Muria.3

Corresponding to Av. anra-, angra-, the Pahlavi has the word (occurring also with the doubledotted ). Numerous explanations had already been proposed when Bartholomae, Zur Kenntnis der mitteliranischen Mundarten, i, 1916, 18 ff., discussed the word more fully than had till then been done. He concluded that the Pāzand ganā was ùntrustworthy, rejected Spiegel's explanation of gan- as equivalent to zan-, equally Darmesteter's zanāk, his own earlier reading zūrāk, and Andreas's druvāk, to suggest a new interpretation dawāk ‘deceiving’.