i36 Literary Discoveries in India. 



tuguese historians relate, that soon after the arrival of their 

 countrymen in India, about three hundred years ago, the 

 Syrian archbishop of Angamalee, by name Mar Jacob, de- 

 posited in the fort of Cochin, for safe custody, certain ta- 

 blets of brass ; on which were engraven rights of nobility 

 and other privileges, granted to the Christians by a prince 

 of a former age ; and that while these tablets were under 

 the charge of the Portuguese, they had been unaccountably 

 lost, and had never after been heard of. The loss of the 

 tablets was deeply regretted by the Christians ; and the 

 Portuguese writer, Gouvea, ascribes their subsequent op- 

 pressions by the native powers to the circumstance of their 

 being no longer able to produce their charier. It is not ge- 

 nerally known, that at a former period the Christians pos- 

 sessed regal power in Malayala. The name of their last 

 king was Beliarte. He died without issue ; and his king- 

 dom descended, by the custom of the country, to the king of 

 Cochin. When Vasco de Gama was at Cochin, in 1503, 

 he saw the sceptre of the Christian king. 



It is further recorded by the same historians, that besides 

 the documents deposited with the Portuguese, the Christians 

 possessed three other tablets, containing antient grants, 

 which they kept in their own custody, and that these were 

 exhibited to the Romish archbishop Menezes, at the church 

 ofTevelecar, near the mountains, in 1599, the inhabitants 

 having first exacted an oath from the archbishop, that he 

 would not remove them. Since that period little has been 

 heard of the tablets : though they are often referred to in 

 the Syrian writings, the translation itself has been lost. It 

 has been said that they were seen about forty years ago ; but 

 Adrian Moens, a governor of Cochin in 1770, who pub- 

 lished some account of the Jews of Malabar, informs us that 

 he used every means in his power for many years to obtain 

 a sight of the Christian plates, and was at length satisfied 

 they were irrecoverably lost, or rather, he adds, that they 

 never existed. 



The learned world will be gratified to know that all these 

 antient tablets, not only the three last mentioned exhibited 

 in 1599, but those also (as is supposed) delivered by the 



Syrian 



