262 Rev. Dr. Watt on the different Kinds of Cuneiform Writing 
sition which, besides that it clears up a difficulty otherwise impenetrable, is further 
supported by its accordance with the oldest accounts that have reached us of the 
ancient state of India,* and has nothing against it but the forgeries and fictions 
* The oldest authors, who, in works of their’s still extant, make express mention of the 
Brahmans as a learned and sacerdotal class, are Strabo and Arrian; and from the accounts they 
have transmitted to us, it may be clearly collected that, down to the periods in which they respec- 
tively flourished, neither those priests, nor any of the rest of the Hindus, had the slightest know- 
ledge of alphabetic writing. Strabo quotes yet earlier authors, whose works have not been 
preserved,—Nearchus, who accompanied Alexander in his expedition to India, and Megasthenes, 
who wrote not long after,—as both of them attesting that the Hindus had no written laws; and he 
cites the latter of those authors as assigning for this fact the following reason, “ for that they 
[the Hindus] are ignorant of the use of letters, and manage every thing by memory”? [ovd2 yae 
etre sidever evtous, &AA’ amo pevhns Exuorae Dtoimcicbar—Strabo, Oxon. edit. lib. xv. p. 1007]. 
He, indeed, gives also another statement of the former historian, not very consistent with the 
foregoing one, namely, that the Hindus wrote epistolary communications on bits of fine linen ; 
but, to show how little entitled to credit was this assertion, he subjoins to it from himself the 
remark: ‘* Whereas the others [that is, all others who, down to his own time, had touched upon 
the subject] declare that they [the Hindus] do not make use of letters” [ray 0 errwy yedupacr 
aureus wh yencbxs Payévov'—Ibid., pp. 1016-7]. Arrian wrote near the middle of the second 
century, about a hundred and fifty years after Strabo, when a great deal more was known to 
Europeans about India, though not as much as is at present; but as he was in an eminent degree 
one of the best informed men of the age in which he lived, he surely must be allowed to have 
been better acquainted with the then condition of the Hindus than any person can now become 
through other channels ; and, consequently, his statements are peculiarly entitled to attention in 
reference to this subject. Now, he relates in the sixteenth chapter of the sixth book of his 
History of Alexander’s Expedition, that the Brahmans were the sophists, or wise men, of the 
Indians, ‘“‘ concerning the learning of whom, if indeed they have any, \ shall tell in my Treatise 
upon India” [— ize ay tyw ths coPias, ci On tis eoriv, ey +H LvdixH ZuyypePh dnawew |. The manner 
in which our author here expresses himself shows that he had a very low opinion of the learning 
of those sophists; and, accordingly, when he comes to describe it, which he does in the eleventh 
chapter of his Treatise on India, not by quotations from earlier writers, but on his own authority, 
as upon a matter on which he had fully satisfied himself, he makes it to consist solely in a power 
to interpret sacrifices and skill in divination, and does not include in it any knowledge whatever 
of letters. The evidence, therefore, of ancient history, combines with that supplied by the very 
forms of the letters of the oldest Sanscrit syllabary, to prove that the Hindus had no alphabetic 
writing till long after the commencement of the Christian era; nor is the force of this proof in 
the least weakened by the inscriptions deciphered by the late Mr. Prinsep, in the Lat character, 
purporting to have been written in the time of Grecian sovereigns who lived before the above- 
mentioned epoch, as those inscriptions betray several very decisive indications of their having 
