IMITATIVE AMD SYMUULICAj^. 



300 



Gient poem, we find him ascribing a familiar knowledge of writing, and 

 not only of writing but of engraving and sculpture, to the Arabians ; for 

 of this country were Job and his companions. And if, as appears from 

 the preceding passages, the Hebrews were generally acquainted with at 

 least two of these arts at the time of their quitting Egypt, it would be 

 reasonable to suppose, even though we had no other ground for such a sup- 

 position, that the Egyptians themselves were equally acquainted with them. 

 We have also some reason for believing that alphabetic writing was at 

 this very period common to India ; and either picture-writing or emblem- 

 atic writing to China. The Hindu Scriptures, if the term may be allowed, 

 consist of four distinct books, called Baids or Beids, Bed as or Vedas, which 

 are conceived to have issued successively from each of the four mouths 

 of Brahma ; and of these. Sir William Jones calculates that the second 

 or Yajur Beda may have been in existence fifteen hundred and eighty 

 years before the birth of our Saviour, and consequently in the century 

 before the birth of Moses : whence, if there be any approach towards 

 correctness in the calculation, the 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 estabhshed with more certainty, and that 

 the conclusions he deduces from them were supported by inferences and 

 arguments less nicely spun. Admitting the existence of these composi- 

 tions 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 sohd ground 

 for believing that the Hmdus might not have been in possession of a 

 similar art. The different ages of the Kings ^ or five sacred and most 

 ancient books of the Chinese, have been still less satisfactorily settled 

 than the Vedas of the Hindus. A very high antiquity, however, is fully 

 established for them by a distinct reference to their existence in the In- 

 stitutes 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 diflfer from any other : and, adopting the 

 I chronology of the Septuagint, Mr. Butler ingeniously conjectures that 

 I the era of the Chinese empire may be fixed, with some latitude of calcu- 

 ] lation, at two thousand five hundred years before Christ,t which would 

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

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

 i extent, synchronize with the chronology of Josephus, the Samaritan Pen- 

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

 copies of the Hebrew text ; and, according to the former, the highest pre- 



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

 Institutes, aud about 600 before the Purauas and Itahasas, which he felt convinced were not, 

 the production of Vyasa. Works, vol. ii. p. 306 ; and iii. p. 484. 4to. ed» 



t Horse Biblicae, vol. ii. p. 179. 2d ed, 8vo. 1807. 



