Between 1690 and 1720 Śridhar narrated in simple Marathi verse nearly all the basic, perennial stories of the Indian tradition: the epics in Rāmavijaya and Pāṇḍava-pratāpa, the essential puranic tales in Harivijaya and Śivalīlāmṛta. As a consequence he is still read very widely by the devout

It is well known that the Mahābhārata sometimes contains narrative inconsistencies. In this article I consider a number of these, particularly certain cases in which one or more characters appear to be presented in an inconsistent manner. After considering possible explanations for the existence of such seeming discrepancies, I put forward the possibility that they are more apparent than real, and that the Mahābhārata was never intended to be read as a smooth-flowing temporal sequence.

The subject to which I venture to invite your attention is not altogether new to the members of the Royal Asiatic Society. Three years ago, at a meeting of the Society on 14th March, 1916, with Sir Charles Lyall in the chair, when the Campbell Memorial Gold Medal was awarded to Professor Macdonell, of Oxford, the latter in his reply touched upon the desirability of creating, on behalf of British Sanskrit scholars, some opportunity of study and research in India. “The only remedy,” Professor Macdonell said, “seems to be the establishment of a school of research for Europeans at some centre of Sanskrit learning, preferably Benares, like the School of Classical Archæology at Athens or the French School at Hanoi in Indo-China. It will be a reproach to this country if we cannot establish something of this kind in India, with all our obligations to advance education and learning in connexion with the ancient civilization and literature of the vast Indian Empire.”

Although even at the present day nothing is certain in regard to the origin of the Kurds, even less was known to ancient writers, whose accounts are purely mythical. They were, however, generally so little studied that speculation on this question does not seem to have become common until a comparatively late period, and even then to have been almost exclusively confined to eastern scholars.

In recent studies of the Tibetan epic, much effort has been spent on analysing the origins and types of material that make up the epic literature, but no study presents an overall view of Ling (Gling) society. In the paper I gave at the second Symposium on the Epic of King Gesar at Lhasa in 1991, I therefore discussed the theoretical basis upon which the whole of Tibetan epic literature is built. I demonstrated that the Tibetan epic reveals a basic principle as well as a ‘chronological order’ in its development. Without this theoretical basis, Tibetan epic literature appears as a tangled web of material which is moreover still growing in complexity.

This article introduces an English version (translator unknown) of a Burmese law report: Judge Hpo Hlaing's ruling in Ma Hla v. Ma Wa, delivered in Mandalay in 1877. The judgement contains a paragraph dealing with the sources of Buddhist Law which appears to be a riposte to work published earlier that year in Lower Burma. That the judge was Burma's leading political philosopher gives special resonance to his views on law. His list of five law reports from the Pali canon and related texts is of interest. A reading is advanced in which the five cases link to Burmese ideas about legal pluralism.

The first traveller who brought copies of Pahlavi inscriptions to Europe was Garsten Niebuhr. On 2 March 1765, he arrived at Shīrāz, and on 13 March he went to Persepolis. In its surroundings he sojourned till 7 April, almost every day visiting its ruins and the monuments of Naqš-i Raj ab and Naqš-i Rustam, all of which he describes very minutely (Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, 11, Copenhagen, 1778, 121–63). In the ruins of Persepolis he found and copied the Old Persian inscriptions on which Grotefend, in 1802, based the first decipherment of the Persian cuneiform script. At Naqš-i Rajab he copied three short inscriptions, each in two Pahlavi versions and a Greek translation, of the Sasanian kings Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Hornmd; and at Naqš-i Rustam the left corner, the tails of 23 very long lines, of a Pahlavi inscription which he could not identify at all. The short inscriptions, together with two kindred inscriptions of Shapur II and Shapur III at Tāq-i Bostān, were deciphered by Silvestre de Sacy (Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse, Paris, 1793), who thus initiated the Pahlavi palaeography. Carsten Niebuhr and Silvestre de Sacy have a claim to be called the fathers of this branch of Oriental research.

A Buddhist practice existed whereby a dānapati, patron, had a manuscript of a Buddhist religious text copied, into which at the appropriate place his personal name was inserted with Sanskrit inflexion. In the Buddhist Sanskrit Sitātapatra-sūtra, the ‘Book of the white umbrella’, Stein manuscript S 2529, two personal names are inserted. In lines 45–6 occurs aṣṭānā mahāgrrahāṇā vaidhvasanakara hu ttrū 〈rakṣa rakṣa〉 mama vaṣayānasya ‘O destroyer of the eight great ravishers, hūṃ trūṃ. Protect, protect me Yaṣayāna’. In lines 48, 70, 88, 117 the name is Sīdyākaraca. Here we read:

48 auma svasta〈ka〉ra bavattū mama sīdyākaracasya

70 rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

88 ye ke cai salvā mama sīdyākaracasya ∥

117: rakṣa rakṣa mama sīdyākaracasya:

Instead of a name in line 122 occurs the word īthanāmasya ‘of so-and-so’.