﻿OV THE TARTARS. 



• tions of every species.' If this be true, the people of 

 Khata must have been a polished, and even a lettered 

 nation ; and it may be true, without affecting the 

 general position, that the Tartars were illiterate ; but 

 Ibnu Arabshah was a professed rhetorician, and it is 

 impossible to read the original passage without full 

 conviction that his object in writing it was to display 

 his power of words in a flowing and modulated pe- 

 riod. He says further, that in Jaghatai the people of 

 Oighur, as he calls them, * have a system of fourteen 



* letters only, denominated, from themselves, Oighuri\ 

 and those are the characters which the M on gals are 

 supposed, by most authors, to have borrowed. Alml- 

 ghazi tells us only, that Chengiz employed the natives 

 of Eighur as excellent penmen ; but the Chinese as- 

 sert, that he was forced to employ them, because he 

 had no writers at all among his natural-born subjects ; 

 and we are assured by many, that Kublaikhan ordered 

 letters to be invented for his nation by a Tibet'ian, 

 whom he rewarded with the dignity of chief Lama. 

 The small number of Eighuti letters might induce us 

 to believe that they were Zend ok Pahlavi, which must 

 have been current in that country when it was go- 

 verned by the sons of Feridim ; and, if the alphabet 

 ascribed to the Eighurians by M. Des Hautesrayes be 

 correct, we may safely decide, that in many of its 

 letters it resembles both the Zend and the Syriac, with 

 a remarkable difference in the mode of connecting 

 them ; but, as we can scarce hope to see a genuine 

 specimen of them, our doubt must remain in regard to 

 their form and origin. The page exhibited by Hyde as 

 Khatayan writing, is evidently a sort of broken Cufick ; 

 and the fine manuscript at Oxford, from which it was 

 taken, is more probably a Mendean work on some reli- 

 gious subject, than, as he imagined, a code of Tarta- 

 rian laws. That very learned man appears to have 

 made a worse mistake, in giving us for Mongal charac- 

 ters a page of writing which has the appearance of 

 Japanese, or mutilated Chinese letters. 



