ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY. 693 



language wliicb are su])posed to be shared in comnion by the Semitic 

 and Aryan families of speech. Both are too protoplastic, too jelly- 

 like, too indefinite for scientific handling.* 



Still no researches, if only carried on methodically, should be dis- 

 couraged a jM'iori, and we must always be willing to learn new lessons 

 however much they may shock our inherited opinions. 



It is not so very long ago that the best Semitic schohirs stood aghast 

 at the idea that the cuneiform letters were borrowed from a non-Semitic 

 race, and that some of the cuneiforiii inscriptions should contain speci- 

 mens of a non-Semitic (n^ Accadian language. We have got over this 

 surprise, and though there are still some formidable skeptics, the fact 

 seems now generally recognized that there was in very ancient times 

 an intercourse betAveen the Semitic and non-Senntic races of Asia as 

 there was between the Egyptians and the Phenicians, and between the 

 Phenicians and Greeks, that is, between the greatest people of antiq- 

 uity, and that these non-Semitic people or Accadians were really the 

 schoolmasters of the founders of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms. 

 But though we must for the present consider any connection between 

 Chinese and Babylonian writing as extremely doubtful, there can be no 

 doubt as to the rapid advance of the cuneiform system of writing itself 

 from East to West. This wonderful invention, more mysterious even 

 than the hieroglyphic alphabet, soon overflowed the frontiers of the 

 Mesopotamian kingdoms, and found its way into Persia and Armenia, 

 where it was used, though for the purpose of inscriptions only, by 

 people speaking both Aryan and non-Aryan languages. Here, then, 

 we see an ancient intercourse between people who were formerly con- 

 sidered by all historians as entirely separate, and we are chiefly 

 indebted to English scholars, such as Rawlinson, Norris, Sayce, Pinches, 

 and others, for having brought to light some of the ruins of that long 

 buried bridge on which the thoughts of the distant East may have 

 wandered toward the West. 



Few generations have witnessed so many discoveries in Oriental 

 scholarship, and have lived through so many surprises, as our own. If 

 any two countries seemed to have been totally separated in ancient 

 times by tlie barriers both of language and writing they were Egypt 

 with its hieroglyphic and Babylon with its arrow-headed literature. 

 We only knew of one communication between Egypt and its powerful 

 neighbors and enemies, carried on through the inarticulate and mur- 

 derous language of war, of spears and arrows, but not of arrow-headed 

 writings. Who could have supposed that the rows of wedges covering 

 the cylinders of Babylonian libraries, which have taxed the ingenuity 

 of our cleverest decipherers, were read without any apparent difficulty 

 by scribes and scholars in Egypt about 1500 b. c? Yet we possess 



"Professor Hominel, in his jiapcr submitted to our Congress, bas pointed out strik- 

 ing similarities between Egyptian bieroglyphifs and corresponding l^abylonian ideo- 

 graphs. Who was the inventor and who tbe borrower, udhuc sub jiidice lis est. 



