VI.] THE SOUTHERN MONGOLS. 215 



the field. What may be called the old, but by no means the 

 obsolete school, regards the Chinese populations as the direct 

 descendants of the aborigines who during the Stone Ages entered 

 the Hoang-ho valley probably from the Tibetan plateau, there 

 developed their peculiar culture independently of foreign in- 

 fluences, and thence spread gradually southwards to the whole of 

 China proper, extirpating, absorbing, or driving to the encircling 

 western and southern uplands the ruder aborigines of the Yang- 

 tse-Kiang and Si-Kiang basins. 



In direct opposition to this view the new school, championed 

 especially by the late T. de Lacouperie 1 , holds that 

 the present inhabitants of China are late intruders i on i a n theory. 

 from south-western Asia, and that they arrived, not 

 as rude aborigines, but as a cultured people with a considerable 

 knowledge of letters, science, and the arts, all of which they 

 acquired either directly or indirectly from the civilised Akkado- 

 Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia. 



Not merely analogies and resemblances, but what are called 

 actual identities, are pointed out between the two cultures, and 

 even between the two languages, sufficient to establish a common 

 origin of both, Mesopotamia being the fountain-head, whence the 

 stream flowed by channels not clearly defined to the Hoang-ho 

 valley. Thus the Chin, yit, originally go, is equated with Akkad 

 gu, to speak; ye with ge, night, and so on. Then the astronomic 

 and chronologic systems are compared, Berosus and the cunei- 

 form tablets dividing the prehistoric Akkad epoch into 10 periods 

 of 10 kings, lasting 120 Sari, or 432,000 years, while the corre- 

 sponding Chinese astronomic myth also comprises 10 kings (or 

 dynasties) covering the same period of 432,000 years. The 

 astronomic system credited to the emperor Yao (2000 B.C.) 

 similarly corresponds with the Akkadian, both having the same 



1115 A.D. by the Nti-Chan Tatars. Ptolemy's Thinae is rightly regarded by 

 Edkins as the same word as Sinae, the substitution of t for s being normal in 

 Annam, whence this form may have reached the west through the southern 

 seaport of Kattigara. 



Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization , from 2300 B.C. to 200 A.D. , 

 or Chapters on the Elements Derived from the Old Civilizations of West Asia 

 in the Formation of the Ancient Chinese Culture, London, 1894. 



