424 



General Meeting of the Asiatic Society of Paris. [No. 125, 



Mr. Dernburg is preparing an edition of the Tarifat of Djordjani, to- 

 gether with a French translation and a commentary. The Tarifat is 

 a dictionary of the technical terms of Arabic Grammar, Philosophy, and 

 Theology, and you all know, what value Mr. de Sacy attached to this 

 work. Mr. Dernburg takes as basis of the redaction of the text, the 

 edition of Constantinople compared with the manuscripts of Paris. I 

 should besides mention a work of Ibnal-Beither on the medicine of 

 the Arabs, which Mr. Sortheimer is translating into German. 



The Semitic dialects have furnished this year a subject of new and 

 curious studies. Every body knows, that on ascending Mount Sinai 

 from the Gulf of Suez, one may follow some collateral valleys, inter- 

 secting the foot of the mountain, which exhibit on the walls of the 

 rocks they traverse, inscriptions not yet decyphered. One of these val- 

 leys abounds so much with them, that it has received the name of 

 *' Wadi Mokatteb," the valley of inscriptions. A great number of them 

 have been published in different works, and Mr. Beer at Leipzig, who 

 has already distinguished himself in other branches of oriental paleo- 

 graphy, has undertaken the task of decyphering them. He has printed 

 the first part of his labours, forming the third part of his " Studia 

 Asiatica," 17 and the conclusions at which he has arrived are, that these 

 inscriptions date from the fourth century, that they are written in one 

 of the Semitic alphabets and dialects, and that they are the work of 

 the Nabatenes. 



With regard to Persian literature, only one work referring to it 

 has become known to me; viz. Sadi's Galistan, translated into the 

 German, by Mr. Wolff, in a most elegant manner. 18 Other works are 

 commenced or advertized. Your associate, Mr. Troyer, has under the 

 press an English translation of the Dabistan, a work which has a long 

 time excited the curiosity of the learned. It is a history of religi- 

 ons, written in Akbar's time, by a Guebre, Mobed Shah, who turned 

 Musulman. The intention of the author appears to have been to fur- 

 nish to Akbar, a pretended historical basis of the religion which this 

 emperor had invented, and which he was desirous to introduce. For 



17. Studia Asiatica, edid. Beer fasc. iii. Lipzig, 1840, in 4to. The first two numbers 

 of this work have not appeared, and the author unfortunately died since the publi- 

 cation of it. 



18. Sadi's Rosengarten, uberselzt durch Dr. Ph. Wolff. Stuttgart, 1841, in l2mo. 



