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part of which have tested the ingenuity of several sinologues and historians; but few of these Sino-Iranian terms have been dealt with accurately and adequately. While a system for the study of SinoSanskrit has been successfully established, Sino-Iranian has been woefully neglected. The honor of having been the first to apply the laws of the phonology of Old Chinese to the study of Sino-Iranica is due to ROBERT GAUTHIOT.1 It is to the memory of this great Iranian scholar that I wish to dedicate this volume, as a tribute of homage not only to the scholar, but no less to the man and hero who gave his life for France.' Gauthiot was a superior man, a kiün-tse 3- in the sense of Confucius, and every line he has written breathes the mind of a thinker and a genius. I had long cherished the thought and the hope that I might have the privilege of discussing with him the problems treated on these pages, which would have considerably gained from his sagacity

and wide experience — *AA.1310-fiatA.

Iranian geographical and tribal names have hitherto been identified on historical grounds, some correctly, others inexactly, but an attempt to restore the Chinese transcriptions to their correct Iranian prototypes has hardly been made. A great amount of hard work remains to be done in this field. In my opinion, it must be our foremost object first to record the Chinese transcriptions as exactly as possible in their ancient phonetic garb, according to the method so successfully inaugurated and applied by P. Pelliot and H. Maspero, and then to proceed from this secure basis to the reconstruction of the Iranian model. The accurate restoration of the Chinese form in accordance with

1 Cf. his Quelques termes techniques bouddhiques et manichéens, Journal asiatique, 1911, II, pp. 49-67 (particularly pp. 59 et seq.), and his contributions to Chavannes and Pelliot, Traité manichéen, pp. 27, 42, 58, 132.

2 Gauthiot died on September II, 1916, at the age of forty, from the effects of a wound received as captain of infantry while gallantly leading his company to a grand attack, during the first offensive of Artois in the spring of 1915. Cf. the obituary notice by A. MEILLET in Bull. de la Société de Linguistique, No. 65, pp. 127-132.

a I hope to take up this subject in another place, and so give only a few examples here. Ta-ho gwi A-44( is the Ta-ho River on which Su-li, the capital of Persia, was situated (Sui §u, Ch. 83, p. 7 b). HIRTH (China and the Roman Orient, pp. 198, 313; also Journal Am. Or. Soc., Vol. XXXIII, 1913, p. 197), by means of a Cantonese Tat-hot, has arrived at the identification with the Tigris, adding an Armenian Deklath and Pliny's Diglito. Chinese ta, however, corresponds neither to ancient ti nor de, but only to *tat, dat, dad, dar, d'ar, while ho 14 represents *hat, kat, kad, kar, kal. We accordingly have *Dar-kat, or, on the probable assumption that a metathesis has taken place, *Dak-rat. Hence, as to the identification with the Tigris, the vocalism of the first syllable brings difficulties: it is i both in Old Persian and in Babylonian. Old Persian Tigram (with an alteration due to popular etymology, cf. Avestan ti'yri.f, Persian tir, "arrow") is borrowed from Babylonian Di-ik-lat (that

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