﻿26 THE FirTH DISCOURSE : 



the occasion called for it ; and will barely observe, 

 that the first king of the Hyumuus, or Huns, began 

 his reign, according to Flsdehu, about three thousand 

 Jive hundred and sixty years ago, not long after the 

 time fixed in my former discourses for the first regu- 

 lar establishments of the Hindus and Arabs in their 

 several countries. 



I. Our first enquiry concerning the languages and 

 letters of the Tartars, presents us with a deplorable 

 void, or with a prospect as barren and dreary as that 

 of their deserts! The Tartars, in general, had no 

 literature (in this point all authorities appear to con- 

 cur) , the Turcs had no letters ; the Huns, according 

 to Procop'ius, had not even heard of them ; the magni- 

 ficent Chengiz, whose empire included an area of near 

 eighty square degrees, could find none of his own 

 Mongols, as the best authors inform us, able to write 

 his dispatches ; and Taimur, a savage of strong natu- 

 ral parts, and passionately fond of hearing histories 

 read to him, could himself neither write nor read. 

 It is true that Ihnu Arabshah mentions a set of cha- 

 racters called DUberjin, which were used in Khata : 



* he had seen them,' he says, * and found them to 

 « consist of forty -one letters, a distinct symbol being 



* appropriated to each long and short vowel, and 

 ' to each consonant hard or soft, or otherwise varied 

 « in pronunciation ;' but Khata was in Southern Tar- 

 tary, on the confines of India ; and, from his descrip- 

 tion of the characters there in use, we cannot but 

 suspect them to have been those of Tibet, which are 

 manifestly Indian, bearing a greater resemblance to 

 those of Bengal than to Devanagari. The learned 

 and eloquent Arab adds, * that the Tartars of Khata 

 « wiite, in the Dilberjin letters, all their tales and 

 1 histories, their journals, poems, and miscellanies, 

 « their diplomas, records of state and justice, the laws 

 < of Chengix, their public registers, and their composi- 



