276 



ON LEGIBLE LANGUAGE, 



first, or Rik Beda, must, at the same epoch, have been of very considerable 

 standing. He dates the Institutes of Menu, the son or grandson of Brahma, 

 which he has so admirably translated, at not more than two centuries after 

 the time of Moses ; though he admits that these are the highest periods that 

 can fairly be ascribed to both publications :* and is ready to allow that they 

 did not at first exist in their present form, and were, perhaps, for a long time 

 only traditionary. It is impossible not to wish that the facts upon which this 

 extraordinary scholar builds his premises were established with more cer- 

 tainty, and that the conclusions he deduces from them were supported by 

 inferences and arguments less nicely spun. Admitting the existence of these 

 compositions in any sort of regular shape on their first appearance, it seems 

 more reasonable to suppose, considering their complicated nature and extent, 

 that they were handed down from age to age in a written form, than that 

 they maintained a precarious life by mere oral tradition; for, if the Egyptians, 

 as appears almost unquestionable, were in possession of legible characters 

 at or before the time of Moses, there seems no solid ground for believing 

 that the Hindoos might not have been in possession of a similar art. The dif- 

 ferent ages of the Kings, or five sacred and most ancient books of the Chi- 

 nese, have been still less satisfactorily settled than the Vedas of the Hindoos. 

 A very high antiquity, however, is fully established for them by a distinct 

 reference to their existence in the Institutes of Menu ; nor perhaps less so in 

 the very simple and antiquated style in which all of them are written, how 

 much soever the characters of any one of these books may differ from any 

 other: and, adopting the chronology of the Septuagint, Mr. Butler ingeniously 

 conjectures that the era of the Chinese empire may be fixed, wiih some 

 latitude of calculation, at two thousand five hundred years before Christ,f 

 which would make it nearly a thousand years before the birth of Moses. 



" The annals of China," says Dr. Marshman, " taken in their utmost ex- 

 tent, synchronize with the chronology of Josephus, the Samaritan Pentateuchi, 

 and the Septuagint, rather than with that contained in our present copies of 

 the Hebrew text ; and, according to the former, the highest pretensions of 

 their own annals leave the Chinese inhabiting- the woods, and totally ignorant 

 of agriculture, nearly five hundred years after the deluge. "| The Y-King, 

 or oldest of their sacred books, consists of horizontal lines, entire or cut, 

 which are multiplied and combined into sixty-four different forms or posi- 

 tions. They appear involved in almost impenetrable mystery, as well as 

 antiquity ; but, so far as they have been deciphered, they seem, in conjunction 

 with the other sacred books, to contain a summary of patriarchal religion, or 

 that which alone ought to be regarded as the established religion of China ; 

 under which the people are taught to know and reverence the Supreme Being, 

 and to contemplate the emperor as both king and pontiff ; to whom, exclu- 

 sively, it belongs to prescribe ceremonies, to decide on doctrines, and, at cer- 

 tain times of the year, to offer sacrifices for the nation.^ 



It becomes me, however, to observe that, with all the researches of our 

 most learned writers, we are still involved in a considerable degree of uncer- 

 tainty concerning the chronology of several Of the Oriental empires, and still 

 more so concerning their most ancient publications. M. Freret and M. 

 Bailly, generally speaking, concur in the periods assigned to the earliest Ori- 

 ental writings by Sir William Jones ; but the pretension of several of them, 

 and especially of the Puranas, or series of mythological histories, to a very 

 high antiquity, has lately been powerfully attacked by Mr. Bentley, in his dis- 

 sertation on the Surya Siddhanta;|j and still later by Captain Wilford, in his 

 series of Essays on the Sacred Isles of the West ;]P and a fall in the preten- 



* He calculates the first three Vedas to have been composed about 300 years before the Institutes, and 

 about 600 before the Puranas and Ttahasas, which he felt convinced were not the production of Vyasa. 

 Works, vol. ii. p. 305 ; and iii. p. 484, 4to. ed. t Hors Biblicaj, vol. ii. p. 179, 2d ed. 8vo. 1807. 



i Elements of Chinese Grammar: with a Preliminary Dissertation on the Characters and Colloquial 

 Medium of the Chinese. Serampore, 4to. 1814. § Lettres Edif. et Cur. torn. xxi. p. 218, 1781. 



II Butler, p. ii. utsupr. p. 175. Asiatic Researches, vol. vi. 



TT Asiatic^Researches, vol. x. See also Edin. Rev. No. xxxii. p. 387—389. The difference is indeed 

 wonderful Tor while Sir William Jones reckons the Puranas at nearly 2500 or 2600 years old, » it is evi- 



