Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/20

6 Enoch, the seventh from Adam, leave a work on Astronomy, which the Queen of Sheba possessed, and of which one so late as Tertullian "had seen and read some whole pages ?" The book was written in letters "significative and hieroglyphical," and no one will deny that this description may apply to the Chinese characters, and these have an antediluvian antiquity and are, as Kircher has it, "hieroglyphicorum in omnibus æmuli," in all respects rivals of hieroglyphics. As a clinching argument Webb writes, "And as if all things conspired to prove this the Primitive Tongue, we may observe how forceably Nature struggles to demonstrate so much. The very first expression we make of life, at the very instant minute of our births, is, as was touched on before, by uttering the Chinique word Ya. Which is not only the first, but indeed the sole and only expression that Mankind from Nature can justly lay claim unto."

Many others have supposed that the Chinese people and language had their origin in the neighbourhood of that old country with the soothing name Mesopotamia. That the first speakers of the language also were the offspring of Shem seemed very probable. They had apparently a knowledge of arts and sciences beyond other tribes of the time, and was it likely that Noah would be partial to Ham, the son who was "a reprobate," "peu respectueux et maudit dans sa posterité?" Kircher, indeed, thinks that Ham conducted his colonies out of Egypt into Bactria through Persia. From Bactria they may have passed into China, "the utmost nation of the habitable world, together also with the first elements of Letters, which from their father Cham, and Mercurius Trismegistus, Counsellor of his son Misraim, and first inventor of hieroglyphicks, they had though rudely learned."

But this opinion is regarded as heterodox, and, as has been stated, it has been refuted by Webb. As to the other son of Noah, Japhet, he was doubtless taught by his father all that Shem was taught. But Japhet, or at least his children, evidently