Page:A Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (1869).djvu/99

 88 CATALOGUE OF MANUSCRIPTS. R. IS. 153. The mf^lT^ AduChranth, literally npemthfii^fikiov, or First Sacred Book of the Sikhs, compiled near the close of the 16th century of our era, by the fifth of their ten successiye pontifical leaders, arjun-mal. It comprises the devotional and didactic poems of himself and his four predecessors^ viz., nanac, the founder of the sect (bom in the Lahore country, a.d. 1469), guru-angad, amab-das, and ram-das : together with the supplementary treatises of thirteen other religious teachers (one of whom being a woman causes them to be enumerated by the Sikhs as 12^), all included by him in this Proto-biblion. The work is written in the mixed Hindoi dialect of the Penjab (or Pentapotamia Indica, as Lassen terms it), and in that peculiar form of the Deyanagari character which they call GurumukhL This fine copy, consisting of 840 leaves, exclasive of an ample table of contents that occupies 23 separate leaves, preceding the others, was taken by the late Colonel Wallace Eing, among the spoils of a martial Guru, or teacher, in the late war, who used this Bible, as the Colonel calls it, for the consecration of the ndidrs, or tributary presents made to him, and for reading to himself and his followers. The above table of contents gives a minute enumeration of the books, chapters, and sections, that occupy from foL 1 to fol. 715 of the Adi-Granth following: but then, instead of a like analysis of the remaining 125 leaves, proceeds to give the following chrono- logical dates of the deaths of all their pontifical leaders but the last, i.e., including the compiler and the four that succeeded, as well as the four that preceded him. These dates I transcribe from fol 233., colunm 2 of the tabular part, only omitting the days and months, which are there minutely assigned to each, after the Sanskrit year (which dates from b.c. 56).