Mission, Ladak, while the catalogue work on the Tibetan Buddhist texts, started by Miss C. M. Ridding with the help of Dr. F. W. Thomas, the learned Librarian of the India Office, has also benefited my own task. Professor V. Thomsen, of Copenhagen, the veteran Orientalist and decipherer of the famous Orkhon inscriptions, has done me the honour of examining and interpreting my early Turkish manuscripts in Runic Turki writing. To Dr. A. von Lecoq, of the Royal Ethnographic Museum, Berlin, who carried on exceptionally fruitful excavations at Turfan, I am indebted for the full edition of an important Manichaean text in old Turkish ; and to Dr. E. Denison Ross, Assistant Secretary to the Government of India, for a preliminary investigation of Uigur Buddhist manuscripts. Professor F. W. K. Müller, Director of the Royal Ethnographic Museum, Berlin, has helped me by an analysis of the manuscript materials in the Sogdian language which he was the first to decipher. Even earlier relics of this interesting Iranian language have come to light in certain documents of an ` unknown ' script resembling Aramaic, to which my friend Dr. A. Cowley, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently M. R. Gauthiot, of the École des Hautes Études, Paris, have been kind enough to devote much learned labour.
This long record of much-needed scholarly help cannot make me forget that for the purpose of the present book it was, perhaps, even more important to bring the results of my labours graphically before the eyes of the reader than to determine in all cases their exact scientific bearing. So I feel particularly grateful for the liberality with which my publishers have allowed me to provide illustrations so numerous and varied. My special thanks are due also to Messrs. Henry Stone and Son, of Banbury, who, by dint of much skill and care, have succeeded in making the colour plates worthy and true reproductions of the specimens of ancient art work.
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