Appendix D. 
ASSESSMENT BY NASAQ. 
IN the text I have followed generally the description of Akbar’s 
methods of assessment which was offered in a paper written some 
years ago in collaboration with Mr. Yusuf Ali (J.R.A.S., 1918, 
pp. 8 ff.). I have seen no published criticism of the conclusions 
there put forward, but some scholars have informed me that 
objection has been taken in India to the identification of the 
term nasag with a particular method of assessment, and it is 
perhaps desirable to go into this point in some little detail. The 
objection, as it has been represented to me, is to the effect that, 
since nasag bears a well-defined sense in the general literature 
of the period, this sense must be accepted throughout, and it is 
not permissible to deduce another, and inconsistent, sense from 
isolated passages. My answer is that the general sense of the 
word makes nonsense of passages written by expert officials; 
and that, since we are not entitled to assume that they wrote 
nonsense, we must infer that, in these passages, the word is 
used in a specialised, technical sense, which prevailed at the time 
alongside of the general meaning, but subsequently became 
obsolete. The coexistence of two senses, general and technical, 
is of course no isolated phenomenon. In English at the present 
day, we may write of the manners and customs of a foreign 
nation, and equally we may write of the customs levied at a 
foreign seaport: in the first case we are using the word “custom” 
in its general sense, in the second we give it the specialised, 
technical meaning of taxes on imports levied by the State, taxes 
into which no element of custom now enters. Similarly, the 
Persian word dastir, which in our period had various general 
meanings, one of them being “custom,” meant also, in its 
technical use, a schedule of assessment-rates fixed by authority, 
and in no sense customary. There is no difficulty then in the 
co-existence of a general and a specialised meaning for a particular 
word. 
In its general sense #masag means “administration,” and at 
this period it was used as one of a group of terms denoting the 
administrative charge of a country, province, or district. We