ings. Colonel Marshall and Mr. Breeks seem to me to differ slightly in their accounts, but I shall follow the latter. After death the body is burnt, but the skull is preserved; also a portion of a finger-nail, cut off, I suppose, before the burning. These are kept for about a twelvemonth, and then they are burned with a number of articles. The burning is done at a stone circle,1 and at the entrance a hole is made in the earth, into which the ashes are placed; a stone is laid over them, and a man breaks a chatty over the stone. This part of breaking the chatty is a custom followed more or less by all the primitive tribes of the Nilgiris. I give this account because if this stone with the ashes under it has any connection with the origin of the stone, similarly with relics under it, on the summit of the boath, we have here what might be the explanation of the Kalasa, or vase, which surmounts the amalaka on the Hindu sikhara. This is, of course, assuming the suggestion given above regarding the amalaka is correct.2

I cannot help suspecting that the Toda customs represent at the present day a very primitive condition of the Hindu rites, or perhaps I ought rather to repeat Mr. Fergusson's expression of "Dasya rites." I am not sure whether the bell figures in the old Vedic ceremonies, but we know that it does so very largely in the worship of Siva now. All his temples have a bell, which is sounded by the worshippers, and Nandi has always one hanging from his neck. With the Todas a bell is the most sacred relic in the temple. It is supposed to be old, and has no tongue; a bell is always placed round the necks of the buffalos sacrificed at the cremation; the relics which are preserved from the first burning

1 Mr. Breeks states that the Toda burning-place is called "Methgudi, lit. Marriage Temple," p. 20. This suggests an explanation of the Asura festal rites in relation to the dead.

2 In many Himalayan sikharas, instead of the amalaka there is a small roof formed of wood; it is square, and a pyramid in shape, standing on four small wooden posts. This very marked variation is, I think, a point in favour of the theory that the amalaka is derived from an umbrella, which would be like the wooden structure and canopy. I believe some of the Himalayan temples have more than one of these roofs, one above the other, in this again still more suggesting the umbrellas of the Buddhist dagoba, which Mr. Fergusson believes to be the source of the sikhara.

are placed in a hut, and a bell is hung over them, which the relatives ring night and morning, generally for nearly a year, when the second cremation takes place. When the Votary of Siva at the present day rings a bell at a shrine, which he supposes is to waken or to call the attention of the god, he may be only repeating part of an old rite connected. with the dead, of which we have a marked example in the "dead bell" of the Roman Catholic Church. The Hindu

of

our own time will not kill a cow, in later times he has adopted a more humane ritual; but his Nandi may yet represent the old funereal sacrifice which accompanied the spirit of his proprietor, and was thus a sort of Vahan, to the regions of Yama.2

I can refer to a noted bell of this kind which existed in Glasgow, and was said to have belonged to St. Mungo, the patron saint of the town; it was known as the "Deid Bell," and was used at funerals; it was also rung through the streets for the repose of the souls of the departed." This bell even survived the destruction of many things at the Reformation, as the following record of a Presbytery meeting in 1594 will show: "The Presbyterie declairis the office of the ringing of the bell to the buriall of the deid to be ecclesiasticall, and that the election of the persone to the ringing of the said bell belongis to the ancient canonis and discipline of the reformit kirk." This bell still survives, but only in the armorial bearings of the city.

2

The Vahan of Yama is curiously enough a buffalo, the animal sacrificed at the Toda cremations.

ART. III.-The Chaghatai Mughals. By E. E. OLIVER, M.I.C.E., M.R.A.S.

WITHOUT attempting to go back to the obscure traditions concerning the great nomad confederacy or confederacies that ranged the country north of the desert of Gobi, or to the genealogies of the tribes of Turks, Tārtārs, and Mughals, descendants of Yafis (Japhat) son of Nuḥ, who, after coming out of the Ark with his father, is said to have fixed his yūrat or encampment in the Farther East, and who have furnished subjects for the most copious traditions for native chroniclers, and materials for the most intricate controversies ever since; it may perhaps safely be assumed that Mughal was probably in the first instance the name of one tribe among many, a clan among clans, and extended to the whole as its chief acquired an ascendency over the rest. The name is most likely locally much older than the time of Chengiz, but it was hardly known to more distant nations before the tenth century, and became only widely famous in connection with him.

It is also perhaps unnecessary to enter upon the vexed question as to how the name is to be most properly spelt. Writers who have drawn considerably from Chinese sources, and most of the standard authors, like d'Ohsson, Yule, Howorth, and others, have adopted and familiarized us with

66

Mongols." On the other hand, to the Persian writers who have much to tell concerning them, and in so far as they are associated with India and the countries adjoining, they are Mughals or Mughüls. To Timur, Báber, and Akbar, their ancestors were Mughals, and the first "Irruptions of

the Infidels into Islam" were Mughal incursions. It might be urged that the name, as well as the people, became Muhammadanised, and both in their proper place may be equally correct, but it is certainly more convenient to use one throughout, and, from an Indian point of view, the latter.

THE EMPIRE AND DESCENDANTS OF CHENGIZ.

If he did not actually establish the supremacy of his tribe, Yassukai, the father of Chengiz, had done much towards it. He had enforced obedience on many of the surrounding clans, had asserted his entire independence of Chinese rule, and though, when he died in 1175 (571 H.), the people over whom he directly ruled are said to have only numbered some 40,000 tents, it is probable he had laid the foundations for a rapid increase to the power of his state, disproportionate as those foundations might be to the extraordinary development that followed. When his father died, Tamurchīņ, as he was then called, was but thirteen years old, and for the next thirty years was occupied in establishing his authority, first over his own, and then the neighbouring clans, facing powerful conspiracies, and consolidating his power. In 1205 (602 H.) he summoned a Kuriltai, or general assembly of all chiefs of the tribes in subjection to him, announced that Heaven had decreed he should thenceforth be known as Thengiz Khan,”—a title something equal to the Great Chief of the Khāns, the Shāh-in Shāh, or the King of Kings—and that the "Almighty had bestowed upon him and his posterity the greater part of the Universe." Whatever effect the

"The

announcement may have had on his hearers, he fully believed in himself, and henceforth devoted the remainder of his life to a wider and more comprehensive scheme of conquest, and in twenty years succeeded in building up what, as regards area, was probably the widest Empire the world has ever seen-an Empire that the conquests of himself and his sons finally extended from the Yellow Sea to the Crimea, and from what is now called the Kirghiz Steppes to Khurāsān,

and which included lands and peoples taken from the Chinese, Russians, Afghans, Persians, and Turks.

Not a little of this was accomplished during his own lifetime. He had incorporated the neighbouring Keraits, Naimans, Uīrāts, and other scattered Turkish tribes round about Lake Baikal and what is now Southern Siberia, received the submission of the Uighurs, borrowing from them a creed and an alphabet, and established a residence at Karakorum. He had begun the invasion of China, and subjugated the northern provinces, the ancient kingdom of Liau Tung, and the Tangut kingdom of Hia, though it was reserved for his grandson Kubilai to complete the subjugation of the Celestial Empire. He had absorbed the great Turkish kingdom of the Kara Khatai, formerly ruled over by a line of Gurkhāns, a territory which included Imil, Ālmālīk, Khotan, Kashghar, and Yarkand. He had marched with three of his sons, Chaghatāi, Oktāi, and Jūjī, accompanied by immense armies, estimated at 600,000 men, into the territory of the Khwarazm Shah, whose rule then extended from the Caspian Sea to near the Ili river; and under a discipline of Draconian severity, had harried the fairest plains and spoiled the richest cities of Transoxania and Khurasan, unfortunate countries which suffered a combination of atrocities hardly to be equalled in history. Lastly, he had driven Jalālud-din, the last of the Khwarazm Shahs, a fugitive into Persia. These vast Mughal hordes were subsequently divided into separate armies under his descendants. One swept

over Khwārazm, Khurāsān, and Afghanistān; another over Azarbaijan, Georgia, and Southern Russia; while a third

devoted its attention to China.

In the midst of this career of conquest, Chengiz died in 1226 (624 H.) at the age of 64,1 leaving behind him traces of fire and sword throughout Asia. He had previously, in 1221 (621 H.), according to the Mughal custom, divided his gigantic empire, or, as the distribution was tribal rather than territorial, it is more correct to say, had partitioned out as

1 Some writers make out his age to have been 72.