﻿ON THE TARTARS. 2$ 



all Muhammedan histories, exhibits tribes or nations as 

 individual sovereigns ; and, if Baron De Tott had not 

 strangely neglected to procure a copy of the Tartarian 

 history, for the original of which he unnecessarily offer- 

 ed a large sum, we should probably have found that, it 

 begins with an account of the deluge, taken from the 

 Koran, and proceeds to rank Turc y Chin, Tatar, and 

 JMongal, among the sons ot Yafet. The genuine tradi- 

 tional history of the Tartars, in all the books that I 

 have inspected, seems to begin with Oghuz, as that 

 of the Hindus does with Rama : they place their mira- 

 culous hero and patriarch four thousand years before 

 Chengiz Khan, who was born in the year 1 164, and 

 with whose reign their historical period commences. 

 It is rather surprising that Mr. Bai/Iy, who makes fre- 

 quent appeals to etymological arguments, has not de- 

 rived Ogyges from Oghuz, and Atlas from Altai, or 

 the Golden Mountain of Tartarv : the Greek termina- 

 tions might have been rejected from both words ; and 

 a mere transposition of letters is no difficulty with an 

 etymologist. 



My remarks in this address, Gentlemen, will be 

 confined to the period preceding Chengiz ; and, al- 

 though the learned labours of M. de Gui<jnes, and 

 the Fathers Visdclou, Demailla, and Gauhil, who have 

 made an incomparable use of their Chinese literature, 

 exhibit probable accounts of the Tartars from a 

 very early age ; yet the old historians ot China 

 were not only foreign, but generally hostile to them, 

 and for both those reasons, either through igno- 

 ranee or malignity, may be suspected of misrepre- 

 senting their transactions : if they speak truth, the 

 ancient history of the Tartars presents us, like 

 most other histories, with a series of assassinations, 

 plots, treasons, massacres, and all the natural fruits 

 of Selfish ambition. I should have no inclination 

 to give you a sketch of such horrors, even if 



