prevailed from 600 B. c. to 250 A. D., beginning before the days of Confucius and extending to the dynasty of Cham, under whose auspices the Li-writing and the present alphabet came in use, which, however, has been slightly modified by the art of lithography.

The Chinese possessed, of course, the art of printing, like every other art known to man, long before Europe. Stanislas Julien has established the claims of a Chinese iron-smith, Pi-sching, to have invented, four hundred years before Guttemberg, movable types of burnt clay. The invention was unfortunately not carried out. The first four books of the works of Confucius were the first books printed in Chinese. Klaproth says they appeared between 890 and 925, in the province of Szutschuen. Rashneddin's Persian history of the "Rulers of Khatai" (China) contained, 1310, a minute description of the technical manipulations of a Chinese printing-office.

The Japanese, whose peaceful and uninterrupted isolation has but recently been for the first time seriously threatened, invented printing as well as the Chinese, and made exactly the same use of their discovery. The so-called Yeofa-writing is that used by the common people: it contains 47 letters, and is written in vertical columns from right to left. About 290 of our era, however, the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing, and every educated citizen is able to use both, as the occasion may demand.

It is a peculiar and not generally known fact, that the Mantschu (originally Tunguses), who, in 1646-7, conquered China, and still rule over it, have retained their own language, an idiom not very distantly allied to the Finnish of Europe. It

contains, like the latter, eighteen consonants and six vowels, but is written in vertical columns from left to right-a straight perpendicular line having the letters and marks arranged mainly on its left side.

Of all the Eastern modes of writing, the Sanscrit is, of course, the most important, because, like the idiom it represents, it presents to us the original form from which the Greek and Roman, the Germanic and Slavonic, are derived. It has, as usual, two distinct kinds of writing, the "Nagary," for common purposes, and the "Dêvanagâri," a divine or sacred writing. Formerly written without vowels, and from the right to the left, it is now used in both respects, like European languages. Each sign has a frame in the shape of a gallows, on the left and open side of which the letter proper is found. It is an alphabet evidently quite original, and peculiar to the East Indies, having nothing in common with the Phoenician letters, if we except the remarkable, and as yet unexplained coincidence of numeral signs, which are in both nearly the same.

CHAPTER LXII.

PERSIAN WRITING.

Wedge-Inscriptions-Himyaritic Inscriptions-Their Interpretations.

AMONG the large variety of Eastern writings, which have not become so familiar to all through their application to modern languages, is the Persian of southwestern Asia, of which even the Greeks have left us no information. It has only of late been rediscovered; and even the subdivision of Zend, in ancient Media, Pelvi, on the Persian gulf, and Parsi, the language of the Persians of antiquity, is by no means generally adopted. Of these is the Zend most like Indo-Germanic, though very different from Sanscrit, and written from right to left. Rask, Bopp, and Burnouf have thrown much light upon this subject, which is as yet far from being fully known and appreciated.

In the countries between the Euphrates and the eastern frontier of Persia are found traces of a mode of writing, at once the simplest, merely indented writing, and once used as extensively in the Orient as the Roman characters in the West. These letters, cuneiform or edge-shaped, sometimes called arrow-headed-if the two are not entirely distinct-consisted originally of only two signs, representing a wedge and two lines meeting in a point. This extremely simple sign, placed in every

WEDGE INSCRIPTIONS.

403

variety of position, and frequently repeated, admitted of a large number of variations, and was, at the same time, admirably adapted for letters to be hewn in stone. On the frieze of the temple of Chelminar, in Persia, and in similar positions, it has very much the appearance of music-writing. Colonel Rawlinson, and before him Grotefend and Burnouf, have employed astonishing ingenuity in deciphering and explaining these characters, which, shortly before, a renowned scholar had declared "for ever illegible." Lassen and Westergaard have, still more recently, added considerably to our as yet but partial knowledge of this mysterious mode of writing. But even the not yet complete interpretation of these inscriptions, aided by the critical inquiries of Hincks, Holtzmann, and Oppert, some of which are still going on, must be considered as one of the greatest triumphs of philological science, and a truly wonderful achievement of human ingenuity. Some idea of the extreme difficulty of these investigations may be formed from the fact, that not only was the phonetic value of each separate combination or letter to be determined, but the language itself which these characters were intended to represent a language which has been lost for perhaps more than 2000 years, had to be recovered. Nor was there here a Rosetta stone near to aid in deciphering corresponding words, as with Champollion and Young in Egypt; nor, as with the Himyaritic inscriptions in Southern Arabia, which are strikingly like the Ghyr or Ethiopic, a still extant dialect, like it, spoken by a living race. The material also was comparatively scanty, utterly unknown, before, and unconnected even with any previous discovery. These wedgeinscriptions are found scattered over a vast surface, on rocks

and bricks from the foundation of ancient buildings in Mesopotamia, Babylon, and Chaldea, and invariably connected with those that have the highest and most authentic claim to antiquity. In Armenia and Persia, in Nineveh, and, in fact, from the Mediterranean to the Persian mountains, they are to be met with in detached places. They occur in three different modes of combination, conjectured, on good grounds, to correspond to as many distinct languages, and generally called the Persian, Median, and Assyrian. Colonel Rawlinson ascribes its invention to a primitive race settled in the plains of Shinar. Others believe them to have been invented first in Babylon, but much improved in ancient Persia by a northern or eastern branch of the Shemitic race. It is certain that they were used by Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and the Achaemenian kings of Persia, and spread all over the empire of the great Cyrus. Their importance is as yet little foreseen, although they have already thrown important light on profane history, as they were written in the court language of Susa and Persepolis, lost since the overthrow of the last Darius, and added a new confirmation and evidence to the annals of Jewish monarchies, as recorded in the Bible.