VITA SINE LITEEIS. 20 



therefore had ceased, nay, we may say, had long ceased to be the spoken language of the 

 country when Buddhism arose, and that therefore the youth and manhood of the ancient 

 Vedic language lie far beyond the period that gave birth to the teaching of Buddha, who, 

 though he may have known Sanskrit, and even Vedic Sanskrit, insisted again and again 

 on the duty that his disciples should preach "his doctrines in the language of the people 

 whom he wished to benefit." ' It surely would be as natural to suppose that the scholars 

 and thinkers who spoke that amient tongue had evolved a method of writing it, even 

 though, for the reasons Prof Whitney has given, they chose to limit its iTse ; as that 

 their descendants should have been ibrced to borrow an alphabet from strangers who 

 were less, or at least no more, ingenious. Pauthier records, in his " Chine Ancienne," that 

 many of the inventions in art and science of the earliest Chinese dynasties are said by the 

 native historians to have come from the direction of Thibet, which, in that case, must have 

 enjoyed a priority of civilization. It is to be noted that Magadha, Asoka's seat of power, 

 was in a part of India (Behar) not very distant from that elevated region. Had the system 

 of hieroglyphics, attributed to Fou-Hi as its author, been common to the dwellers on both 

 sides of the mountains, there would be ample time for the differentiation which would 

 give the Hindoos the benefit of an alphabet long before Asoka, while leaving the Chinese 

 at the stage of graphic progress which suited their genius and their speech. 



Mr. Taylor, however, though he does not pronounce the indigenous origin of the 

 Indian alphabet impossible, is rather inclined to trace it to a Semitic source, the derivation 

 from which, he thinks, is rendered probable by the analogy of the repeated transmissions 

 of the Semitic alphabet. " The two primitiA^e Indian scripts," he concludes, " are manifestly 

 based upon alphabets which had reached the Semitic stage of evolution, their partial nota- 

 tion of the medial vowels being non-alphabetic in its character, while the emphatic initial 

 vowels are more fully expressed, as in early Semitic inscriptions." Some writers, while allow- 

 ing this argument as regards the Indo-Bactrian, decline to accept it for the Asoka alphabet. 

 If it is of Semitic origin, they challenge those who hold that view to tell by what channel 

 it reached India. Mr. Taylor replies, though with hesitation, that it may have got there 

 by sea from Arabia Felix, the trade between Yemen and India having flourished between 

 the tenth and sixth centuries, B.C. The Indo-Bactrian alphabet, according to the same 

 authority, was introduced soon after the Persian coucj[uest of the Punjaub, in the begin- 

 ning of the fifth century, B.C. 



In the cuneiform inscriptions, so abundantly unearthed from the ruins of the ancient 

 cities of Mesopotamia, we find evidences of a process similar to that which resulted in the 

 complicated ideography of the Chinese. It is also worthy of note that, here too, we have 

 to deal with the invention, not of an Aryan or Semitic, but of a Turanian or Allophylian 

 race. In the material used, however, the Babylonian writing stands apart from all other 

 systems. They took the clay that was ready to their hands, and thereon imprinted the 

 wedge-like characters which Mr. James Nasmyth considers to have been first suggested by 

 the mark made by a hard brick applied edgeways to a soft day surface. The Semitic Assyri- 

 ans adopted the system from their vanquished foes, and formed syllabaries out of the 

 Accadiau phonograms, — the adaptation being effected in part by the process known as 

 aerology, by which the phonographic symbol was made to indicate the initial syllable of 



' India, etc. Lect. vii. 



