56 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. 



must have been acquainted with and in the possession of metals 1 

 which they offered as tribute; they cannot have lived, therefore, in 

 a true stone period, and the stone arrow-heads must then have been 

 rare and precious objects, otherwise they would not figure in the 

 tribute-list. 



It is worthy of note that the name for the flint arrow-head appearing 

 for the first time in those two passages is a single word nu (Giles 

 No. 8394) ; the written symbol expressing it is composed of the classifier 

 stone and a phonetic element reading nu. The latter element, again, 

 denotes also "a slave, a servant," so that the original meaning "stone 

 of the slaves" i. e. stone of the subjugated tribes may have been in- 

 strumental in the formation of this character. 2 There is further 

 another word nu, — having like the word nu "flint arrow-head" the 

 third tone and therefore perfectly identical with it in sound, — with 

 the meaning of "crossbow," the character being composed of the 

 classifier bow and the same word nu "slave" as phonetic complement. 

 Here, we have accordingly "the bow of the slaves." Now, in the 

 language of the Lolo, an independent aboriginal group of tribes in the 

 mountain-fastnesses of southwestern Sze-ch'uan, the crossbow is 

 called nu, 3 and the crossbow is the national weapon not only of the 

 Lolo, but of the whole Man family, the remnants of which are now 

 scattered throughout southern China. I am under the impression that 

 the Chinese derived the crossbow with many other items of culture 



1 The metals of three qualities are supposed to be gold, silver and copper. The 

 mention of iron, I believe, is not an anachronism as supposed by Hirth (The Ancient 

 History of China, p. 237); the ancient Chinese certainly knew iron ore and meteoric 

 iron; what they received and learned from the Turks was not simply iron, but a 

 specific method of working iron. 



2 1 am well aware of how deceitful such dissections of characters are, and how 

 cautiously any historical conclusions based on such analysis must be taken. The 

 present forms of Chinese characters represent a recent stage of development teeming 

 with alterations and simplifications in comparison with the older forms; many of 

 these changes are due to subsequent reflections on, or modified interpretations of, the 

 ideas associated with the word which they symbolize. Thus, the present way of 

 writing the word nu is possibly only the outcome of an afterthought, but not the 

 original form. The sinological reader may be referred to K'ang-hi's Dictionary 

 where two old forms of this character are given which evidently show no connection 

 with the modern form. I can hardly hope to discuss this question here without the 

 use of Chinese types. 



3 Compare Paul Vial, Les Lolos, p. 71 (Shanghai, 1898), who remarks: " Nou, 

 arbalete, ce mot si singulier, si anti-chinois, unique comme son, vient du lolo nou, 

 arbalete, d'autant que cette arme elle-meme n'est pas d'origine chinoise." In his 

 Dictionnaire francais-lolo, p. 27 (Hongkong, 1909), Father Vial gives the word for 

 crossbow in the form nd, which is a dialectic variant based on a regular phonetic 

 alternation between the vowels a and u in the Lolo group of languages. The same 

 vowel-change takes place also in ancient Chinese and in modern Kin-ch'uan (Jya- 

 rung) as compared with Central Tibetan, and plays such an important role in Indo- 

 chinese languages in general that we can speak of A -groups and c^-groups. 



