262 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. IV. 



of other legible but aberrant types of later growth found throughout India 

 and extending beyond its borders.- The phonetic powers of the Lat 

 Alphabet remained a mystery down to 1838, when Mr. James Prinsep, 

 secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, announced his discovery in 

 the journal of his society. After some discussion, it was generally agreed 

 that Mr. Trinsep had found the key to the Buddhist inscriptions by 

 identifying their characters as forms of the well known Devanagari.-' 

 Hundreds of inscriptions have been partially translated, some of them 

 of considerable length. They are not Sanscrit, they are not Pali, though 

 more like that than anything else; their language is a sort of lingua 

 franca, intelligible only to their translators, and not always even to them. 

 They are full of dates and donations and mendicant monks, and do 

 not afford a single satisfactory fragment of ancient history. P'or all the 

 gain they are to the historian they might as well have kept their worth- 

 less secrets.* 



The translations of Mr. Prinsep, General Cunningham, Professor 

 Dowson, and many learned Babus, proceed on the assumption that the 

 writers of the documents were Brahmans, or at least an Aryan people- 

 Philologists have conclusively shown that the substratum of Indian 

 speech is Turanian, a substratum that exists, almost in its integrity, 

 among the aboriginal or non-Aryan tribes of the empire.^ Archaeologists 

 also have referred the most ancient buildings and monuments of 

 India to these Turanians, who excelled their conquerors in the magnifi- 

 cence of their architecture.'* There is no evidence that Brahmans ever 

 became Buddhists, whose religion was a revolt against their own. 

 Gotama Buddha himself was a Kshattriya, not a Brahman, and although 

 many people of Kshattriya descent may be found among the Hindoos 

 of to-day, this fact no more makes an Aryan of the original Kshattriya 

 than incorporation in the west makes an Italian of the Etruscan, or an 

 Englishman of the Pict. All over Europe, in Armenia, in Kurdistan,, 

 and in Persia, the Aryan incorporated the Turanian, annexing part of 

 his speech and assuming the greater portion of his history and mythology 

 as his own property, but nowhere was this process of amalgamation so 

 complete as in India. The Brahman pantheon overflows with Turanian 

 deities, the Indian epics are the records of Turanian warfare and 

 adventure, the very post-positions of the Sanscrit language exhibit 

 Turanian influence upon something more stable than mere vocabulary. 

 That there was a genuine Turanian empire in India is proved by archi- 

 tectural remains, which are many of them easy to identify with Buddhist 

 cult. Did the wealthy monarchs and powerful emperors who built these 

 great edifices leave no written trace of their existence? Unless Mr- 

 James Prinsep w^as mistaken, they did not. I prefer to believe that Mr. 



