1877.] S. B. Miles— 0;^ tie Geographj of Oman. 125 



Yajati the founder of the Kesarl dynasty, who expelled the Buddhists and 

 re-established Hinduism in Orissa about the close of the 5th century. Hi- 

 therto he has been supposed to have been an independent sovereign ; but in 

 the patent under notice he owns allegiance to Bhava Gupta of Magadha, and 

 hence it would seem that it was a Hindu king of Magadha who overthrew 

 the Buddhist sovereignty of Orissa and held the province as a dependency 

 through a vassal. In the Temple records of Puri, the Buddhists are 

 represented as Yavanas. 



A Photozincograph will accompany the paper, which will appear in 

 No. II of this year's Journal. 



2. 0)1 the Moute hetween Sohdr and eWBereymi in ^Omdn, lulth a note on 

 the Zatt, or gypsies, in Arabia. — JBy Colokel S. B. Miles, Maskat. 



(Abstract.) 



Colonel Miles describes the route from Sohar on the Persian G-ulf, 

 north of Maskat, across the Jabal Akhdhar Range to el-Bereymi on the out- 

 skirts of the southern Arabian Desert. He refers to the antiquities of the 

 coast, which before the spread of Islam was held by the Persians, and gives 

 interesting notes on the places he j)assed, the customs of the people, the 

 scenery and produce of the country, and the geology and fauna of the 

 mountain tracts. A map accompanies the essay. 



The paper concludes with a notice of the Zatt, or gypsies, of Arabia, 

 whom Dr. Sprenger identifies with the Jats of India. They are at once dis- 

 tinguishable from the Arabs as a distinct race, and are numerous in Arabia. 

 They are accomplished handicraftsmen, and are to the natives of the inte- 

 rior what the banians are in the seajDort towns. They speak among them- 

 selves, as elsewhere, a gibberish of their own manufacture, the plan being 

 to prefix to Arabic words the letter on and to suffix the syllable eeh ; thus 

 the Arabic kamar, ' moon', becomes mkdmareek. 



The paper will be shortly published in No. 1, Pt. I, of the Jom-nal, 

 for 1877. 



Mr. Blochmann said — Several of the Zatt words given by Colonel Miles 

 are corruptions of Arabic words ; but some have no Arabic sound. The 

 word for ' father' biveieekee, looks like the diminutive of ah, father, with the 

 ending kee ; other words as jiddmeh (rice) , jarrdhali (knife) are Arabic, 

 but have in classical Arabic only kindred meanings. 



It would be of interest to have the Zatt numerals, provided they do 

 not use, when speaking among themselves, the Arabic numerals. 



Mr. W. T. Blanford said that Col. Miles's paper referred to a region 

 of great interest, but of which very little was known. It was visited by 

 Lieut. Wellsted, of the Indian Navy in 1835, and briefly described by him 



