a ea TY
“ ona ee <i
ee Sa ae ‘ es Jo
e
ASIA TIC: RESEARCHES,
h . OR y . xt /
ya ¢ TRANSACTIONS
?
a OF
me $h |
on eg ; ‘HE SOCIETY INSTITUTED IN BENGAL,
4 awe
ieee ey we FOR INQUIRING INTO: ow “ : | = | ce THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES,
+ ;
i
ee
- THE ARTS, SCIENCES, AND LITERATURE es ae ,
io
* Oo F \
; dol VOLUME THE SECOND.
Printed verbatim from the Calcutta Edition, in Quarto, pea \ i ! London: . ae
, PRINTED FOR VERNOR AND HOOD, IN THE POULTRY.
~
1799
an
ce 4 co hw, wig
ran
santo
a Sa
EOC NER Ean 8
OF THE
SECOND VOLUME.
I, P)ISCOURSE the Fourth: onthe drabs - II Discourse the Fifth: on the 7artars - IIT. Discourse the Sixth: on the Persians - + IV. On the Descent of the Afghans from the Neca V. On the Island of Hinzuan - - + - NES VI. -On the Indian Gross-beak - - - Vil. On the Chronology of the Hindus - - VII. On the Cure of the Elephantiasis. - 1X, On the Indian Game of Chess - = - X. Inscriptions from the Viadhya Medaios XI. A Description of 4am - - - -"\-
XII. On the Book of Chinese Odes - - - - XIV. On the Introduction of 4rabic into Persian XV. On the Astronomy of the Hindus - - - - XVI. Onthe Indian Zodiac - - - + = = - XVII. An Accountof Nefal - + - - - “ XVII. On the Cure of Persons bitten by Sinked XIX. On some Roman Coins found at Ne/ore XX. On two Indian Festivals, and the Spite XXI. On the Isle of Carnicobar + - = _ XXII. On the Medicinal Plants of India - XXIIL On the dissection of the Pangolin - XXIV. Onthe Zac insect - - - - = = XXV. Discourse the Seventh : on the Chinese XXVL An Inscription found near Jslamabad XXVII. A Supplementto No. VII - - - XXVIII. On the Spikenard of the Antients Ar. I, A Meteorological Diary - - - Il. On the Cases in deducing the ieee &e. III, On an Ancient Building in Hajipur - - TV. On some Eclipses of ‘Fupiter’s Satellites - V. On the Hindu Binomial Theorem - - =
o-
| materials have been collected.
XIE. On the Mountaineers of Trifura - - - -
345 353 36% 335 383 9389 405 419 473 477 487 487
_ *,* There was not room in this volume for the Disser- tations on the Music of the Hindus and the Laws of Siam; but they will appear in the Third volume, for which ample
ADVERTISEMENT.
IT may greatly conduce to the advancement of useful knowledge, if the learned Societies established in Europe, will transmit tothe Secre- tary of the Society in Bengal a Collection ~ of short and precise Queries on every branch of Asiatic History, Natural and Civil, on the Phi- losophy, Mathematics, Antiquities, and Polite Literature of 4s7a, and on Eastern Arts, both
~ liberal and mechanic; since it is hoped that accurate Answers may in due time be procured to any Questions that can be proposed on those - subjects ; which must in all events be curious and interesting, and may prove, in the highest degree, Denese! to mankind.
\
ghd role sie Matin: bod
ake 1
bs | i - - Lor]
.
tO. SHORE SD
-
i.
THE FOURTH
Roe Bhatia SARY DISCOURSE, DELIVERED 15 FEBRUARY, 1787,
BY THE PRESIDENT.
Gentlemen,
| a the honour last year of opening to you my intention to discourse at our annual meetings on the ve principal nations who have peopled the continent and islands of Asia, so as to trace, by an historical and. philological analysis, the number of ‘ancient stems from which those five branches have severally sprung, and the central region from which they appear to have proceeded; you may, therefore, expect that, having submitted to your consideration a few general. narks on the old inhabitants of India, I should now offer my sentiments on some other nation, who, from a similarity of anguage, religion, arts, and manners, may be supposed to have had an early con- -néction with the Amdus; but, since we ~find some Asiatic nations totally dissimilar to them in all or most of those parti€ulars, and since the difference. will strike you more forcibly by an immediate and close comparison, I design at present to give a short ac- count of a wonderful people, who seem in every respect so strongly contrasted: to the original natives of this country, that they must have been for clit a distinct.and separate race
Vou. Ik. «
2 THE FOURTH. DISCOURSE ?
For the purpose of these discourses I discovered Jn- dia on its largest scale, describing it as lying between Perfia and China, Tartary and Java; and, for'the same purpose, [ now apply the name of Arabia, as the Arabian geographers often apply it,- to that exten- five peninsula» which the Red Sea divides from Africa, the great Assyrian river from Iran, and of which the Erythrean Sea washes the base ; without ex- cluding any part of -its western side, which would be completely maritime, if no isthmus intervened be- tween the Mediterranean and the Sea of Kolzom: that country am short I call Arabia, in which the Arabic language and letters, or such as have a near affinity to them, have been immemorially current.
Arabia, thus divided from India by a vast ocean, or at least by a broad bay, could hardly have been connected in any degree with this country, until na- vigation and commerce had been considerably im- proved; yet, as the Hindus and the people of Yemen were both commercial nations in a very early age, they were probably the first instruments of conveying to the western world the gold, ivory, and perfumes of India, as well as the fragrant wood, called A/luwwa in Arabic, and Aguru in Sanscrit, which grows in the greatest perfection in Anam, or Cochinchina. It is possible too that a part of the Arabian idolatry might have been derived from the same source with that of the Afimdus ; but such an intercourse may be considered as partial and accidental only; nor am I more convinced than J was fifteen years ago, when I took the liberty to animadvert on a passage in the His- tory. of Prince Kantemir, that the Turks have any just reason for holding the coast of Yemen to be a part of India, and calling its inhabitants Yellow Indians.
The Arabs have never been entirely subdued, nor shas any impression been made on them,” except on
ON THE ARABS. \3
their borders; where, indeed, the Phenicians, Per- sians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, and, in modern times, the Othman Tartars, haye severally acquired settlements; but, with these exceptions, the na- tives of Hejax and Yemen’ have preserved for ages the sole dominion of their deserts and pastures, their mountains and fertile valleys: thus apart from the rest of mankind, this extraordinary people have re- tained their primitive manners and language, features and character, as long and as remarkably as the Hin- dus themselves. All the genuine drabs of Syria whom I knew in Europe, tliose of Yemen whom | saw in the isle of Hinzuan, whither many had come from Maskat for the purpose of trade, and those of Hejazx, whom I have met in Benga/, form a striking contrast to the Hindu inhabitants of those provinces: their eyes are full of vivacity, their speech voluble and articulate, their deportment-manly and dignified, their apprehension quick, their minds always present and attentive, with a spirit of independence appearing in the countenances even of the lowest among them. Men will always differ in their ideas of civilization, each measuring it by the habits and prejudices of his own country ; but, if courtesy and urbanity, a love of poetry and elo- quence, and the practice of exalted virtues be a juster measure of perfect society, we have certain proof that the people’of radia, both on plains and in cities, in republican and monarchical states, were eminently ci- vilized for many ages before their conquest of Perfia.
It is deplorable, that the ancient history of this majestic race should be as little known in detail before the time of Diu Yezen, as that of the Hindus before Vicramaditya ; for, although the vast historical work of Alnuwairi, and the Murujuldhahab or Golden Mea- dows of Almasuudi, contain chapters on the kings of Himyar, Ghasan, and Hirah, with lists of them and sketches Of their several reigns ; and although genea-
oa | :
4 THE FOURTH DISCOURSE:
logical tables, from which chronology might be better ascertained, are prefixed to many compositions of the old Arabian Poets, yet most manuscripts are so incorrect, and so many-contradictions are found in the best of them, that we can scarce Jean upon tra- dition with security, and must have recourse to the same media for investigating the history of the Arabs that I before adopted in regard to that of the Judians; namely, their Janguage, letters, and religion, their an- " Client monuments, and the certain remains of their arts; on-each of which heads I shall touch very concisely, having premised§that my observations will in general be confined to the state of 4rabia before that singular revolution at the beginning-of the seventh century, the effects of which we feel at this day from the Pyre- wean Mountains and the Danube, to the ‘farthest parts of the Indian Empire, and even to the Eastern Islands. : oy} I. For the knowledge which any European who pleases may attain of the Arabian language, we are principally indebted to the university of Leyden; for, though several Italians have assiduously laboured in the same wide field, yet the fruit of their labours has been rendered almost useless by more commodious and more accurate works printed in Holland; and, though Pocock certainly accomplished much, and was able to accomplish any thing, yet the acudemical ease which he enjoyed, and his theological pursuits, in- duced him to leave unfinished the valuable work of Maidani which he had prepared for publication; nor, even if that’ mine of Arabian philology had seen the light, would it have borne any comparison with the fifty dissertations of Hariri, which*the first 4/- bert Schultens translated and explained, though he ‘sent abroad but few of them, and has left his worthy grandson, from whom perhaps Maidani also may be expected, the honour of publishing the rest: but the palm of glory in‘ this branch of litera-
ON THE ARABS, 5
ture is due to Golivs, whose works are equally pro- found and elegant; so perspicuous in method, that they may always be consulted without fatigue, and read without languor, yet so abundant in matter, that any man who shall begin with his noble edition of the Grammar compiled by his master Erpenius, and proceed with the help of his incomparable dictionary, to\ftudy his Hiftory of Tasmur by fbni Arabshah, and shall make himself complete mafter of that sublime work, will understand the learned 4rabic better than the deepest scholar at Constantinople or at Mecca. The Arabic language, therefore, is almoit wholly. in our power; and, as it is unqueftionably one of the moft ancient in the world, so it yields to none ever spoken by mortals in the number of its words and the precision of its phrases; Lut it is equally true and wonderful, that it bears not the least resemblance, either in words or the structure of them, to the Szn- serit, or great parent of the Jndian dialects; of which dissimilarity I shall mention two remarkable instan- ces: the Sanscrit, like the Greek, Persian, and Ger- man, delights in compounds, but in a much higher degree, and indeed to such an excess, that I could produce words of more than twenty syllables, not formed ludicrously, like that by which the buffoon in Aristophanes describes a feast, but with perfect seri- - ousness, onthe most solemn occasions, and in the most elegant works ; while the 4radic, on the other hand, and all its sister dialects, ahhor the composition of words, and invariably express very complex ideas by circumlocution ; so that if a compound word be found in any genuine language of the Arabian pen- insula (zenmerdah for instance, which occurs in the Hamasah) it may at once be pronounced an exotic; * Again:. It is the genius of the Swnscrit, and other languages of the same stock, that the roots of verbs be almost universally diliteral, so that five-anid- twenty hundred such 1305 might be formed by the > 3
Z
6 THE FOURTH DISCOURSE:
composition of the f#fty Indian letters; but the Arabic roots are as universally ¢ri/iteral, so that the compo- sition of the ¢wenty-eight Arabian \etters would give near fwo-and-twenty thousand elements of the language: and this will demonstrate the surprising extent of it 5 for, although great numbers of its roots are confessed- ly lost, and some, perhaps, were never in use; yet, if. we suppose ten thousand of them (without reck- oning guadriliterals) to exist, and each of them to admit only five variations, one with another, in form- ing derivative nouns, even then a perfect Arabic dic- tionary ought to contain fifty thousand words, each of which may'receive a multitude of changes by the tules of grammar. The derivatives in Sanscrit are considerably more numerous: but a farther compa- rison between the two languages is here unnecessary, since, in whatever light we view them, they seem totally distinct, and must have been invented by two different races of men; nor do I recollect a single word in common between them, except Suri, the plural of Siraj, meaning both a damp and the sum; the Sanscrit mame of which is, in Bengal, pronounced Surja; and even this resemblance may be purely ac- cidental. We may easily believe with the Aimdus, that not even Indra himself, and his heavenly bands, much less any mortal, ever comprehended in his mind such an ocean of words'as thetr sacred language con- tains; and with the Arahs, that no man uninspired was ever a compicte master of Arabic: in fact, no person, | believe, now living in Europe or Asia, can read without study an hundred couplets together, in any collection of ancient Arabian poems; and we are told, that the great author of the Kamus learned by accident from the mouth ofa child, in a village of Arabia, the meaning of three words, which he had long sought in vain from grammarians, and from books, of the highest reputation. It is by approxi- mation alone that a knowledge of these two venerable Janguages can be acquired ; and, with moderate atten-
: -
OW THE ARABS. 4
tion, enough of them may be known to delight and instruct us in an infinite degree. I conclude this head with remarking, that the nature of the Ethiopic dia~ lect seems to prove an early establishment of the Arabs in part of Ethiopia, from which they were afterwards expelled, and attacked even in their own country by the dyssinians, who: had -been invited over as auxiliaries against the tyrant of Yemen about a century before the birth of Muhammed.
Of the characters in which the old compositions of. Arabia were written, we know but little, except that the Koran originally appeared in those of Cufah, from which the modern Arabian letters, with all their ele- gant variations, were derived, and which unquestionably had a common origin with the Hebrew or Chaldaie ; but, as to the Aimyaric letters, or those which we see mentioned by the name of /musnad, we are still in total darkness; the traveller Mebuhr having been unfortunately prevented from visiting some ancient monuments in Yemen, which are said to have inscrip- tions on them. If those letters bear a strong resem- blance to the Nagari, and if a story current in India be true, that some Aimdu merchants heard the Sans- crit language spoken in drabia the Happy, we might be confirmed in our opinion that an intercourse for- merly subsisted between the two nations of opposite coasts,;—but should have no reason to believe that they sprang from the same immediate stock. The first syllable of Hamyar, as many Europeans write it, might perhaps induce an etymologist to derive the Arabs of Yemen from the great ancestor of the’ Jz- dians; bat we must observe, that Himyar is the proper appellation of those .4rabs; and many rea- sons concur to prove that the word is purely drabic. The similarity of some proper names on the borders of India to those of Arabia, as the river Arabius, a place’ ‘called draba, 2 ae named Aribes or Ara-
4
g THE FOURTH DISCOURSE:
ies, and another called Sabai, is indeed remarkable, and may hereafter furnish me with observations of
some Importance, but not at all inconsistent with my present ideas.
II. Itis generally asserted that the old religion of the 4rabs was entirely Sabiam; but I can offer so little, accurate information concernjng the Sabian faith, or even the meaning of the word, that I dare not yet speak on the subject with confidence. This at least is Certain, that the people of Yemen very soon fell into the commun, but fatal, error of adoring the sun and the firmament ; for even the Aird in descent from Yoktan, who was consequently as old as Nahor, took the surname of dbdushams, or Servant of the Sun; and his family, we are assured, paid particular ho- nours to that luminary: other tribes worshipped the planets. and fixed stars; but the religion of the poets. at least, seems to have ae pure Theism ; and this we know with certainty, because we have 4rabian verses of unsuspected antiquity, which contain. pious and elevated sentiments on the goodness and. justice, the power and omnipresence, of Allah, or the God. If an Inscription, said to have been found on marble in Yemen, be authentic, the ancient inhabitants of that country preserved the religion of Eder, and protessed . a belief in miracles and a futur é state.
We are also told, that a strong resemblance may be found between the religions - of the pagan Arabs and the Hindus; but, though this. may be true, yet an agreement. in. worshipping the sun and stars will not prove an affinity between the two nations: the powers of God, represented as female deities, the adoration of stoves, and the name of the idel Wudd, may lead us indeed to suspect that some of the Hindu superstitions had found their way into Arabia; and, though we have no traces in Arabiay
' ON THE ARABS. “9
history of such a conqueror or legislator as the great Sesac, who is said to have raised pillars in Yemen as well as at the mouth of the Ganges, yet, since we know that Saeya isatitle of Buddha, whom some sup- pose to be Woden, since Buddha was not a native of India, and since the age of Sesac perfectly agrees with that of Sacya, we may form a plausible conjecture that they were in fact the same person who travelled eastward from E¢hiopia, either as a warrior or as a law- giver, about a thousand years before Christ, and whose rites we now see extended as far as the country of Nison, or, as the Chinese call it, Japuen, both words - signifying the Rising Sun. Sacya may be derived from a word meaning power, or from another denoting ve- getable food ; so that this epithet will not determine whether he was a hero or a philosopher; but the title Buddha or wise, may induce us to believe that he was rather a benefactor than a destroyer of his species: if his religion, however, was really introduced into any part of Arabia, it could not have been general in that country ; and we may safely pronounce, that before the Mohammedan revolution, the noble and learned Arabs were Theists, but that a stupid idolatry pre- vailed amorg the lower orders of the people.
I find no trace among them, till theiremigration, of any philosophy but ethics; and even their system of morals, generous and enlarged as it seems to have been in the minds of a few illustrious-chieftains, was on the whole miserably depraved for a century at least before Muhammed. The distinguishing virtues which they boasted of inculcating and practising, were a cOn- tempt of riches and even of death; but, in the age of the Sever Poets, their liberality had deviated into mad profusion, their courage into ferocity, and their patience into an obstinate'spirit of encountering fruit- Jess dangers; but I forbear to expatiate on the man- nets of the -drabs in that age, because the poems, en-
io THE FOURTH DISCOURSE:
titled A/moallakat, which have appeared in our own language, exhibit an exact picture of their virtues and their vices, their wisdom and their folly; and show what may be constantly expected from men of open hearts and boiling passions, with no law to con- trol, and little religion to restrain them, |
III. Few monuments of antiquity are preserved in Arabia, and of those few the best accounts are very uncertain; but we are assured that inscriptions on rocks and mountains are still seen in various parts of the peninsula; which, if they are in any known lan- guage, and if correct copies of them can be procured, may be decyphered by easy and infallible rules.
The first Albert Schultens has preserved in his An+ cient Memorials of radia, the most pleasing of all his works, two little poems in an elegiac strain, which are said to have been found, about the middle of the seventh century, on some fragments of ruined edifices in Hadramut, near Aden, and are supposed. to be ofan indefinite, but very remote age. It may. naturally be asked,—In what characters were they written? Who decyphered them ? Why were not the original letters preserved in the book where the verses are cited? What became of the marbles which ddurrahman, then governor of: Yemen, most probably sent to the Khalifah at Bagdad? If they be genuine, they prove the people of Yemen.to have been * herdsmen and warriors, inhabiting a fertile and well-watered country ‘ full of game, and near a fine sea abounding with fish, ¢ under a monarchical government, and dressed in green silk, or vests of needlework,’ either of their own manufacture or:imported from Jndia. The mea- sure of these verses is perfectly regular, and the dia- lect, undistinguishable, at least. by me, from that of Kuraish; so that, if the Arabian writers were much . addicted to literary impostures, I should strongly sus-
ON THE ARABS, Tt
pect them to be modern compositions on the instabis lity of human greatness, and the consequences of ir- religion, illustrated by the example of the Hymyarie princes; and the same may be suspected of the first poem quoted by Svéu/tens, which he ascribes to an Arab in the age of Solomon.
The supposed houses of the people called Thamud, are also still to be seen in excavations of rocks; and, in the time of Tabrizi the Grammarian, a castle was extant in Yemen which bore the name of Aladbat, an old bard and warrior, who first, we are told, formed his army, thence called a/khamis, in five parts, by which arrangement he defeated the troops of atiripartt in an Se ecition against Sanaa. |
Of pillars erected by Sesac, after his invasion of Yemen, we find no inention in Arabian histories ; and, perhaps, the story has no more foundation than ano- ther told by the Greeks and adopted by New#on, that the Arabs worshipped Urania, and even Bacchus by name, which, they say, means great in Arabic; but. where they found such a word, we cannot discover : it is true, that Beccah signifies a great and tumultuous crowd, and, in this sense, is one name of the sacred city commonly called Meccah.
The Cabah, or quadrangular edifice at Meccah, is indisputably so ancient, that its original use and the name of its builder are lost in a cloud of idle tradi- tions. An drab told me gravely, that it was raised by Abraham, who, as J assured him, was never there : others ascribe it, with more probability, to Ismail, or one of his icpenadiets descendants ; but whether it was built as a place of divine worship, as a fortress, as a sepulchre, or as a monument of the treaty between the old possessors of Arabia and the sons of Kidar, anti- quaries may dispute, but no mortal can determine.
T2 _ THE FOURTH DISCOURSE?
It is thought by Re/and to have been the maxsion of some ancient patriarch, and revered on:that account by
his posterity; but the room 1n which we now are as-
sembled, would contain the whole Arabian edifice ;
and, if it were large enough for the dwelling-house of a patriarchal family, it would seem ill adapted to the
pastoral manners of the Kedarites. A Persian author
insists, that the true name of Mecczh is Mahcadah, or
the Temple of the Moon; but, although we may smile
at his etymology, we cannot but think it probable that
the Cabah was originally designed for religious pur- poses. Three couplets are cited in an Arabic history
of this building, which, from their extreme simpli-- city, have less appearance of imposture than other
verses of the same kind: they are ascribed to Asad,
a Tobba, or king by succession, who is generally allowed
to have reigned in Yemen anhundred and twenty-eight
years before Christ’s birth, and they commemorate,
without any poetical imagery, the magnificence of the
prince in covering the holy temple with stripped cloth
and fine linen, and in making keys for tts gate’ This
temple, however, the sanctity of which was restored
by Muhammed, had been strangely profaned at the time
of his birth, when it was usual to decorate its walls
with poems on all subjects, and often on the triumphs
of Arabian gallantry and the praises of Grecian wine, which the merchants of Syria brought for sale into the
deserts.
From the want of materialson the subject of Arabian antiquity, we find it very difficult to fix the chronolo- gy of the Jsmailites'with accuracy beyond the time of ‘Adnan, from whom ‘the imposture was descended in the twenty-first deeree ; and, although we have gene- alogies of Alkamah and other Himyaric bards as high - as the thirtieth degree, or for a period of nine hundred years at least, yet we can hardly depend on them so far, as to establish a complete chronological system.
a
ON THE! ARABS. 13 By reasoning downwards, however, we may ascertain some points of. considerable importance. The uni- versal tradition of Yemen is, that Yoktan, the son of Eber, first settled his family in that country ; which settlement, by the computation admitted in Europe, must have been above three thousand six hundred years ago, and nearly at the time when the Hindus, under the conduct of Rama, were subduing the first inhabit- ants of these regions, and extending the Indian em- pire from Ayodhya, or dudh, as far as the isle of Sinhal, or Silan. According to this calculation, Nuuman, king of Yemen, in the ninth generation from Eber, was con- temporary with Joseph ; and, if a verse composed by that prince, and quoted by .4/u/feda, was really pre- served, as it might easily have been, by oral tradition, it proves the great antiquity of the Arabian language and metre. ‘This isa literal version of the couplet : ¢ When thou, who art in power, conductest affairs with ‘ courtesy, thou attainest the high honours of those ‘ who are most exalted, and whose mandates are “ obeyed.’ - Welare told that, from an elegant verb in this distich, the royal poet acquired the surname of Almuaaser, or the Courteous. Now the reasons for believing this verse genuine are its brevity, which made / at easy to be remembered, and the good sense com- prized in it, which made it become proverbial; to which we may add, that the dialect is apparently old, and differs in three words from the idiom of Hejaz. . The reasons for doubting are, that sentences and verses of indefinite antiquity are sometimes ascribed by the © Arabs to particular persons of eminence; and they even go so far as to cite a pathetic elegy of Adam himself on the death of 4Je/, but in veiy good Arabic and correct measure. Such are the doubts which necessarily must arise on such a subject ; -yet we’ have no need of ancient monuments or traditions to prove all that our analysis requires, namely that the Arvbs of Hejaz and Yemen sprang from a stock entirely differ-
14 THE FOURTH DISCOURSE:
ent from that of the Hindus, and that their first esta- blishments in the respective countries where we now find them, were nearly coeval.
I cannot finish this article without observing, that, when the King of Denmark’s ministers instructed the Danish travellers to collect historical books in Arabic, but not to busy themselves with procuring Arabian poems, they certainly were ignorant that the only mo- numents of old rabian history are collections of poe- tical pieces and the commentaries on them ; that all memorable transactions in Arabia were recorded in verse; and that more certain facts may be known by reading the Hamasah, the Diwan of Hudhail, and the valuable work of Obaidullah, than by turning over a hundred volumes in prose, unless indeed those poems are cited by the historians as their authorities.
>. 1V. The manners of the Hejaxi Arabs, which have continued, we know, from the time of So/omon to the present age, were by no means favourable to the cul- tivation of arfs; and, as to sciences, we have no rea~ son to believe that they were acquainted with any ; for the mere amusement of giving names to stars, which. were useful to them in their pastoral or preda- tory rambles through the deserts, and in their obser- vations on the weather, can hardly be considered as a material part of astronomy. The only arts in whicb they pretended to excellence (I except horsemanship and military accomplishments) were poetry and rheto- ric. That we have none of their compositions in prose before the Koran, may be ascribec, perhaps, to the little skill which they seem to have had in writing, to their, predilection in favour of poetical measure, and to the facility: with which verses are committed ‘to memory ;. but all their stories prove, that they were eloquent in a high degree, and possessed wonderful powers of speaking, without preparation in flowing.
ON THE ARABS, 15
and forcible periods. I have never been able to dis- cover what was meant by their books called Rawa- sim; but suppose that they were collections of their common or customary law. Writing was so little practised among them, that their old poems, which are now accessible to. us, may almost be considered as originally unwritten ; and | am inclined to think that Samuel Johnson’s reasoning on the extreme imperfec- tion of unwritten languages, was too general ; since a language that 1s only spoken, may nevertheless be highly polished by a people who, like the ancient Arabs, make the improvement of their idiom a na- tional concern, appoint solemn assemblies for the pur- pose of displaying their poetical talents, and hold it a duty to exercise their children in getting by heart their most approved compositions.
The people of Yemen had possibly more mechanical arts, and, perhaps, more science ; but, although their ports must have been the emporia of considerable commerce between Egypt and India, or part of Persia, yet we have no certain proofs of their proficiency in navigation or even in manufactures. That the Arabs ofthe Desert had musical instruments, and names for the different notes, and that they were greatly delighted with melody, we know from themselves; but their lutes and pipes were probably very simple, and their music, I suspect, was litle more than a natural and tuneful recitation of their elegiac verses and love- songs. The singular property of their language, in shunning compound words, may be urged, according to Bacon’s idea, asa proof that they had made no progress in arts, ‘ which require,’ says he, <a variety * of combinations to express the complex notions aris- ‘ ing from them ;’ but the singularity may perhaps be imputed wholly to the genius of the language, and the taste of those who spoke it, since the old Germans who knew no art, appear to have delighted in com=
«
16 THE FOURTH DISCOURSE %
pound words, which poetry and oratory, one would conceive, might require as much as any meaner art whatsoever. 3
So great, on the whole, was the strength of parts or capacity, either natugal or acquired from habit, for which the drabs were ever distinguished, that we can- not be surprised when we see that blaze of genius which they displayed, as far as their arms extended, when they burst, like their own dyke of drim, through their ancient limits, and spread, like an inundation, over the great empire of Jran. That a race of Taxis, or Coursers, as the Persians call them, * who drank ‘ the milk of camels and fed on lizards, should enter- ‘ tain a thought of subduing the kingdom of Feridun,’ was considered by the General of Yesdegird’s army as the strongest instance of fortune’s levity and muta- bility; but Firdausi, a complete master of Asiatic manners, and singularly impartial, representsthe_drabs, even in the age of Feridun, as ¢ disclaiming any kind * of dependence on that monarch, exulting in their ‘liberty, delighting in eloquence, acts of liberality, ‘ and martial achievements, and thus making the whole ‘ earth,’ says the poet, ‘ om as wine with the blood ¢ of their foes, and the air like a forest of canes with ‘ their tall spears.’ With such.a character they were likely to conquer any country that they could invade;
and, if 4/exander had invaded their dominions, they
would unquestionably have made an obstinate, and probably a successful resistance.
But I have detained you too long, gentlemen, with a nation who have ever been my favourites, and hope at Our neXt anniversary meeting to travel with you over a part of Asia which exhibits a race.of men dis- tinct both from the Hindas and from the Arabs. In the mean time, it shall be my care to superintend the publication of your transactions; in which if thelearned
OF THE ARABS. 17
in Europe have not raised their expectations too high, they will not, I believe, be disappointed: my own imperfect essays I always except; but, though my other engagements have prevented my attendance on your society for the greatest part of Jast year, and I have set an example of that freedom from restraint, without which no society can flourish; yet, as my few hours of leisure will now be devoted to Sanscrit literature, I cannot but hope, though my chief object be a knowledge of Hindu law, to make some disco- very in other sciences, which I shall impart with hu- mility, and which you will, I doubt not, receive with indulgence.
-¥
} Af # \ ih ry wi) Fe mei ye bi ia ai “hy rene a
on bg fi rh ay Vy ea 1) Wr otitis ce in abe HOR OD
Ws Wi aya oO ab inti’ oy ree ate tse
! ee histo > ick Gain bth <a “tit ea Het iad Deve eal at Gavin er ' Neo ora aya) ft he sem buy ate tae OnE’ Bro hs Linenhys stented Vee a
med
THE! DPR: ANNIVERSARY DISCOURSE,
DELIVERED 21 FEBRUARY, 1788,
BX it de PR SLD EN 7.
At the close of my last address to you, Gentlemen, I declared my design of introducing to your no- tice a people of Asa, who seemed as different in moft respects from the Hindus and Arabs as those two na- ‘ tions had been shown to differ from each other; I mean the people whom we call Yartars: but I en- ter with extreme diffidence on my present subject, be- cause I have little knowledge of the Yurtarean dia- Jects; and the gross errors of European writers on ~ Asiatic \iterature, have long convinced me that no sa- ‘tisfactory account can be. given of any nation with whose language we are not perfectly acquainted. Such evidence, however, as I have procured by attentive reading and scrupulous enquiries, I will now lay be- fore you ;. interspersing such remarks as I could not but make on that evidence, and submitting the whole a st impartial decision.
Conformably to the method bellire a lied in aide: scribing Arabia and India,i consider Tartary also, for the purpose of this discourse, on its most extensive scale; and request your attention whilst I trace the largest boundaries that are assignable to it, Conceive a line drawn fromthe mouth of the Oly to that of the
ie
20 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE ¢
Dneiper, and, bringing it back eastward across the Euxine, so as to include the peninsula of Kvim, extend it along the foot of Caucasus, by the rivers Cur and Aras, tothe Caspian Lake, from the opposite shore of which follow the course of the Jahan, and the chain of Caucasean hills, as far as those of /maus; whence continue the line beyond the Chinese wall to the White Mountain and the country of Yerso; skirting the bor- ders of Persia, India, China, Corea, bat including part of Russia, with all the districts which fie betweer the Glacial Sea and that of Japan. M. de Guignes,
whose great work on the Hfuns abounds more im solid ~
learning than in rhetorical ornaments, presents us, however, with a magnificent image of this wide re- gion; describing it as a sttipendous edifice, the beams and pillars of which are many ranges of lofty hills, and the dome one prodigious mountain, to which the Chinese give the epithet of Celestial, with a considera~ ble number of broad rivers flowing down its sides. If the mansion be so amazingly sublime, the land around it is proportionably extended, but more won-
derfully diversified; for some parts of it are encrusted -
with ice, others parched with inflamed airand covered with a Kind of lava: here we meet with immense tracts of sandy deserts, and forests almost impenetra- ble; there, with gardens, groves, and: meadows, per- fumed with musk, watered by numberless rivulets, and abounding in fruits and flowers; and, from east to west, lie many considerable provinces, which appear as valleys in comparison of the hills towering aboye thei, but in truth are the flat summits of the highest mountains in ee eh or at least the highest in Asia. Near one fourth
is in the same charming climate with Greece, Jtaly, and Provence; and another fourth in that of Exgland, Germany, ‘and the northern parts of France; but the
Typerborean countries can Sha few beauties to re~
‘commend them, at least in” the present state of the
latitude of this extraordinary region ©
~ ay
ON THE TARTARS. 21
earth’s temperature. To the south, on the frontiers of Tran are the beautiful vales of Soghd, with the cele- brated cities of Samarkand and Bokhara ; on those of Tibet are the territories of Cashghar, Khoten, Chegil, and Khata, all famed for perfumes, and for the beauty of their inhabitants; and on those of China lies the country of Chm, anciently a powerful kingdom; which name, like that of Khaia, has in modern times been given to the whole Chinese empire, where such an ap- pellation would be thought an insult. We must not omit the fine territory of Zuncxt, which was known to the Greeks by the name of Serica, and considered by them, as the farthest eastern extremity of the habitable
globe.
‘Scythia seems to be the general name which.the an- cient Europeans gave to as much as they knew of the country thus bounded and described; but whether that word be derived, as P/imy seems to intimate, from Sacai, a people known by.a similar name to. the Greeks and Persians, ot, as Bryant imagines, from Cuzhia, or,
as Colonel Vallancey believes, “from. words denoting
navigation, or, as it might have been supposed, from _ a Greek root implying wrath and ferocity, this at least
is certain, that, as dudia, China, Persia, Japan, are not
appellations of those countries in the languages of the nations who inhabit them, so neither Scythia nor Tar-
tary are names by which the inhabitants of the coun-
try now under our consideration, have ever distin-~ guished themselves. .Zusgristan is, indeed, a word used by the Persians for the south-western part. of Scythia, where the musk-deer is said to be common ; and the name Tusar is by some considered as that of a particular tribe; by others, as that of a smail river
only; while Turan, as opposed to, Jran,,seems. to
mean the ancient dominion of 4frasiah to the north
and east of the nll There is nothing more idle
than a debate concer names, which, after all, are
°o
2
22 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE:
of little consequence when our ideas are distinct with-" out them. Having given, therefore, a correct notion of the country which I proposed to examine, I shall not scruple to call it by the general name of Turtary 5 though I am conscious of using a term equally impro- _ per in the pronunciation and the application of it.”
Tartary, then, which contained, according to Pliny, an innumerable multitude of nations, by whom the rest of Asia and all Europe has in different ages been over- run, is denominated, as various images have presented themselves to various fancies, the great hive of the northern swarms, the nursery of irresistible legions, and, by stronger metaphor, the fowrdery of the human race 5 but Mi. Bailly, a wonderfully ingenious man and a, very lively writer, seems first to have considered it as the cradle of our species, and to haye supported an opinion that the whole ancient world was enlightened by sciences brought from the most northern parts of Scythia, particularly from the banks of the Jenisea, or from the Hyperborcan regions. All the fables of old. Greece, Italy, Persia, India, he derives from the north; and it must be owned, that he maintains his paradox | with acuteness and learning. Great learning and great acuteness, together with the charms of a most engaging style, were indced necessary to render even tolerable a system which ‘places an earthly paradise, the gardens of Hesperus, the. islands of the Macares, the groves of Elysium, if not of Eden, the heaven of Indra, the Peristan, or fairy-land of the Per- sian poets, with its city of diamonds and _ its country of Shadcam, so named fiom Pleasure and Love, not in any one climate which the common sense of mankind considers as the seat of de- lights, but beyond the mouth of the Ody, in the Frozen Sea, ina region equalled only by that where the wild imagination of Dante Jed him to fix the worst of cfiminals in a state’ of punishment after
/
ON THE TARTARS, 23 death, and of which he could not, he says, even think without shivering. A very curious passage in a tract of Plutarch on the figure in the moon's orb, naturally induced M. Bailly to ; place Ogygia in the north; and he concludes that island, as others have concluded rather fallaciously, to be the Atlantis of Plato; but is at a loss to determine whether it was Iceland or Greenland, Spitsbergen or New Zembla, Among so many charms it was difficult, indeed, to give a pre- ference ; but our philosopher, though as much per- plexed by an option of beauties as the shepherd of ids, seems on the whole to think Zemb/a the most worthy of the golden fruit ; because it is indisputably an island, and lies opposite toa gulph near a conti- nent, from which a great number of rivers descend
- into the ocean. He appears equally distressed among
five nations, real and imaginary, to fix upon that which the Greeks named -4f/antes; and his conclusion in both cases must remind us of the showman at E/on, who, having pointed out in his box all the crowned heads of the world, and being asked by the school- boys who looked through the glass, which was the Emperor, which was the Pope, which the Sultan, and which the Great Mogul, answered eagerly, * which you please, young gentlemen, which you please.’ His letters, however, to Voltaire, in which he unfolds his new systera to his friend, whom he had not been able to convince, are by no means to be derided ; and his general proposition, that arts and sciences had their source in Tartary, deserves a longer examination than can be given to it inthis discourse. 1 shall, neverthe- less, with your permission, shortly discuss. the ques- tion under the several heads, that will present them- selves in order.
Although we ‘may naturally suppose that the numberless communities of Tartars, some of whom are established in great cities, and some encamped
| ae, mit
Ye THE FIFTH DISCOURSE :
on plains in ambulatory mansions, which they remove from pasture to pasture, must be as different in their features as in their dialects; yet, among those who have not emigrated into another country, and mixed with another pase, we may discern a famil -likeness, especially in their eyes and countenance, and in that configuration of lineaments which we generally call a Tartar face ; ; but, without making anxious’enquiries, whether all the inhabitants of the vast region before described have similar features, we inay conclude from those whom we have seen, and from the original por- traits of Timur and his descendants, that the Turtars in general differ wholly in complexion and counte- nance from the Hindus and from the Arabs: an ob- servation which tends, in some degree, to confirm the account given by modern Tartars ‘themselves of their descent from a common ancestor. Unhappily, their lineage cannot be proved by authentic pedigrees, or historical monuments; for all their writings extant, even those in the Adogu/ dialect, are long subsequent to _ the time of Muhammed ; nor is it possible to distinguish their genuine traditions from those of the Arabs, whose teligious opinions they-have in general adopted. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Khwajah Rashid, surnamed Fadlullah, anative of Kazvin, com- piled his account ‘of the: Tartars.and Mongals from the papers of one Pulad, whom the great grands Holacu had sent into Tutaristan for the sole pur
of collecting historical information; and the com- mission itself shows: how little the Tartarian’ princes really knew of their own origin.” From this work of Rashid, and from other materials, Abul. ghaxi, king of Khwaresm, composed in the Mo- gul language his Genealogical History, which, hav- img been purchased from a merchant of Bokhara by some Swedish officers, prisoners of war in Siberia, has found its way into several European tongues: it contains much valuable matter, but, like
~ z)
ON THE TARTARS. 25
all Muhammeda 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- eda 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, Chin, Latar, and Mongal, among the sons of Yafet. The genuine tradi- tional history of the Zartars, in all the books that I have inspected, seems to begin with Oghuss, ; 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 1164, and with whose reign their historical period commences. it is rather surprising that Mr. Bai//y, who makes fre- quent ‘appeals to etymological arguments, has not de- rived Ogyges from Oghuz, and Atlas from Altai, or the Golden Mountain of Pantury ; 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 Jearned labours of M. de Guignes, aid the Fathers Visdelou, Demailla, and Gaubil, Who have
aade an incomparable use of their Chinese literature, we! ibit probable accounts of the Yurtars from a_ “very edrly age; yet the old historians’ of China were not only foreign, but generally hostile to them, and for both those reasons, either through igno- rance or malignity, may be suspected of misrepre- senting: their transactions: if they speak truth, the ancient history of the Yurtars 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
mo. . y
26 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE :
the occasion called for it ; and will barely observe, that the first king of the Hywmnus, or Huns, began his reign, according to Visdelou, about. three thousand five hundred and sixty years ago, not long after the time fixed in my former discourses for the first regu- lar establishments of the Himdus and Arabs in their several countries. PER NIN cece
. ert . oy gta I. Our first enquiry concerning the /anguages and letters of the Turtars, presents us with a deplorable void, or with a prospect as barren and dreary as that of their deserts. The Zurtars, in general, had.no literature (in this point all authorities appear to con- cur); the Zures had no letters; the Huns, according to Procopius, had not even heard of them ; the magni- ficent Chengiz, whose empire included an area of near eighty square degrees, could find none of his own Mongals, as the best authors inform us, able to write his dispatches; and Twimur, a savage of strong natu- ral parts, and passionately fond of hearing histories read to him, could himself neither write nor read. It is true that Ju Arabshah mentions a set, of cha- racters called Dilberjin, which were used in Khata : “he had seen them,’ he says, ‘ and found them to < consist of forty-one letters, a distinct symbol. bein ‘ appropriated to each long and short, vowel, ani <to each consonant hard or soft, or otherwise ae < jn pronunciation ;’ but Kata was in Southern Ta@r- tary, on the confines of India;,and, from his descrip- tion of the characters there in use, we cannot but suspect them to have been those of Tibet, which are ‘manifestly Indian, bearing a greater resemblance to those of Bengal than to Devanagari. The learned and eloquent drab adds, ‘that the Tartars of Khata < wiite, in the Dilberjin letters, all their tales and ¢ histories, their journals, poems, and miscellanies, < their diplomas, records of state and justice, the laws ¢ of Chengiz, their public me their composi-
ae
s
ON THE TARTARS. 27
‘tions of every species.’ If this be true, the people of Khata must have been a polished, and even a lettered ~ pation; and it may be true, without affecting the
eneral position, that the Zurtars were illiterate 3 3 but Ibnu Arabshah was a professed rhetorician, and it is impossible to read the original passage without full
conviction that his object in writing it was to display his power of words in.a flowing and modulated pe- riod. He says further, that in Jaghatai the people of Oighur, as he calls them, ‘ have a system of fourteen letters only, denominated, from themselves, Oighuri;’ and’ those are the characters which the Mongals are supposed, by most authors, to have borrowed. Abul- ghazi tells us only, that Chengis employed the natives _ of Eighur as excellent penmen; but the Chinese as- _sert, that he was forced to employ them, because he had no writers at all among his natural- born subjects ; and we are assured by many, that Kwb/aikhan ordered letters to be invented for Ins nation by a Tvbetian, whom he rewarded with the dignity of chief Lama, The small number of Eighurz letters might induce us to believe that they were Zend or Pahlavi, which must have been current in that country when it was go- verned by the sons of Feridun; and, if the alphabet ascribed to the Eighurians by M. Des Hautesrayes' be correct, we may safely decide, that in many of its — it resembles both the Zend and the Syriae, with
markable difference in the mode of connecting
eth i but, as we can scarce hope to see a. genuine specimen of them, our doubt must remain in regard to their form and origin. The page exhibited by Hyde as Khatayan writing, is evidently a sort of broken Cujick ; and the fine manuscript at Oxford, from which it was taken, is more probably a Mendean work on some reli- gious subject, than, as he imagined, a code of Tarta- rian laws. That very learned man appears to have made a worse mistake, in giving us for Mongal charac- ters a _ of tired which has the appearance of Japanes , or mutilated Chimese letters.’
23 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE:
If the Turtars in general, as we have every reason to believe, had no written memorials, it cannot be thought wonderful that their /enguages, like those of America, should have been in perpetual fluctuation, and that more than fifty dialects, as Hyde had been credibly informed, should be spoken between Moscow and China, by the many kindred tribes or their seve- ral branches, which are enumerated by dbulghazi. What those dialects are, and whether they really sprang from a common stock, we shall probably learn from Mr. Pallas, and other indefatigable men employed by the Russian court; and_it is fromthe Russians thatwe must expect the most accurate information concerning their Asiatic subjects: { persuade myself that, if their enquiries be judiciously made, and faithfully reported, the result of them will prove that all the languages properly Turtarian, arose from one common source 5 excepting always the jargons of such wanderers or mountaineers as, having long been divided from the main body of the nation, must, ina course of ages, have framed separate idioms for themselves. . The only Tartarian language of which I have any know- ledge, is the Turkish of Constantinople, which is how- ever so copious, that whoever shall know it perfectly, will easily understand, as we are assured by intelligent authors, the dialects of Tutaristan; and we may col- lect from Abulghazi, that he would find little i culty in the Ca/mac and the Mogu/. 1 will not offend your ears by a dry catalogue of similar words in those different languages; but a careful investigation has convinced me that, as the Indian and Arabian tongues are severally descended from a common parent, so those of Vartary might be traced to one ancient stem essentially differing from the two. others. It appears, indeed, from a story told by bu/ghaxi, that the Virats and the Mongals could not understand each other; but no more can the Danes and the English, yet their dialects, beyond a “-— are branches of
*
ON THE TARTARS. | 29
the same Gothic tree. The dialect of the Mogu/s, in which some histories of Timur and his descendants were originally composed, is called in Jndia, where a learned native set me right when I used another word, Turci; not that itis precisely the same with the 7urk- ish of the Othmanlus, but the two idioms differ, per- haps, less than Swedish and German, or Spanish and Portuguese, and certainly less than Welsh and Irish, In hope of ascertaining this point, I have long search-
ed in vain for the original works ascribed to Taimur .
and Baber; but all the Mogu/s with whom I have ‘conversed in this country, resemble the crow in one ‘of their popular fables, who, having long affected to walk like a pheasant, was unable, after all, to acquire the gracefulness of that elegant bird, and in the mean time forgot his own natural gait. They have not learned the dialect of Persia, bu thave wholly forgot- ten that of their ancestors. .A very considerable part of the old Tartarian \anguage, which in Asia would probably have been lost, is happily preserved in Eu- rope; and, if the groundwork of the western Turkish, _ when separated from the Persian and Arabic, with
_ which it is embellished, bea branch of the lost Oghr-
iam tongue, I can assert, with confidence that it has not the least resemblance either to 4rabie or Sanscrit, and must have been invented by a race of men wholly a from the Arabs or Hindus. This fact alone oversets the system of M. Bailly, who. considers the Sanscrit, of which he. gives in'several places a mast erroneous account, as‘ 4 fine monument of his prune- “val Scythians, the preceptors of mankind, and plant- * ers of a sublime philosophy even m India;’ =~ he holds 1t an incontestable truth, that ¢ language whick as dead, supposes a nation which is destroyed; and he ‘seems to think such reasoning perfectly decisive of the question, without having recourse to astronomical! arguments, or. the spirit of ancient institutions. For
my part, I ~ % better proof than that which the f tee a .
‘Ie ‘
<=
30 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE:
lancuage of the Brahmans affords, of an immemorial and total difference between the Savages of the Moun-
' tains,as the old Chinese justly called the Zartars, and
the studious, placid, contemplative inhabitants of © these Indian plains.
Il. The geographical reasoning of M. Bailly. may, perhaps, be thought equally shallow, if not inconsist- ent in some degree with itself. * An adoration of the
- © sun and of fire,’ says he, ‘ must necessarily have .
© arisen ina cold region ; therefore it must have been * foreign to India, Persia, Arabia ; therefore it must ‘ have been derived from Yartary.’ No man, I be» lieve, who has’ travelled in winter through Bahar, or has even passed'a cold season at Calcutta within the tropic, can doubt that the solar warmth is often de- sirable by all, and might have been considered as ado- rable by the ‘ignorant in these climates; or that the return of spring deserves all the salutations which it receives from the Persian and Indian poets; not to. rely on certain historical evidence, that Antarah, a celebrated warrior and bard, actually perished with cold. ona mountain of drabia. To meet, however, . an objection which might naturally enough be made to the voluntary settlement and amazing population of his primitive race, in the icy regions of the north, he takes refuge in the hypothesis of M. Buffon, who ima- gines that our whole globe was at first of a white heat, and has been gradually cooling from’the poles to the equator; so that the Hyperborean countries had once a delightful temperature ; and Siberia itself was even hotter. than the climate of our temperate zones; that is, was in too hot a-climate, by his first proposition, for the primary worship of the sun. That thé tempera- ture of countries has. not sustained a change in the lapse of ages, I will by. no means insist ;\ but we can
o ye . : . hardly reason conclusively from a variation of tempe-
- rature to the cultivation and diffusion of science. If as
many female elephants and tigresses ‘as we now find in
vw
ON THE TARTARS. 3t
Bengal had formerly littered in the Siberian forests, and the young, as the earth cooled, had sought a ge- _ nial warmth in the climate of the south, it would not follow that other savages, who migrated in the same direction, and on the same account, brought religion and philosophy, language and writing, art and science, into the southern latitudes.
We are told by -Abulghazi that the primitive reli- gion of human creatures, or the pure adoration of one Creator, prevailed in Turtary during the first genera- tions of Yafet, but was extinct before the birth of Oghuz, who restored it in his dominions; that, some ages after him, the Monga/s and the Turcs relapsed -Into gross idolatry; but that Chengiz was a Theist, and, in a conversation with the Mukammedan doctors, admitted their arguments for the being and attributes of the Deity to be unanswerable, while he contested the evidence of their prophet’s legation. From old Grecian authorities we learn that the Massagete wor- shipped the sun; and the narrative of an embassy ftom Justin to the Rhakan, or emperor, who then re- sided ina fine vale near the source of the Jrtish, men- tions the Tartarian ceremony of purifying the Roman ambassadors by conducting them between two fres. The Tartars of that age are represented as adorers of the four elements, indiibelievers in an invisible spirit, to whom they sacrificed bulls and rams. Modern travellers relate, that, in the festivals of some Turta- rian tribes, they pour a few drops of a consecrated liquor on the statues of their gods; after which an attendant sprinkles a little of what remains three times toward the south, in honour of fire; toward the west and east, in honour of water and air; and as often toward the north, in honour of the earth, which contained the reliques of their deceased an- cestors. Now all this may. be very trve, without proving a national affinity between the Turtars
32 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE:
and Hindus; for the -drabs adored the planets and the beauties of Nature; the Arabs had carved ima- ges, and made libations on a black stone; the Arabs turned in prayer to different quarters of the hea- vens; yet we know with certainty, that the rads are a distinct race from the Tartars; and we might as well infer that they were the same people, because
they had each their Nomades, or wanderers for pasture; .
and because the Yurcmans, described by Lbnuarab- shah, and by him called Tutars, are, like most Ara- bian tribes, pastoral and warlike, hospitable and generous, wintering and summering on different plains, and rich in herds and flocks, horses and ca- mels: but this agreement in manners proceeds from the similar nature of their several deserts, and their
similar choice of a free rambling life, without evinc- | ing a community of origin, which they could scarce /
have had without preserving some remnant at least of a common language.
Many Lamas, we ate assured, or priests of Buddha, have been found settled in Szberia ; but it can hardly be doubted that the Lamas had travelled thither from Tibet; whence it is more than probable, that the religion of the Bawddhas was imported into South- ern, or Chinese Tartary ; since we know that rolls of Tibetian writing have been brought even from the borders of the Caspian. The complexion of Buddha hunself, which, according to the Hindus, was between white and’ ruddy, would perhaps have convinced M. Bailly, had he known the Jndian tradition, that the last great legislator and god of the east was a Tar- tar; but the Chinese consider him as a native of India ; the Brahmans insist that he was born in a forest near Gaya; and many reasons may lead us to suspect, that his religion was carried from the west and the south, to those eastern and northern coun- tries, in which it prevails. On the whole, we meet
A,
-
iy
ON THE TARTARS. 33
with fev or no traces in Scythia of Indian rites and cn Sea or of that poetical mythology with
ich the Sanscrit poems are decorated ; and we may allow the Zurtars to have adored the Sun with more reason than any southern people, without admitting them to have been the sole original inyentors of that universal folly. We may even doubt the originality of their veneration for the four elements, which forms a principal part of the ritual introduced by Zeratusht, a native of Razin Persia, born in the reign of Gush- tasp, whose son Pashuten is believed by the Parsis to have resided long in Turtary, at a place called Can-
gidix, where a magnificent palace is said to have been
built by the father of Cyrus, and where the Persian
Pt prince, who was a zealot in the new faith, would na-
turally have disseminated its tenets among the neigh- bouring Turtars.
Of any philosphy, except natural ethics, which the rudest society requires and experience teaches, we find no more vestiges in Asiatic Scythia than in ancient Ara- bia; nor would the name of a philosopher and a Scythian have ever been connected, if Anacharsis had not vi- sited Athens and Lydia for that instruction, which his birth-place could not have afforded him: but Aza- charsis was the son of a Grecian woman, who had taught him her language ; and he soon learned to de- spise his own. He was unquestionably a man of a sound: understanding and fine parts ; and, among the lively sayings which gained him the reputation of a wit even in Greece, it is related by Diogenes Laertius, that, when an Athenran reproached him with being a a Fes a he answered, ‘ My country is, indeed, a Sis.
‘ grace tome, but thou art a disgrace to thy country.’ What his country was, in regard to manners and civil duties, we may learn from his fate ia it; for when, on
. his return from Athens, he attempted to reform it by
introducing the wise Jaws of his friend Solon, he was Vouml. D
34 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE:
killed on a hunting party with an arrow, shot by his own brother, a Scythian. chieftain. Such was the philosophy of M. Bailly’s Atlantes, the first and most enlightened of nations! We are assured, however, by the learned author of the Dadistan, that the Turtars under Chengiz, and his descendants, were lovers of truth, and would not even preserve their lives by a HRY of it. De Guignes ascribes the same veracity, the parent of all virtues, to the Huns; and Strabo, who might only mean to lash the Greeks by praising Barbarians, as Horace extolled the wandering Scythians merely to satirize his luxurious countrymen, informs us that the nations of Scythia deserve the praise due to wisdom, heroic friendship, and justice; and this praise we may readily allow them on his authority, without supposing them to have been the ore of mankind.
As to the laws of Zamolxis, concerning whom we know as little as of the Scythian Deucalion, or of Abaris the Hyperborean, and to whose story even He- rodotus gave no credit, I lament, for many reasons, that if ever they existed they have not been preserved. It is certain thata system of laws, called Yasac, has been celebrated i in Tartary since the time of Chengiz, who is said to have republished them in his empire, as his institutions were afterwards adopted and enforced by Taimur ; but they seem to have been a common or traditionary law, and were probably not reduced into writing tll Chengix } pat Ls a tag a nation who were able to write. | Aah
fit. Had the kigidus opinions atid allege fables | of the Hindus been actually borrowed from Sythia, travellers must have discovered in that country some ancient monuments of them; such as pieces of gro- tesque sculpture, images of the Gods and Avatars,
ON THE TARTARS, 35
-and inscriptions on pillars or in caverns, analogous to those which remain in every part of the western peninsula, or to those which many of us have seen in Bahar and at Banaras; but (except a few detached idols) the only great monuments of Turtarian anti- quity are a line of ramparts on the west and east of the Caspian, ascribed indeed by ignorant Muselmans to » Yajuj and Majuj, or Gog and Magog ; that is, to the Scythians, but manifestly raised by a very different nation, in order to stoptheir predatory inroads through the passes of Caucasus. The Chinese wall was built, _or finished, on a similar construction and for a similar purpose, by an emperor, who died only two hundred and ten years before the beginning of our era; and the other mounds were very probably constructed by the old Persians, though, like many works of unknown origin, they are given to Secander, not the Macedo- nian, but a more ancient hero, supposed by some to “have been Jemshid. It is related, that pyramids and tombs have been found in Tusaristan, or Western Scy- thia, and some remnants of edifices in the lake Sui- son; that vestiges of a deserted city have been recently discovered by the Russians near the Caspian Sea, and the Mountain of. Eagles ; and that golden ornaments and utensils, figures of elks and other quadrupeds in metal, weapons of various kinds, and even imple- ments for mining, but made of copper instead of iron, have been dug up in the country of the Tshudes ; whence M. Bailly infers, wich great reason, the high antiquity of that people: but the high antiquity of the Tartars, and their establishment in that country near four thousand years ago, no man disputes; we are inquiring into their ancient religionand philosophy; which neither ornaments of gold, nor tools of copper, will proye to have had an affinity with the feligious rites and the sciences of Jndia. The golden utensils might possibly have been fabricated by the Tertars D 2 : :
~
» 36 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE:
themselves; but it 1s possible too, that they were car- ried from Rome or from. China, whence occasional embassies were sent to the kings of Fzghur. ‘Towards the end of the tenth century the Chinese emperor dis- patched an ambassador to a prince, named Ers/an, which, in the Turkish of Constantinople, signifies a lion, who resided near the Go/den Mountain ; in the same station, perhaps, where the Romans had been re- ceived in the middle of the sixth century. The Chinese on his return home reported the Eighuris to be a grave people, with fair complexions, diligent workmen, and ingenious artificers not only in gold, silver, and iron, but in jasper and fine stones ; and the Romans had be- fore described their magnificent reception in a rich palace adorned with Chinese manufactures : but these times were comparatively modern; and, even if we should admit that the Eighuris, who are said to have been governed for a period of two thousand years by an Jdecut, or sovereign, of their own race, were in some very early age a literary and polished nation, it would prove nothing in favour of the Hums, Turcs, Mongals, and other savages to the north of Pekin, who seem in all ages before Muhammed, to have been. equally ferocious and illiterate. . * diy <br af “ " f wt» ahd i gif
- Without actual inspection of the manuscripts that have been found near the Caspsan, it would be im- posible to give a correct opinion concerning them ; but one of them, described. as written’ on blue silky paper in letters of gold and silver, not unlike Hebrew, was probably a Zvsetian composition of the same kind with that which lay near the source of the Jrtish, and of which Cassiano, 1 believe, made the first accurate version. Another, ifwe may judge from the description of. it, was ‘probably modern “Turkish; and none of them could have been of great antiquity. 9
IV. From ‘ancient monuments, therefore, we have
ON THE TARTARS. 37
no proof that the Tarfars were themselves well-in- structed, much less that they instructed the world; nor have we any stronger reason to conclude from their general manners and character, that they had made an early proficiency in arts and sciences, Even of poetry, the most universal and most natural of the fine. arts, we find no genuine specimens ascribed to them, ex- cept some horrible war-songs expressed in Persain by Ali of Yexd, and possibly invented by him. © After the conquest of Persia by the Mongals, their princes indeed encouraged learning, and even made astrono- mical observations at Samarkand; as the Turc became polished by mixing with the Persians and Arabs, though their very nature, as one of their own writers confesses, had before been like an incurable distemper, and their minds clouded with ignorance : thus also the ~ Mancheu monarchs of China have been patrons of the learned and ingenious ; and the Emperor Kven- Long is, if he be now living, a fine Chinese poet. In all these instances the Yurfars have resembled the Ro- mans, who, before they had subdued Greece, were little better than tigers in war, and fauns or sylvans in science and art. 7
Before I left Ewrope, 1 had insisted in conversation, that the Tzzwc, translated by Major Davy, was never written by Timur himself, at least not as Cesar wrote his commentaries, for one very plain reason, that no Tartarian king of his age could write at all; and, in support of my opinion, I had cited Linu Arabshah, who, though justly hostile to the savage, by whom his na- ‘tive city, Damascus, had been ruined,’ yet praises his talents and the real greatness of his mind; but adds, “« He was wholly illiterate; he neither read nor wrote “any thing; and he knew nothing of 4rabic; - “« though of Persian, Turkish, and the Mogul dialect, ‘he knew as much as was sufficient for his purpose, ‘and nomore. He used with pleasure to hear histories
D 3
38 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE :
<¢ read to him, and so frequently heard the same book, that he was able by memory to correct an inaccurate “reader.” This passage had no effect on the trans- Jator, whom great and learned men in \ndia had as- pret it seems, that the work was authentic, by which he meant composed by the conqueror himself: but the great in this country might have been unlearned, or the learned might not have been great enough to an- swer any leading question in a manner that opposed the declared inclination of a British inquirer; and, in either case, since no witnesses are named, so gene- ral areference to them will hardly be thought conclu- sive evidence. On my part, I will name a Muselman, | whom we all know, and who has enough both of greainess and of learning to decide the question both impartially and satisfactorily : The Nawwab Mozajfer Jang informed me of his own accord, that no man, of Sense in Hindustan believed the work to have been composed by Tuimur, but that his favourite, surnamed Hindu Shah, was known to have written that book and others, ascribed to his patron, after many confidential discourses with the mr, and, perhaps, nearly in the prince’s words as well as in his person: a story which Ali of Yexd, who attended the court of Tamur, and has given us a flowery panegyric instead of history, renders highly probable, by confirming the latter part of the Arabian account, and by total silences as. to the literary productions of his master. It is true, Pig a very ingenious but indigent ; native, whom Davy su ported, has given me a written memorial on the su D- ject, in which he mentions Tainur as the author of two works in Turkish; but the credit of his informa+ rion is overset by a strange apocryphal story of aking of Yemen, who invaded, he says, the Hmir’s domi-’ nions, and in whose library the manuscript was after- wards found, and translated by order of dlishir, first minister of Tuimur’s grandson; and Major Davy him-
ON THE TARTARS. 39
self, before he departed from Bengal, told me, that he. was greatly perplexed’ by finding in a very ac- curate and old copy of the Tuzuc, which he designed to. republish with considerable additions, a particular account, written wngestionably by Taimur, of his own death. No. evidence, therefore, has been adduced to shake my opinion, that the Mogads and Tartars, before their conquest of India and Persia, were wholly unlettered ; although it may be possible, that, even without art or science, they had, like the Huns, both warriors and lawgivers in their own country some centuries before the birth of Christ.
If Jearning was ever anciently cultivated in the region to the north of Jndia, the seats of it, I have reason to suspect must have been Eighur, Cashghar, Khata, Chin, Tancut, and.other countries of Chinese Tartary, which. lie between the thirty-fifth and forty- fifth-degrees of northern latitude ; but I shall, in an- other discourse, produce my reasons for supposing that those very countries were peopled by a race allied to the Aindus, or enlightened at least by their vici- nity to India and China; yet. in Tancut, which by some is annexed to Tibet, and even among its old inhabitants, the Seres, we have no certain accounts of uncommon talents or great improvements: they were famed, indeed, for the faithful discharge of moral duties, fora. pacific disposition, and for that longe- vity which is often the reward of patient virtues and.a calm temper; but they are said to have been wholly indifferent in former ages to the elegant arts, and even’ to commerce ; though Fd/u’/lah had been informed,’ that near the close of the ¢hirteenth century many’ branches of natural philosophy were cultivated in Cam-cheu, then the metropolis of Serica =) eu Oa 7 mu a Wg edie ithe G04 _ We may readily believe those, whovaffure us; that. . 8 yet
40 THE FIFTH DiIsCOURSE:
some. tribes of wandering Zurtars had real:skilkin ap- plying herbs and minerals, to. the purposes of medi- cine, and pretended to skill inmagic; but the gene- ral character of their nation seems to have been this: -They were professed hunters or, fishers, dwelling on that account in forests or near great rivers, under huts or rude tents, or in waggons drawn by their cattle from station to station; they were dexterous archers, excellent horsemen, bold combatants, appearing often to flee in disorder for the sake of renewing thei attack with advantages; drinking the milk of mares, and eating the flesh of colts; and thus in many respects resembling the old .4rads, but in nothing more than in their love of intoxicating liquors, and in nothing Jess than in a taste for poetry and the improvement of their language.
_. Thus has it been proved, and, in my humble.opi-- nion, beyond controversy, that the far greater part of Asia has been peopled and immemorial possessed by three considerable nations, whom, for want of better names, we may call, Hindus, Arabs, and Tartars; each of them divided and subdivided into, am. infinite number of branches, and all of them. so different in form and features, language, manners, and:religion, that, if they, sprang originally from a common root, they must have been separated for ages. Whether more than three primitive stocks can be found, or, nother words, whether the Chinese, Japanese, and: Persians; — are entirely distinct from them, or formed by:theirin- termixture, I shall hereafter, if your indulgence:ito me continue, diligently inquire. To, what conclusions these inquiries, will lead, I cannot yet clearly discern; but, if they lead to truth, we, shal] not regret our
journey through this dark. region of ancient history, in which, while we proceed step by step, and fullow: every glimmering of certain light that presents. itself,
oN THE TARTAR, 4
deserts of DED SE) AGL VG LO: VL be ET eh bbat es wrby «eT d bedding tlh OMRL ipcatlong To Aas : Payor npn, Der BM ‘ode pi Non | Cy hae ‘yh amir Tage. apne gs) ayy tld ge 335 nt 10) me nihag, aT, > we Kare elo. RIO We). d Coa re Ais pail rit ABTS IIGK LpIedooo> oo fla hie} ine adh La mraekt AEA RE: val ee ud : i; SP 2 dh) fh, aah eh | Ra, ttre i litte Sut) is hgtaly (4805 i) ot ry 7) magi L WRAL, Bi nail Life Mp to i t A. Teh Py Bo viol TLC cI HK Lt Q09 Pi HO Ses Baie eer bai “mans pong § 14 tee Vad) Mi cil % ney yp ABAD 99 | | dg ond Dias bk: 4d be hae A ey RA BADE
| : i i , 2 al ts 4
siden ei bite: havior ead 2: Em ie ; dT
yeh) i 7 Py pek'g PETE OK ave the gif LLY,
thigh Rie 12 CONIA 'S itr erie Miso eaytelt Py nae ee lathoah dice nce, 8% jssauel She at he tei Spy loebe bas wobiyih w sit Lo Wie, pe sfiib, os. sods V9 fle bas 23 donind Ye: Soedreveder i 3 ts 4 had 1 TOMER DEL PORN TEs tui 2 pb hy Fog ot Lib hed ee 3 srk gaya yond Wy adr Hes a poad oved Zemmy ely PA: Solces PE ee cena tt shy, gees, othr hw “ahawn Nit sdaureth htinse
Ve ong finde 1 ie SV aeoeeer
4. ANe ose bas px iQwu Ae y {POG eae ayy a ,
Mee ed rere a ae Ha
: « rd es PS Ay
& weit
a ny pe ies an rath ck Ber halal "Mie SiN ee} i cae ae Ne Ye:
iil.
THE SIXTH
ors eC OU. ues PERSIANS.
DELIVERED 19 FEBRUARY, 1”80.
Gentlemen,
T TURN with delight from the vast mountains and barren deserts of Turan, over which we travelled last year with no perfect knowledge of our course, and request you now to accompany me on a literary jour- ney through one of the most celebrated and most beautiful countries in the world: a country, the his- tory and languages of which, both ancient and mo- dern, I have long attentively studied, and on which I may without arrogance promise you more positive information than I could possibly procure on a na- tion so disunited and so unlettered as the Tartars: I mean that which Europeans improperly call Persia, the rame of a single province being applied to the whole empire of Jran, as it is correctly denominated by the present natives of it, and by the learned Musel- ‘mans who reside in these British territories. To give you an account of its largest boundaries, agreeably to my former mode of describing India, Arabia, and
44 THE SiIxTH DISCOURSE:
Tartary, between which it lies, let us begin with the source of the great Assyrian stream Euphrates (as the Greeks, according to their custom, were pleased ‘to miscall the Forat) and thence descend to its mouth © in the Green Sea, or Persian Gulf; including in our line some considerable districts and towns on both sides of the river; then, coasting Persia, properly 'so named, and other Jranian provinces, we come to the Delta of the Sindhu or Indus; whence ascending to the mountains of Caskghar, we discover its fountains — and those of the Jaihun, down which we are conduct- ed to the Caspian, which. formerly perhaps it entered,
though it loses itself now in the sands and lakes of Kkhwarezm, We next are led from the Sea of Khozar, by the banks of the Cur, or Cyrus, and along the Caucasean ridges to the fhore of the Eusine, and thence by the several-Grecian Seas to the point whence we took our departure, at no considerable. distance from the Mediterranean. We cannot but include the Lower Asia within this outline, because it was un- questionably a part of the Persian, if not of the old Assyrian empire; for we know that it was under the dominion of Ca:khosrau; and Diodorus, we find, as- serts, that the kingdom of Troas was dependent on Assyria, since Priamimplored and obtained succours from his emperor Tewtames, whose name approaches — ‘nearer to Tvhmuras than to that of any other Assy- rian monarch. Thus may. we look on Jran as the no- blest island (for so:the Greeks and the rabs would have called it) or at least as the noblest .peninfula on this habitable globe ; and if M. Bailly hadi fixed omit as the d¢/antis of Plato, he might have supported his opinion with far stronger.arguments than any. that he has adduced in favour of New Zembila. If the account, indeed, of the A¢lantes be:not purely an Egyptian, or an. Utopian fable, | should be more inclined to place them in Jran thansin any cage with whichy I am ae quainted.
ON THE PERSIANS, 45
It may seem strange, that the ancient history of so distinguished an empire should be yet so imperfectly known ; but very satisfactory reasons may be assigned for our ignorance of it: the principal of them are the superficial knowledge of the Greeks and Jews, and the loss of Persian archives, or historical compo- sitions. That the Grecian writers, before Xenophon, had wo acquaintance with Persia, and that a// their accounts of it are wholly fabulous, is a paradox too extravagant to be seriously maintained: but their con- nection with it in war or peace had, indeed, been ge- nerally confined to bordering kingdoms under feuda- tory princes; and the first Persian emperor, whose life and character'they seem to have known with tole- «fable accuracy, was the great Cyrus, whom I call, without fear of contradiction, Caikhosrau ; for I shall then only doubt that the Khosrau of Firdausi was the Cyrus of the first Greek historian, and the hero of the oldest political and moral romance, when I doubt that Lows Quatorze and Lewis the Fourteenth were one and the same French King. It is utterly in- credible that two different princes of Persia should. each have been born in a foreign and hostile territory ; should each have been doomed to death in his infancy by his maternal grandfather in consequence of por- tentous dreams, real or invented; should each have been saved by the remorse of his destined murderer ; and should each, after a similar education*amen herdsmen, as the son of a herdsman, have found means to revisit his paternal kingdom; and having delivered it, after a long and triumphant war, from the tyrant. who had invaded it, should have restored it to the summait of power and magnificence ! ‘Whether so romantic a story, which is the subject of an epic poem, as majestic and entire as the Jad, be historically true, we may feel perhaps an inclination to doubt; but it cannot with reason be denied, that the outline ‘of ir related to.a single hero, whom the Asiatics, convers-
46 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE: |
ing with the father of European history, described according to their popular traditions by his true name, which the Greek alphabet could not express: nor will a difference of names affect the question, since the Greeks had little regard for truth, which they sacrificed willingly to the graces of their language, and the nicety of their ears; and, if they could render foreign words melodious, they were never solicitous to make them exact; hence they probably formed Cambyses from Cambakhsh, or granting desires, a title rather than a name; and Xerxes from Shiruyz, a prince and warrior in the Shahnamah, or from Skhirshah, which might also have been a title; for the Asiatic princes have constantly assumed new titles or epithets at dif- ferent periods of their lives, or on different occasions ; custom which we have seen prevalent in our own times both in Jran and Hindustan, and which has been a source of great confusion even in the scriptural accounts of Bubylonian occurrences. Both’ Greeks and Jews have in fact accommodated Persian names to their own articulation ; and’ both seem to have dis- regarded the native literature of Jran, without which they could at most attain a general and imperfect knowledge of the country. As to the Persians them- selves, who were contemporary with the Jews and Greeks, they must have been acquainted with the his- tory of their own times, and with the traditional ‘ac- counts of past ages ; but for a reason, which will pre~ sently appear, they chose to consider Caywmers as the founder of their empire; and, in the numerous’ dis- tractions which followed the overthrow of ‘Dara, especially in the great’ revolution on the defeat’ of Yezdegird, their civil histories were lost, ‘as ‘those of India have unhappily been, from the solicitude of the priests, the only depositaries of their learning, to preserve their books of law and religion at the expence of all others. Hence it has happened, that nothing remains of genuine Persian history before the dynasty
ON THE PERSIANS, 47
of Sasan, except-a few rustic traditions and fables, which furnished materials for the Shahknamah, and which are still supposed to exist in the Pahlavi lan- guage. All the annals of the Pishdadi, or Assyrian race, must be considered as dark and fabulous; and those of the Cayanz family, or the Medes and Persians, as heroic and poetical; though the lunar eclipses, said to be mentioned by Ptolemy, fix the time of Gushtasp,: the prince by whom Zeratush was pro- tected, of the Parthian kings descended from 4r- shac or Arsaces, we know little more than the names; but the Szsanis had so long an intercourse with the emperors of Rome and Byzantium, that the period of their dominion may be called an historical age. Jn attempting to ascertain the beginning of the Assy- rian empire, we are deluded, as ina thousand instances, by names arbitrarily imposed, It had been settled by chronologers, that the first monarchy established * in Persia was the Assyrian; and Newton, finding seme of opinion, that it rose in the first century at- ter the Flood, but unable by his own calculations to extend it farther back than seven hundred and ninety years before Christ, rejected part of the old system, and adopted the rest of it; concluding, that the 4s- syrian_ monarchs began to reign about two hundred years after Solomon, and that, in all preceding ages, the government of Jran had been divided into several petty states:and principalities. Of this opinion | con- fess myself to have been ; when, disregarding the wild chronology of the Muselmans and Gabrs, | had al- lowed the utmost natural duration to the reigns of eleven Pishdadi kings, without being able to add more than a: hundred years to Newton's computation. It seemed indeed unaccountably strange, that, although Abraham had found a regular monarchy in Egypé; although the kingdom of Yemen had just pretensions to very high antiquity; although the Chinese, in the twelfth century before our era, had made approaches
48 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE:
at least to the present form of their extensive domi-
nion; and although we can hardly suppose the first
Indian monarchs to have reigned less than three thou-
sand years ago, yet Persia, the most delightful, the
most compact, the most desirable country of them
all, should have remained for so many ages unsettled
and disunited. A fortunate discovery, for which I
was first indebted to Mir Muhammed Husain, one of the most intelligent Musel/mans in India, has at once
dissipated the cloud, and cast a gleam of light onthe” primeval history of Jraz and of the human race, of which I had long despaired, and which could hardly
have dawned from any other quarter.
The rare and interesting tract on twelve different religions, entitled the Dabistan, and composed by a Mohammedan traveller, a native of Cashmir, named Mohsan, but distinguished by the assumed surname of Fani, ov Perishable, begins with a wonderfully curi- ous chapter on the religion of Hushang, which was long anterior to that of Zeratusht, but had conti-
nued to be secretly professed by many learned Per- sians evento the author’s time; and several of the most eminent of them, dissenting in many points —
from the Gabrs, and persecuted by the ruling powers — of their country, had retired to India; where they
compiled a number of books, now extremely scaree,
which Mohsan had perused, and with the writers of which, or with many of them, he had contracted an. intimate friendship. From them he learned, that a
powerful monarchy had been established for ages in ~
fran before the accession of Cayumers 5 that it was — called the Mahabadian dynasty, for a reason which. will soon be mentioned; and that many princes, | whom seven or eight are only named in the Dabistan, and among them Mahbul, or Maha Beli, had raised
their empire to the zenith of human glory. olf we °
fi H a
vs
ON THE PERSIANS. 49
can rely on this evidence, which to me appears unexceptionable, the Jranian monarchy must have been the oldest in the world; but it will remain du- bious to which of the three stocks Hindu, Arabian, or Tartar, the first Kings of Iran belonged, or whe- ther they sprang from a fourth race distinct from any of the others; and these are questions which we shall be able, | imagine, to answer precisely, when we have carefully inquired into the /anguages and letters, religion and philosophy, and incidentally into the arts and sciences, of the ancient Persians.
J. In the new and important remarks which I am going to offer on the ancient /anguages and characters of /ran, 1 am sensible that you must give me credit _ for many assertions which, on this occasion, it is Im- possible to prove; for I should ill deserve your indul- gent attention, if I were to abuse it by repeating a dry list of detached words, and presenting you with a vocabulary instead of a dissertation; bur, since I have no system to maintain, and have not suffered imagination to delude my judgment ; since I have ha- bituated myself to form opinions of men and things from evidence, which is the only solid basis of ezvi/, as experiment is of natural knowledge; and since | have maturely considered the questions which I mean to discuss, you will not, I am persuaded, suspect my testimony, or think that | go too far, when I as- sure you, that I will assert nothing positively which l-am not able satisfactorily to demonstrate. When Muhammed was born, and Anushiravan, whom he calls the Just King, sat on the throne of Persia, two lan- guages appear to have been generally prevalent in the great empiré of Iran; that of the Court, thence named Deri, which was only a refined and elegant dialect of the Parsi, so called from the province, of which $%:- faz is now the capital, and that of the learned, in which most books were composed, and which had the
}
- Vou. Hi. te
50 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE:
name of Pahlavi, either from the heroes, who spoke it in former times, or from Pahlu, a tract of land, which included, we are told, some considerable cities of Irak. The ruder dialects of both were, and, I be- lieve, still are spoken by the rustics in several pro- vinces; and in many of them, as Herat, Zabul, Sis- tan, and others, distinct idioms were vernacular, as it happens in every kingdom of great extent. Besides the Parsi and Pahlavi, a very ancient and. abstruse tongue was known to the priests.and_ philosophers, called the language of the Zend, because a book on religious and moral duties, which they held sacred, and which bore that name, had been written in it; while the Pazand, or comment on that work, was composed in Pahlavi, as a more popular idiom; but a learned follower of Zeratusht, named Bahman, who lately died at Calcutta, where he had lived with me as a Persian reader about three years, assured me, that the Jetters of his prophet’s book were properly called Zend, and the language Avesta, as the words of the Vedas are Sanscrit, and the characters Nagar; or as the old Sagas and poems of Jse/and were expressed in Ruzic letters. Let us however, in compliance with cus- tom, give the name of Zend to the sacred language of Persia, until we can find, as we shall very soon, a fitter appellation for ir. The Zend and the old Pahlavi are almost extinct in Jran; for among six or seven thou- sand Gabrs, who reside chiefly at Yesd, and in Cir- man, there are very few who can read Pahlavi, and scarce any who even boast of knowing the Zend; while the Parsi, which remains almost pure in the Shahmamah, has now become by the intermixture of numberless 4rabic words, and many imperceptible changes, a new language exquisitely polished by a se- ries of fine writers in prose and verse, and analogous to the different idioms gradually formed in Exrope at- ter the subversion of the Roman empire: but with modern Persian we have no concern in our present in-
ON THE PERSIANS, $2
quiry, which I confine to the ages that preceded the Mohammedan conquest. Having twice read the works of Firdausi with great attention since I applied my- self to the study of old Jndian literature, I can assure you with confidence, that hundreds of Parsi nouns are pure Sanscrit, with no other change than such as may be observed in the numerous bhashas, or verna- cular dialects of India; that very many Persian ims peratives are the roots of Samseri¢ verbs; and that even the moods and tenses of the Persian verb sub- stantive, which is the model of all the rest, are dedu= cible from the Sanscrit by an easy and clear analogy : we may hence conclude, that the Parsi was derived, like the various Indian dialects, from the language of the Brahmans ; and I must add, that in the pure Per- stan I find no trace of any Arabian tongue, except what proceeded from the known intercourse between the Persians and Arabs, especially inthe time of Bahram, who was éducated in Arabia, and whose Arabic verses are still extant, together with his heroic line in Deri, which many suppose to be the first attempt at Perszan versification in Arabian metre: but, without having re- course to other arguments, the composition of words, in which the genius of the Persian delights, and which that of the Arabic abhors, is a decisive proof that the . Parsisprang from an Indian, and not from an Arabian stock. Considering languages as mere instruments of knowledge, and having strong reasons to doubt the existence of genuine books in Zend or Pahlavi (espe- cially since the well-informed author of the Dabistan affirms the work of Zeratusht to have been lost, and its place supplied by a recent compilation) I had no inducement, though I had an opportunity, to learn what remains of those ancient languages; but I often | conversed on them with my friend Bzhman; and both. of us were convinced after full consideration, that the Zend bore a strong resemblance to Sanscrit, and the Pahlavi to Arabic. He had at my request translated
EK 2 |
52 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE:
into Pahlavi the fine. inscription exhibited in the Gulistan, on the diadem of Cyrus; and I had the pa- tience to read the list of words from the Pazend in the appendix to the Parhangi Jehangiri. ‘This examina- tion gave me perfect conviction, that the Pahlavi was a dialect of the Chuldaic; and of this curious fact T will exhibit a fhort proof. By the nature of the Chaldean tongue most words ended in the first long vowel, like shemia, heaven; and that very word, un- altered in a single letter, we find in the Pazend, toge- ther with beilia: night; meyd, water; nira, fite; ; matra, Yain; anda m leant of others, ‘all Arabi or Hebrew, with a Chaldean termination ; so samar, by a beautiful metaphor, from pruning trees, means in Hebrew to compose verses, and thence, by an easy transition to sig them; and in Pahlavi we see the verb xamruniten, to sing, with its forms zamrunemi, 1 sing, and zamrunid, he sang ; the verbal terminations of the Persian being added to the Chaldaic root. Now all those words are integral parts of the lan- guage, not adventitious: to it like the 4ratic nouns and verbals engrafted on modern Persian; and this distinction convinces me, that the dialect of the Gabrs, which they pretend to be that of Zeratusht, and of which Bafman gave me a variety of written specimens, is a late invention of their priests, or sub- sequent at least to the Muselman invasion; for, although it may be possible that a few of their sacred beaks 3 were preserved, as he used to assert, in sheets of lead or copper, at the bottom of wells near Yesd, yet, as the conquerors had not only a spiritual, but a political interest in persecuting a warlike, robust, and indignant race of irreconcileable, conquered subjects, a long time must have elapsed, befare the hidden scriptures could have been safely brought to light, and few, who could perfectly understand them, must then have remained; but, as they continued to profess among them selves the religion of their forefathers, it then became expedient for the Mudbeds
ON THE PERSIANS. SF
to supply the lost or mutilated works of their legis« lator by new compositions, partly from their imper- fect recollection, and partly from such moral and re- ligious knowledge as they gleaned, most probably, among the Christians, with whom they had an inter- course. One rule we may fairly establish in deciding the question, Whether the books of the modern Gadrs were anterior to the invasion of the drabs? When an Arabic noun occurs in them, changed only by the. spirit ‘of the Chaldean idiom; as werta for werd, a rose; daba for dhahab, gold; or deman for zeman, time, we may allow it to have been ancient Pah/avi; but when we meet with verbal nouns or infinitives, evidently formed by the rules of Arabian grammar, we may be sure that the phrases in which they occur are comparatively modern; and nota single passage, which Bahman produced from the books of his reli- gion would abide this test.
We come now to the language of the Zend; and here I must impart a discovery which I lately made, and from which we may draw the most interesting consequences. -M. dnquetil, who had the merit of undertaking a voyage to India, in his earliest youth, with no other view than to recover writings of Zera~ tusht, and who would have acquired a brilliant repu- tation in France, if he had not sullied it by his immo- derate vanity and virulence of temper, which alienated the good-will even of his own countrymen, has ex- hibited in his work, entitled Zendavesta, two vocabu- jaries in Zend and Pahlavi, which he had. found in- anapproved collection of Rawayat, or Traditional Pieces, in modern Persian. Of his Pahlavi no more need be said than that it strongly confirms my opi- nion concerning the Cha/daic origin of that language ; 4 but, when I perused the Zend glossary, I was inexpres- sibly surprised to find that six or seven words in ten were pure Sanscrit, and even some of their inflexions
E 3
$4 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE?
formed by the rules of the Vyacaran; as yushmacam, the genitive plural of yushmad. Now M. Anguetil most certainly, and the Magis compiler most proba- bly, had no knowledge of Sanscrit; and could not, therefore, have vented: a list of Sanscrit words: it is, therefore, an authentic list of Zend words which had been preserved in books, or by tradition; and it follows, that the language of the Zend was at least a dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly to itas the Pracrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in Jndia two thousand years ago. Irom ail these facts it is a necessary con- sequence, that the oldest discoverable languages of Persia were Chaldaic and Sanscrit; and that, when they had ceased to be vernacular, the Pollaus and Zend were deduced from them respectively, and the ‘Parsi either from the Zend, or immediately from the dialect of the Brahmans; but all had perhaps a mix- ture of Turtarian; for the best lexicographers assert, that numberless words in ancient Persian are taken from the ee of the Cimmerians, or the Tartars of Kipchak ; so that the three families, whose lineage we have examined in former discourses, had left visible traces of themselves in Jran, long betore the Turtars and 4rabs had rushed from their deserts, and re- turned to that very country from which, in all pro- bability, they originally proceeded, and which the Fiimdus had abandoned in an earlier age, with posi- tive commands from their legislators to revisit it no more. I close this head with observing, that no sup- position of a mere political or commercial inter- course between the different nations, will account for the Sanscrit and Chaldaic words, which we find in the old Persian tongues; because they are, in the first place, too numerous to have been introduced by such means; and secondly, are not the names of exotic animals, onavaeearh or arts, but those of |
aaterial elements, parts of the body, natural objects
ON THE PERSIANS. 55
and relations, affections of the mind, and other ideas common to the whole race of man.
Ifa nation of Hindus, it may be urged, ever pos- sessed and governed the country of Iran, we should find on the very ancient ruins of the temple or pa- lace, now called the Throne of Jemshid, some in- scriptions in Devanagari, or at least in the charac- ters on the stones at E/ephanta, where the sculpture Is unquestionably Indian, or in those on the Staff of firuz Shah, which exist in the heart of India; and such inscriptions we probably should have found, if that edifice had not been erected after the migra- tion of the Brahmans from Iran, and the violent schism in the Persian religion, of which we shall presently speak ; for, although the popular name of the build- ing at Istakhr, or Persepolis, be no certain proof that it was raised in the time of Jemshid, yet such a fact might easily have been preserved by tradition ; and we shall soon have abundant evidence, that the tem- ple was posterior to the reign of the Aimdu mo- narchs. The cypresses indeed, which are represented with the figures in procession, might induce a rea- der of the Shahnamah to believe, that the sculptures related to the new faith introduced by Zeratusht ; but as a cypress is a beautiful ornament, and as many of the figures appear inconsistent with the reformed adoration of fire, we must have recourse to stronger proofs, that the Takhti Jemshid was erected after Cayumers. The building has lately been visited, and the characters on it examined, by Mr. Franck- lin; from whom we learn, that Nrebuhr has delineated them with great accuracy; but without such testi- mony I should have suspected the correctness of the delineation, because the Danish traveller has ex- hibited two inscriptions in modern Persian, and one ef them from the same place, which cannot have
55. THE SIXTH DISCOURSE:
~
been exactly transcribed: they are very elegant verses of Nizami and Sadi on the instability of human reatness, but so il] engraved or so ill copied, that if I had nor had them nearly by heart, I should not have been able to read them; and M. Rousseau of Isfahan, who translated them with shameful inac- curacy, must have been deceived by the badness of the copy, or he never would have created a new king Wakam, by forming one word of Jem and the par- ticle prefixed to it. Assuming, however, that we may reason as conclusively on the characters pub- lished by Niebuhr as we might on the monuments themselves, were they now before us, we may begin with observing, as Chardin had observed on the very spot, that they bear no resemblance whatever to the letters used by the Gabrs in their copies of the Kendidad. This 1 once urzed, in an amicable debate with Bakman, as a proof that the Zend letters were a modern invention; but he secmed to hear me without surprize, and imsisted that the letters to which I alluded, and which he had often seen, were monumental characters never used in books, and intended either to conceal some religious mysteries from the vulgar, or to display the art of the sculptor, like the embellished Cufick and Nagari on seyeral Arabian and Indian monuments. He wondered that any man could seriously doubt the antiquity of the Pahlavi letters ; and in truth the inscription behind the horse of Rustam, which Niebuhr has also given us, is apparently Pahlavi, and might with some pains be decyphered; that character was extremely rude, and seems to have been written, like the Roman and the Arabic, in a variety of hands; for 1 remember to have examined a rare collection of old Persian coins in the Muscum of the great Anatomist Wil- liam Hunter; and, though I believed he legends to be Pahlavi, and had no doubt that they were coins of Parthian. Kings, yet I could not read the i inser
ON THE PERSIANS. $7
tions without wasting more time than T had then at command, in comparing the letters and ascertaining the proportions in which they severally occurred. The gross Pah/avi was improved by Zeratusht or his disciples into an elegant and perspicuous character, in which the Zendavesta was copied; and both were written from the right hand to the left, like other Chaldaic alphabets, for they are manifestly both of Chaldean origin; but the Zend has the singular ad- vantage of expressing all the long and short venwels b distinct marks in the body of each word, and all the words are distinguished by full points between them ; 3 so that if modern Persian were unmixed with Arabic, it might be written in Zend with the greatest conveni- ence, as any one may pefceive, by copying in that character a few pages of the Shahnamah. As to the unknown inscriptions in the palace of Jemshid, it may reasonably be doubted whether they contain a system of letters which any nation ever adopted: in fve of them the letters, which are separated by points, may be reduced to forty, at least I can distinguish no more essentially different; and they all seem to be regular variations and compositions of a straight line and an angular figure like the head of a javelin, or a leaf (to use the language of botanists) hearted and lanced. Many of the Runic letters appear to have been formed of similar elements ; and it has been ob- served, that the writing at Persepolis bears a strong resemblance to that which the Jrish call Ogham. The word Agam in Sanscrit means mysterious knowledge ; but I dare not affirm that the two words had a com- mon origin; and only mean to suggest that, if the characters in question be really alphabetical, they were probably secret and sacerdotal, or a mere cypher per- haps, of which the priests only had the key. They might, I imagine, be decyphered if the language were certainly known ; but in all other inscriptions of the
55 THE SiXTH DISCOURSE:
same sort, the characters are too complex, and the va- riations of them too numerous, to admit an opinion that they coul'| be symbols of articulate sounds ; for even the Nagari system, which has more distinct let- ters than any known alphabet, consists only of forty- nine simple characters, two of which are mere substi- tutions, and four of little use in Saxserif, or in any other language; while the more complicated figures, exhibited by Niebukr, must be as numerous at least as the Chinese keys, which are the signs of zdeas only, and some of which resemble the old Persian letters at Istakhr. The Danish traveller was convinced from his own observation that they were written from the left hand, like all the characters used by Hindu na- tions; but I must leave this dark subject, which I cannot illuminate, with a remark formerly made by myself, that the square Chaldaic letters, a few of which are found on the Persian ruins, appear to have been originally the same with the Devanagari before the latter were enclosed, as we now see them, in angular frames.
II. The primeval religion of Jran, if we rely on the authorities adduced by Mohsani Fani, was that which Newton calls the oldest (and it may be justly called the noblest) of all religions : ** A firm belief that one << Supreme God made the world by his power, and ‘* continually governed it by his providence ; a pious << fear, love, and adoration of him; a due reverence << for parents and aged persons; a fraternal affection «¢ for the whole human species, and a compassionate « tenderness even for the brute creation.” A system’ of devotion so pure and sublime could hardly, among mortals, be of long duration; and we learn from the Dabistan, that the popular worship of the Lranians under Hushang, was purely Sabian; a word of which I cannot offer any certain etymology, but which has been deduced by grammarians from Seba, an fost,
ON THE PERSIANS. 39
and particularly the ost of heaven, or the celestial bodies, in the adoration of which the Sabian ritual is believed to have consisted. There is a description in the learned work just mentioned, of the several Persian temples dedicated to the Sun and Planets, of the images adored in them, and of the magnificent processions to them on prescribed festivals; one of which is probably represented by sculpture in the ruined city of Jemshid. But the planetary worship in Persia seems only a part of a far more complicated religion, which we now find in these /ndian provinces ; for Mohsan assures us that, in the opinion of the best informed Persians, who professed the faith of Hue. shang, distinguished from that of Zeratusht, the first monarch of /ran, and of the whole earth, was Afzha- bad (a word apparently Sanscri#) who divided the people into four orders, the religious, the military, the commercial, and the servile, to which he assigned names unquestionably the same in their origin with those now applied to the four primary classes of the Hindus. They added, that he received from the Creator, and promulgated among men, a@ sacred book in a heavenly language, to which the Muselman author gives the 4rabic utle of Desatir, or Regulations, but the original name of which he has not mentioned ; and that fourteen Mahabads had appeared or would appear in human shapes for the government of this world. Now when we know that the Hindus believe in fourteen Menus, or celestial personages with similar functions, the first of whom left a book of regulations, or divine ordinances, which they hold equal to the Veda, and the language of which they believe to be that of the gods, we can hardly doubt that the first corruption of the purest and oldest religion was the sys- tem of Indian theology, invented by the Brahmans,
and prevalent in these territories, where the book of Mahabad, or Menu, is at this moment the standard of all religiousand moral duties. The accession of Cayu-
60 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE:
mers to the throne of Persia, in the eighth or ninth century before Christ, seems to have been accompa- nied by a considerable revolution both in government and religion: he was most probably of a different race from the Mahabadians who preceded him, and began perhaps the new system of national faith which Hushang, whose name it bears, completed ; but the reformation was partial ; for, while they reject- ed the complex polytheism of their predecessors, they retained the laws of Makabad, with a superstitious ve- neration for the sun, the planets, and fire; thus ree sembling the Hindu sects, called Sauras and Sagnicas, the second of which is very numerous at Banares, where many agvihotras are continually blazing, and where the Sagnicas, when they enter on their sacerdo- tal office, kindle, with two pieces of the hard wood Semi, a fire which they keep lighted through their lives for their nuptial ceremony, the performance of solemn sacrifices, the obsequies of departed ancestors, and their own funeral pile. This remarkable rite was continued by Zeratusht, who reformed the old re- ligion by the addition of genil, or angels, presiding over months and days, of new ceremonies in the ve- neration shown to fire, of a new work which he pre- tended to have received from heaven, and, above all, by establishing the actual adoration of one Supreme Being. He was born, according to Mohsan, in the district of Rai; and it was he (not, as Azmanus as- serts, his protector Gushtash) who travelled into Judia, that he might receive information from the Bradmans in theology and ethics. It is barely possible that Py- thagoras knew him in the capital of Jrak; but the Grecian sage must then have been far advanced in years; and we have no certain evidence of an inter- ° course between the two philosophers. ‘The reformed religion of Persia continued in force till that country was subdued by the Muse/mans ; and, without study- ing the Zend, we have ample information concerning
ON THE PERSIANS. 61
it in the modern Persian writings of several who pro- fessed it. Bahman always named Zeratusht with re- verence, but he was in truth a pure Theist, and strongly disclaimed any adoration of the frre or other elements: he denied that the doctrine of two coeval principles, supremely good and supremely bad, form- ed any part of his faith; and he often repeated with emphasis the verses of £irdausi on the prostration of Cyrus and his paternal grandfather before the blazing altar: ‘* Think not that they were adorers of fire ; «¢ for that element was only an exalted object, on the ‘< Justre of which they fixed theireyes; they humbled ** themselves a whole week before God; and, if thy “* understanding be ever so little exerted, thou must “© acknowledge thy dependence on the Being supreme- «ly pure.” “In a story of Sadi, near the close of his beautiful Bustan, concerning the idol of Somanath, or Mahadeva, he confounds the religion of the Aimdus with that of the Gabrs, calling the Brahmans not only Moghs, (which might be justified by a passage in the Mesnavi) but even readers of the Zend and Pazend. Now, whether this confusion proceeded from real or pretended ignorance I cannot decide, but am as firmly convinced that the doctrines of the Zend were distinct from those of the Heda, as 1am that the reli- gion of the Brahmans, with whom we converse every day; prevailed in Persia before the accession of Cayz- mers, whom the Parsis, from respect to his memory, consider as the first of men, although they believe in an unrversal deluge before his reign.
With the religion of the old Persians their pii- Josophy {or as much as we know cf it) was inti- mately connected; for they were assiduous obsery- ers of the luminaries, which they adored and esta- blished, according to Mohsan, who confirms in some degree the fragments of Berosus, a number of arti-
62 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE:
ficial cycles with distinct names, which seem to iridis cate a knowledge of the period in which the equinoxes appear to revolve. They aresaidalso to have known the most wonderful powers of nature, and thence to have acquired the fame of magicians and enchanters ; but I will only detain you with a few remarks on that metaphysical theology which has been professed ims memorially by a numerous sect of Persians and Hin- _ dus, was carried in part into Greece, and prevails even now aimong the learned Muselmans, who sometimes avow it without reserve. The modern philosophers of this persuasion are called Sufs, either from the Greek word for a sage, or from the woo//en mantle which they used to wear in some provinces of Persia : their fundamental tenets are, that nothing exists abso- lutely but God; that the human soul is an emanation from his essence, and though divided for a time from its heavenly source, will be finally reunited with it; that the highest possible happiness will arise from its reunion; and that the chief good of mankind in this transitory world, consists in as: perfect an union with the Eternal Spirit as the incumbrances of a mortal frame will allow; that for this purpose they should break all connection (or taulluk, as they call it) with extrinsic objects, and pass through life without attachments, a8 swimmer in the ocean strikes freely without the impediment of clothes; that they should be straight and free as the cypress, whose fruit is hardly perceptible, and not sink under a load, like fruit-trees attached to a trellis; that, if mere earthly charms have power to influence the soul, the idea of celestial beauty must overwhelm it in extatic delight; that for want of apt words to express the divine perfec- tions and the ardour of devotion, we must borrow such expressions as approach the nearest to our ideas, and speak of Beauty and Love in a transcendent and mystical sense; that, like a reed torn from its native
ON THE PERSIANS. 63
bank, like wax separated from its delicious honey, the soul of man bewails its disunion with melancholy mu- sic, and sheds burning tears, like the hates taper waiting passionately for the moment of its extinction, as a disengagement from earthly trammels, and the means of returning to its only beloved. Such in part (for I omit the minuter and more subtil metaphysics of the Sis, which are mentioned in the Dabistan) is the wild and enthusiastic retigion of the modern Persian poets, especially of the sweet Hafiz and the great Maulavi. Such is the system of the Vedants philosophers and best lyric poets of India; and as it was a system of the highe st antiquity in both | nations, it may be added to the many other proofs of an im- memorial affinity between them.
III. On the ancient monuments of Persian sculpture and architecture we have already made such obser- Vations as were sufficient for our purpose; nor will you be surprized at the diversity between the figures at Elephanta, which are manifestly Hindu, and those at Persepolis, which are merely Sabian, if you concur with me in believing that the Tukhti Jemshid was erected after the time of Cayumers, when the Brah- mans had migiated from Iran, and when their intri- cate mythology had been superseded by the simpler adoration of the planets and of fire.
IV. As to the sciences or arts of the old Persians, I have little to say; and no complete evidence of them seems to exist. Mohsan speaks more than once of ancient verses in the Puah/avi language; and Bahkman assured me, that some scanty remains of them had been preserved: their music, and painting, which Nizam: celebrated, have irzecover- ably perished; and in regard to Mam, the painter
..and impostor, whose book of drawings,’ calicd .r-
e
64 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE?
tang, which he pretended to be divine, is supposed to have been destroyed by the Chinese, in whose domi- nions he had sought refuge, the whole tale is too modern to throw any light on the questions before us concerning the origin of nations, and the inha- bitants of the primitive “world:
Thus has it been proved by clear evidence and lain reasoning, that a powerful monarchy was established in Jran long before the Assyrian, or Pish- dadi government; that it was in truth a Aimdu mo- narchy, though if any chuse to call it Cuszan, Casdean, or Scythian, we shall not enter into a debate on mere names; that it subsisted many centuries, and that its history has been ingrafted on that of the Hindus, who founded the monarchies of Ayodhya and Indraprestha; that the language of the first Persian empire was the | mother of the Sanserit, and consequently of the Zend and Parsi, as well as of Greek, Latin, and Gothic; that the language of the Assyrians was the parent of Chaldaic and Pahlavi, and that the primary Tartarian language also had been current in the same empire ; although, as the Zartars had no books or even let- ters, we cannot with certainty trace their unpolished and variable idioms. We discover thérefore in Per- sia, at the earliest dawn of history, the ¢Arce distinct races of men, whom we described on former occa-= sions as possessors of India, Arabia, Tartary; and, whether they were collected in fran from distant re- gions, or diverged from it as from a common centre, we shall easily détermine by the following consider- ations. Let us observe, in the first place, the central osition of Iran, which is bounded by Arabia, by Marsa: and by India; whilst Arabia lies contiguous to Iran only, but is remote from Tur/ary, and divided even from the skirts of India by a considerable gulf; no country, therefore, but Persia scems likely to have
ON THE PERSIANS. 65
seftt forth its colonies to all the kingdoms of Asia. The Brahmans could never have migrated from India to Iran, because they are expressly forbidden by their oldest existing laws to leave the region which they in- habit at this day; the raby have not ven a tradition of an emigration into Persia before Mohammed, riot had they indeed any inducement to quit their beauti- ful and extensive domains ; and as to the Turtars, we have no trace in history of their departure from their plains and forests till the invasion of the Medes, who, according to etymologists, were the sons of Madai ; and ‘even they were conducted by princes of an Assy- rian family. The three races, therefore; whom we have already mentioned (and more than three we have not yet found) migrated from /ram as from theit common country; and thus the Savon Chronicle; I presume from good authority, brings the first inhabit- ants of Britam from Armenia; while a late very learned writer concludes, after all his laborious re- searches, that the Goths or Scythians came from Per- sia; and another contends with great force, that both thefrish'and old Britons proceeded severally from the borders of the Caspian; a coincidence of conclusions from different media by persons wholly unconnected, which could scarce have happened if they were not grounded on solid prinsiples. We may therefore hold this proposition firmly established, that Jran,-or Persia in its largest sense, was the true centre of popu- lation, of knowledge, of languages, and of arts ; which, instead of travelling westward only, as it has been fan- cifully supposed, or eastward, as might with equal reason have been asserted, were expanded in all di- rections to all the regions of the world in which the Hindu race had settled under various denominations : but whether Asia has not produced other races of men, distinct from the Hindus, the Arabs, or the Tartars ; or whether any apparent diversity may not yave sprung trom an intermixture of those thres-
F
66 THE SIXTH DISCOURSE: ON THE PERSIANS,
in different proportions, must be the subject of a fu- ture inguiry. ‘There is another question of more im- mediate importance, which you, gentlemen, only can decide ; namely, ‘‘ by what means we can preserve ‘¢ our Society from dying gradually away? as it has ad- «< vanced gradually to its present (shall I say flourish-_ “‘ ing or languishing ?) state.’’ It has subsisted five years without any expence to the members of it, until the first volume »of our Transactions was published ; and the price of that large volume, if we compare the different values of money in Benga/ and in England, is not more than equal to the annual contribution to- wards the charges of the Royal Society by each of its fellows, who may not have chosen to compound for it on his admission. ‘This I mention not from an idea that any of us could object to the purchase of one copy at least, but from a wish to inculcate the neces- sity of our common exertions in promoting the sale of the work, both here and in London. In vain shall we meet as a literary body, if our meetings shall cease to be supplied with original dissertations and memo- rials; and in vain shall we collect the most interesting papers, if we cannot publish them occasionally with- out exposing the superintendents of the Company’s press, who undertake to print them at their own ha- zard, to the danger of a considerable loss. By united efforts the French have compiled their stupendous re- positories, of universal knowledge ; and by united ef- forts only can we hope to rival them, or to. diffuse over our own country and the rest of Ewrope the lights attainable by our Asiatic [esearches,
( 67 ) * IV. A LETTER’ FROM
THE LATE HENRY VANSITTART, ESQ.
TO THE PRESIDENT. Sir,
AVING some time ago met with a Persian
. abridgment, composed by Maulavi Khairuddin, of the asrarul Afaghinah, or the secrets of the Afghans, a book written in the Pushto language by Husain, the son of Sabir, the son of Khizr, the disciple of Hazrat Shah Kasim Sulaimani, whose tomb is in Chunargur, I was induced to translate it. Although it opens with a very wild description of the origin of that tribe, and contains a narrative which can by no means be offered upon the whole as a serious and probable history 5 yet I conceive that the knowledge of what a nation suppose themselves to be, may be interesting to a So- ciety like this, as well as of what they really are. In- deed the commencement of almost every history is fabulous ; and the most enlightened ae after they have arrived at that degree of civilization and importance which has enabled and induced them to commemorate their actions, have always found a va- cancy at their outset which invention, or at best pre- sumption, must supply. Such fictions appear at first in the form of traditions; and having in this shape amused successive generations by a gratification of their national vanity, they are committed to writing, and acquire the authority of history.
B 2
( 68 )
As a kingdom is an assemblage of component parts, condensed by degrees from smaller associations of in- dividuals to their general union, so history is a combiw nation of the transactions not only of the different tribes, but even of the individuals of the nation of which it treats: each particular narrative in such a ge- neral collection must be summary and incomplete. Biography, therefore, as well as descriptions of the manners, actions, and even opinions of such tribes as are connected with a great kingdom, are not only en- tertaining in themselves, but useful, as they explain and throw alight upon the history of the nation.
Under these impressions I venture to lay before the Society the translation of an abridged history of the. Afghans ; a tribe at different times subject to and al- ways connected with the kingdoms of Persia and Hin- dustan. 1 also submit a specimen of their language, which is called by them Pukhto; but this sin is sof- tened in Persian into Pushto.
1am, Sir P- ii F) ie With the greatest respect, os 3 A
Your most obedient humble servant,
oat VANSITT ART.
Culeutta, March 3, 1 fas
( 69 }
. ON THE DESCENT OF THE AFGHANS FROM THE JEWS
HE Afghans, according to their own traditions,
are the posterity of Mele Talut (king Saul)
who, in the opinion of some, was a descendant of Ju-
dah, the son of Jacob; and according te others of Bex- jamin, the brother of Joseph.
Ina war which raged between the children of Israe/ and the -4malekites, the latter being victorious, plun- dered the Jews, and obtained possession of the ark of the covenant. Considering this the god of the Jews, they threw it into the fire, which did not affect it. They afterwards attempted to cleave it with axes, but without success: every individual who treated_it with indignity was punished for his temerity. They
~ then placed it in their temple; but all their idols bow-
ed to it. At length they fastened it upon a cow, which they turned loose in the wilderness.
When the prophet Samuel arose, the children of Israel said to him, ‘* We have been totally subdued << by the Amalekites, and have no king. Raise to us ‘© a king, that we may be enabled to contend for the “* glory of God.” Samuel said, *‘ In case you are led ** out to battle, are you determined tofight?” They answered, ‘* What has befallen us that we should not “© fight against infidels? That nation has banished “< us from our country and children.” At this time the angel Gabriel descended, and, delivering a wand, said, ‘“‘It is the command of God that the person
_ « whose stature shall correspond with this wand, shall
be king of Israel.” F 3
79 ON THE DESCENT OF THE
Melic Talut was at that time a man of inferior con- dition, and performed the humble employment of feeding the goats and cows of others. One day a cow under his charge was accidentally lost. Being disappointed in his searches, he was greatly distressed, and applied to Samuel, saying, ‘1 have lost a cow, << and do not possess the means of-satisfying the owner, «¢ Pray for me, that I maybe extricated from this ‘< difficulty.” Samuel, perceiving that he was a man of lofty stature, asked his name. He answered, Tu/ut. Samuel then said, ‘* Measure Ta/ut with the wand «¢ which the angel Gabriel brought.” His stature was equal to it. Samuel then said, ‘* God has raised Talut to be your king.” The children of Jsrael_an- swered, ** We are greater than our king. We are «men of dignity, and he is of inferior condition. «¢ How shall he be our king.” Samuelinformed them they should know that God had constituted Talut their king, by his restoring the ark of the covenant. He accordingly restored it, and they acknowledged him ‘their sovereign. | Seow
After Talut obtained the kingdom, he seized part of the territories of Ja/ut, or Goliah, who assembleda large army, but was killed by David. Talut after- wards died a martyr in a war against the infidels; and God constituted David king of the Jews..
- Melic Talut had two sons, one called Berkia, and the other Jrmia, who served David, and were beloved by him. ‘He sent them to fight against the infidels ; and, by God’s assistance, they were victorious...
The son of Berkia was called fghan, and the son of Irmia was named Usbec.. Those youths. distin- guished themselves in the reign of David, and were employed by Solomon. -Afghan was distin
a 2
AFGHANS FROM THE JEWS. qt
guished by his corporal strength, which struck fer- ror into Demons and Genii. OUsbee was eminent for
“his learning.
Afghan used frequently to make excursions to the mountains ; where his progeny, after his death estab- lished themselves, lived ina state of independence, built forts, and exterminated the infidels.
When the select of creatures, Muhammed, appeared upon earth, his fame reached the Afghans, who sought him in multitudes under their leaders Khalid and Abdul Rashid, sons of Wald. The prophet ho- noured them with the most gracious reception, say- ing, ** Come, O Muluc, or Kings ;’”? whence they - assumed the title of Mehc, which they enjoy to this day. The prophet gave them his ensign, and said that the faith would be strengthened by them.
’ ‘Many sons were born of Khalid, the son of /¥z- lid, who signalized themselves in the presence of the prophet, by fighting against the infidels. Muhammed
erent and prayed for them.
In the reign of Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznah, aght men arrived, of the posterity of Khalid the son of Walid, whose names were Kalun, Alun, Daud, Yalua, Ahmed, Awin, and Ghazi. ‘The Sultan was much pleased with them, and appointed each a com> mander in his army. He also conferred on them the offices of Vazir, and Vakili Mutlak, or Regeay of the Empire.
Wherever they were stationed they obtained pos- session of the country, built mosques, and \over-—
threw the temples of idols. They encreased so much, that the army of Mahmud was chiefly
4
72 ON THE DESCENT OF THE
composed of Afghans. When Herhind, a powerfal prince of Jdindustan, meditated an invasion of Ghaz- nah, Sultan Mahmud. dispatched against him the descendants of KéAalid with twenty thousand horse: a battle ensued ; the Afghans made the attack ; and, after a severe engagement, which lasted from day- break till noon, defeated Herhind, killed many of the infidels, and converted some to the Muhammedan faith. | é
The Afghans now began to establish themselves in the mountains; and some settled in cities with the permission of Sultan Mahmud. They framed regu- ‘lations, dividing themselves into four classes, agree- ably to the following description :—The first is the pure class, consiting of those, whose fathers and mothers were Afghans. The second class consists of those: whose fathers were Afghans, and mothers of another nation. The third class contains those whose mothers were Afghans, and fathers of another nation... The fourth class is composed of the. chil- dren of women whose mothers were Afghans, and fathers and husbands of a different nation. Persons who do not belong to one of these classes, are ng called Afghans. Wy bail
After the death of Sultan Mahmud they made ano- ther settlement in the mountains. Shihabuddin Gauri, a subsequent Sultan of Ghaznah, was twice repulsed from Hindustan. “His /uzir assembled the people, and asked if any of the posterity of Khalid
_were living. They answered, ‘* Many now live ‘‘ in a state of independence in the mountains, ‘© where they have a considerable army.” |The Vazir requested them to go to the mountains, and_ by entreaties prevail on the -dfehans to come; for they .were the descendants of companions of the prophet mee a He
AFGHANS FROM THE JEWS, 73
_ The inhabitants of Ghaznah undertook this em- bassy, and, by entreaties and presents, conciliated the minds of the dfghans, who promised to engage in the service of the Sultan, provided he would himself come and enter into an agreement with them. The Sultan visited them in their mountains, honoured them, and gave them dresses and other presents. They supphed him with twelve thousand horse, and a considerable army of infantry. Being dispatched by the Sultan before his own army, they took Dehli, killed Roy Pak- toura the king, his ministers and nobles ; laid waste the city, and made the infidels prisoners. They after- wards exhibited nearly the same scene in Canauj.
The Sultan, pleased by the reduction of those cities, conferred honours upon the 4fghans. It is said that he then gave them the titles of Patan and Khan. The word Patan is derived from the Amd: verb Paitna, to rush, in aljusion to their alacrity in attacking the ene- my. The Pazans have greatly distinguished them- selves in the history of Hi ndustan, and are divided into a variety of sects. .
ime The race of Afghans ia themselves of the Mountain of Solomon, which is near Kandahar, and the circumjacent country, where they have built forts : this tribe has furnished many kings. The following monarchs of this race have sat upon the throne of Dehli :—Sultan Behlole, Afghan Lodi, Sultan Secan- der, Sultan Ibrahim, Shir Shah, Islam Shah, Adil Shak Sur. They also number the following kings of Gaur : ——Solaiman Shah Gurzant, Bayaxid Shah, and Kuth
_ Shah; besides whom their nation has produced many conquerors of provinces. The Afghans are called So. faimani, either because they were formerly the sub- jects of Solomon, king of the Jews, or because they in- habit the Mountain of So/omon,
ves ON THE DESCENT OF THE
The translation being finished, I shall only add that the country of the 4fgkans, which is a province of Cabul, was originally called Rok, and from hence is derived the name of the Rohi//ahs. The city, which was established in it by the Afghans, was called by them Paishwer, or Paishor, and is now the name of the whole district. The sects of the 4dfghans, or Pa- tans, are very numerous. The principal are these :— Lodi, Lohaunt, Sur, Serwani, Yusufzihi, Bangish, Di- laxai, Khatt1, Yasin, Khail, and Baloje. The mean- ing of Zihi, is offspring ; and of Khaz/, sect. A very particular account of the Afghans has been written b the late Hafiz Rahmat Khan, a chief of the Rohillahs, from which the curious reader may derive much infor- mation. "They are Muselmans, partly of the Szni, and partly of the Siizk persuasion, They are great boasters of the antiquity of their origin, and reputation of their tribe; but other Muse/mans entirely reject their claim, and consider them of modern and even base extrac- tion. "However, their character may be collected from
history, they have distinguished themselves by their courage, both singly and unitedly, as principals and auxiliaries. They have conquered for their own prin- ées and for foreigners, and have always been consider= ed the main streneth of the army in which they have served. - As they have been applauded for virtues, they have also been reproached for vices, having some- times been guilty of treachery, and even acted the base part of assassins,
AFGHANS FROM THE JEWS. 7§
A Specimen of the Puswro Lancuace.
ro - - fo - - - = = a wrtbeet aS, 5 prin Ses ° > i - OF Qaeer 9 «+ OD _%
$5 a2 8555 S53 yo 5 9 L5!
By the oppression of tyrannical rulers, Fire, the grave, and Pazshor, all three have been rendered equal. |
~-e 9 F9NG Ge -=-9% wey eS a Oe
oO. Hg 355 SES G3 es pp 5 Cin 9
With respect to prayers enjoined by the Sunnah, they are remitted.
: ¥ may; , It is thus expressed in the reports :
RAD OO Oss) (ETO & el oO” eared
SHS Usd AG GU soak op, U5) ll
If a man perform them, it is very laudable. If he do not perform them, it is no crime in him.
Ces Sj peo
TH Lee -9 Gs tele - Sp Srigg gna at Sy wo oS
dials al gd tw O 9 duw d
Y
If the difpofition be not good, O Mirza,
What difference is there between a Sayyed and a Brabmant!
>
( 76 )
NOTE BY THE PRESIDENT.
HIS account of the Afghans may lead to a very a interesting discovery. We learn from Esdras, that the ten tribes, after a wandering journey, came to a country called Arsareth; where, we may suppose, they settled. Now the 4fghans are said, by the best Persian historians, to be descended from the Jews; they have traditions among themselves of such a des- cent; and it is even asserted, that their families are distinguished by the names of Jewish tribes, although, since their conversion to the Js/am, they studiously conceal their origin: the Pushto language, of which I have seen a dictionary, has a manifest resemblance to the Chaldaic; and a considerable district under their dominion is called Hazareh, or Hazaret, which might easily have been changed into the word used by Esdras. 1 strongly recommend an inquiry into the literature and history of the 4fghans.
C7p)
V. REMARKS
ON THE ISLAND OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA.
BY THE PRESIDENT.
INZUAN (a name which has been gradually corrupted into Anzuame, Anjuan, Juanny, and Johanna) bas been governed about two centuries by a colony of drabs, and exhibits a curious instance of the slow approaches toward civilization, which are made by a small community, with many natural ad- vantages, but with few means of improving them. An account of this African island, in which we hear the language and see the manners of Arabia, may neither be uninteresting in itself, nor foreign to the objects of inquiry proposed at the institution of our Society.
_ On Monday, the 28th of July, 1783, after a voyage, in the Crocodile, of ten weeks and two days from the rugged islands of Cape Verd, our eyes were delighted with a ptospect so beautiful, that neither a painter nor a poet could perfectly represent it, and so cheering to us, that it can justly be conceived by such only as have been in our preceding situation. Ix was the sun rising in full splendor on the isle of Mayata (as the seamen called it) which we had joyfully distinguished the pre- ceding afternoon by the height of its peak, and which now appeared at no great distance from the windows
of our cabin; while-Alimzuan, for which we had so long panted, was plainly discernible a-head, where its high lands presented themselves with remarkable bold- ness. The weather was fair, the water smooth ; and a
78 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
gentle breeze drove us easily before dinner-time round a rock, on which the Bri//iant struck just a year before, into a commodious road *, where we dropped our anchor early in the evening. We had seen Mehila, another sister island, in the course of the day.
The frigate was presently surrounded with canoes, and the deck soon crowded, with natives of all ranks, from the high born chief, who washed linen, to the half-naked slave, who only paddled. Most of them had letters of recommendation from Englishmen, which none of them were able to read, though they spoke English intelligibly ; and'some a ppeared vain of titlesy which our countrymen had given them in play, ac- cording to their supposed stations. We had Lords, Dukes, and: Princes on board, soliciting our custom and importuning us for presents. In fact, they were too sensible to be proud of empty sounds, but justly imagined, that those ridiculous titles would serve as marks of distinction, and, by attracting notice, pro- cure for them something substantial. The only men of real consequence in the island, whom. we saw before we landed, were the Governor Abdullah, second cou-
fin to the king, and his brother 4/w, with their seves .
ral sons; all of whom ‘will again be particularly men- tioned : they understood rabic, seemed zealots in the Mohammedan faith, and. admired my copies of the Alkoran some verses of which they read, whilst “47- wi perused the opening of. another Arabian manuz _ script, and explained it in Englisk more accurately
than could Have been expected.
- The next morning showed us the island in all its beauty 5 and the scene was so diversified, that a oa
* Lat. 12° 10° 47” 8. Longs “f° 25/5” E. ‘he the Master. : ;
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. 79
tinct view of it could hardly have been exhibited by the best pencil: ‘you must, therefore, be satisfied with a mere description, written on the very spot, and compared attentively with the natural landscape. We were at anchor ina fine bay, and before us was a vast amphitheatre, of which you may form a ge- neral notion by picturing in your minds a multi- tude of hills infinitely varied in size and figure, and ‘then supposing them to be thrown together, with a kind of artless symmetry, in all imaginable posi- tions. The back ground was a series of moun- tains, one of which is pointed, near half a mile ‘perpendicularly high from the level of the sea, and little more than three miles from the shore: all of them were richly clothed with wood, chiefly fruit- trees, of an exquisite verdure. I had seen many @
mountain of a stupendous height in Wales and Swisserland, but never saw one before, round the bosom of which the clouds were almost continu- ally rolling, while its green summit rose flourishing; above them, and received from them an additional ‘brightness. Next to this distant range of hills was another tier, part of which appeared charmingly yerdant, and part ‘rather barren; but the contrast of colours changed even this “nakedness into a beauty. Nearer still were innumerable mountains, or rather cliffs, which brought down their verduré and fertility quite to the beach; so that every shade of green, the sweetest of colours, was, displayed at one view by land and by water. But nothing con- duced more to the variety of this enchanting pros- pect, than the many rows of palm.-trees, especi- ally the tall and graceful drecas on the shores; in the valleys, and on the ridges of hills, where: one might almost suppose them to have been planted regularly by design. A more beautiful appearance can scarce be conceived, than such a number of ele- gant palms in such a situation, with luxuriant tops, hike ib icin plumes, * placed’ at just intervals, and
80 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
showing between them part of the remoter landscape, while they left the rest to be supplied by the be- holder’s imagination. The town of Matsamudo lay on our left, remarkable at a distance for the tower of the principal mosque, which was built by Heh- mah, a queen of the island, from whom the pre- sent king is descended: a little on our right was a small town, called Bantani. Neither the territory of Nice, with its olives, date-trees, and cypresses, nor the isles of JZeres, with their delightful orange- groves, appeared so charming to me as the view from the road of Hinzuan; which, nevertheless, is far surpassed, as the Captain of the Crocodile assured us, by many of the islands in the Southern Ocean, lf life were not too short for the complete discharge of all our respective duties, public and private, and for the acquisition even of necessary knowledge in any degree of perfection, with how much pleasure and improvement might a great part of it be spent in admiring the beauiies of this wonderful orb, and contemplating the nature of man in all its varieties!
We hastened to tread on firm land, to which we had been so long disused, and went on shore, after breakfast, to see the town, and return the Govyernor’s visit. As we walked, attended by a crowd of natives, — I surprized them by reading aloud an drabic inscrip- ‘tion over the gate of a mosque, and still more, when I entered it, by explaining four sentences, which were written very distinctly on the wall, signifying, ‘* that “* the world was given us for our own edification, “< not for the purpose of raising sumptuous build- “‘ ings; life, for the discharge of moral and reli- <* gious duties, not for pleasureable indulgences ; ‘«* wealth, to be liberally bestowed, not avariciously ** hoarded ; and learning, to produce good actions, s* not empty disputes.” We could not but. respect the teinple even of a false prophet, in which we-
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. St
found such excellent morality: we saw nothing. bet- ter among the Romish trumpery in the church at Ma- deira. When we came to Abdullah's house, we were conducted through a smal] court-vard into an open Toom, on each siae of which was a large and conves nient sofa, and above it a high bed-place in a dark recess, over which a chintz counterpoint hung down from the ceiling. This is the general form of the best rooms if the island; and most of the tolerable houses havea similar apartment on the opposite side of the
court, that there may be at all hours a place in the
shade for dinner or for repose. We were entertained
with ripe dates from Yemen, and the milk of cocoa-
nuts; but the heat of the room, which seemed accessible
to all who chose to enter it, and the scent of musk, or
civet, with which it was perfumed, soon made us
desirous of bréathing a purer air; nor could I be
detained long by the Arabic manuscripts, which
the Governor produced, but which appeared of lit-
tle use, and consequently of no value, except to such
as love mere curiosities. One of them, indeéed, relat-
ing to the penal law of the Mohammedans, 1 would
oladly have purchased at a just price; but he knew not
what toask; and 1 knewthat better books on that sub-
ject might be procured in Bengal, He then offered
mea black boy for one of my ° Alkorans, and pressed
me to barter an Jwdian dress, which he had seen on
board the ship, for a cow and calf.. The golden
slippers attracted him most, since his wife, he said,
would like to wear them; and, for that reason, J
made him a present of them; but had destined the
book and the robe for his superior. No high opi-
nion could be formed of Sayyad Abdullah, who seemed very eager for gain, and very servile where
he expected it. : pt
Our next visit was to Shaikh Ss the king’s eldest son; and if we had seen him. first, the state Vet, IL. G
82 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
of civilization in Finzwan would have appeared at its lowest ebb. The worst English hackney i in the
worst stable is better lodged, and ‘looks more princely |
than this heir apparent ; but though his mien and apparel were extremely savage, yet allowance should have been made for his illness 5 which, as we after- wards learned, was an abscess in the spleen: a disor- der not uncommon in that country, and frequently - cured, agreeably to the Arabian practice, by the actuak cautery. He was incessantly chewing pieces of the Areca-nut with shell-lime : a custom borrowed, I sup- pose, from the Indians, who greatly improve the composition with spices and betel-leaves, to which they formerly added camphor: all the natives of rank chewed it, but not, I think, to so great an ex- cess. Prince Slim from time to time gazed at him- self with complacency in a piece of broken looking- glass, which was glued on a small board: a specimen of wretchedness, which we observed in no other house ; but many circumstances convinced us that the apparently low condition of his royal highness, who was not on bad terms with his father, and seem- ed not to want authority, proceeded wholly from his avarice. His brother Hamdullah, who generally re- sides in the town of Domoni, has a very different cha- racter, being esteemed a man of worth, good sense, and learning: he had come, the day before, to Mat- samudo, on hearing that an English frigate was in the road; and I, having gone’out for a few minutes to read an Arabic i inscription, found him on my return devouring a manuscript which I had left with some of the company. He is a Kadi or Mohammedan judge; and as he seemed to have more bea bys than his countrymen, Iwas extremely concerned that I had so little conversation with him. The king, Shaikh Ah- med, has a younger son, named Abdullah, whose usual
residence is’ in the town of Vani, which he seldom
leaves, as the state of his ‘health is very infirm. Since the succession to the title and authority of Su/-
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. 83
éan is not unalterably fixed in one line, but requires confirmation by the chiefs of the island, it is not im- , probable that they may hereafter be conferred on - prince Hamdullah.
A little beyond the hole in which Salim received us, was his 4aram, or the apartment of ‘his women, which he permitted us all to sed, not through polite- hess tO strangers, as we believed at first, but as [ learned mp ea dl from his own lips, in expectation of a present. Wesaw only two or three miserable - creatures with their heads covered, while the favour- Ite, as we supposed, stood behind a coarse curtain, and showed. her ankles under it, loaded with silver rings; which, if she was capable of reflection, she must have considered as glittering fetters rather than ornaments; buta rational being would have preferred the condition of a wild beast, exposed to perils and hunger in a forest, to the splendid misery of being - wife or mistress to ae oe.
Before we returned, 4/wi was desirous of fhowing me his, books; but the day was too far advanced, and I promised to visit him some other morning. The governor however prevailed on us to see his place in, the country,. where he invited us to dine the next day. The walk was extremely pleasant from the town to the side of a rivulet, which formed in one part a small pool very convenient for bathing, and thence through groves and alleys tothe foot of a hill; but the dining-room was little better than an open barn, and was recommended only by the coolness. of its shade. Abdullah would accompany us on our return to the ship, together with two Muftis who spoke Ara- bic indifferently, and seemed eager to see all my ma- nuscripts; but they were! very moderately jearned, and gazed with stupid wonder on a fine copy of the Hamasak, and on other collections of ancient poetry.
G2
$4 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
Early the next morning a black messenger, with @ tawny laud as his interpreter, came from prince Salm. who having broken his perspective glass, wished to: procure another by purchase or barter. A polite an- swer was returned, and steps taken to gratify his wishes. As we on our part expressed a desire to visit the king at Domoni, the prince’s messenger told us that his master would, no doubt, lend us_ palan- quins (for there was not a horse in the island) and order a sufficient number of his vassals to carry us). whom we might pay for their trouble as we thought just. We commissioned him therefore to ask that favour, and' begged that ‘all might be ready for our excursion before sun-rise, that we might escape the heat of the noon, which,. though it was the middle of winter, we had found excessive. The boy, whose name was Combo Madi, staid with us longer than: his companion: there was something in-his look so ingenuous, and in his broken English so simple, that we encouraged him to continue his innocent prattle. He wrote and read Arabic tolerably well, and set down at my desire the names of several towns in the island, which he first told me was properly called Hm- zuan. The fault of begging for whatever he liked, he had in common with the governor and other nobles, but hardly in a greater degree: his first pe- tition for some lavender-water was readily granted 5: and a small bottle of it was so acceptable to him, that if we had suffered him, he would have kissed our feet : but it was not for himfelf that he rejoiced so extra- vagantly: he told us, with tears starting from ‘his eyes, that his mother would be pleased with it, andi the idea of her pleasure seemed: to fill him with rap- ture. Never did I see filial affection more warmly felt, or more tenderly and, in my opinion, unaffect- edly expressed; yet this boy was nota favourite of the officers, who thought him artful. His mother’s name, hesaid, was Fasima ; and he importuned us te
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA, 85
visit her ;. conceiving, I suppose, that all mankind must love and admire her. We promised to gratify him ; and having made him several presents, permit- ted him to return. As he reminded me of A/addin in the Arabian tale,I designed to give him that name ina recommendatory letter, which he pressed me to write, instead of St. Domingo, as some European visiter had tidiculously called him; but, since the allusion would not have been generally known, and since the title of Alau'ldin, or eminence in faith, might have offended his superiors, I thought it .advisable for him to keep his African name. A very indifferent dinner was prepared for-us at the house of the Governor, whom we did not-see the whole day, as it was the beginning of Ramadan, the Mohammedan \ent, and he was en- gaged in his devotions, or made them his EXcuse 5 but his eldest son sat by us while we dined, together with Musa who was employed, jointly with his bro- ther Husain, as purveyor to the Captain of the frigate.
Having observed a very-elegant shrub, that grew about six feet high, in the court-yard, but was not then in flower, | learned with pleasure, that it was dinna, of which I hadread:so much in drabian poems, and which Ezropean botanists:have ridiculously named Lawsonia. Musa bruised some of the leaves, and, having moistened them with water, applied them to our nails and the tips of our fingers, which in a short time became of a dark orange-scarlet. I had be- fore conceived a different idea of this dye, and ima- gined, that it was used by the Argbs to imitate the atural redness of those parts in young and healthy per- sons, which in all countries must be considered as a beauty :—perhaps a less quantity of hinna, or the same differently prepared, might have produced that effect. - The old men in Arabia used the same dye to conceal their grey hairs, while their daughters were dying their
. G..-9%<
86° REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
lips and gums black, to set off the whiteness of their teeth ; so unfversal in all nations and ages are per- sonal vanity and a love of disguising truth; though in all cases, the farther our species recede from na- ture, the farther they depart from true beauty ; and men at least should disdain to use artifice or deceit for any purpose or on any occasion. If the women of rank at Paris, or. those in London who wish to imitate’ them, be inclined to call the Arabs barbarians, “let them view their own head-dresses and cheeks in a glass, and, if they have left no room for blushes, be inwardly at least ashamed of their censure. .
~ In the afternoon I walked along way up the moun- tains in a winding path amid plants and trees no less new than beautiful, and regretted exceedingly that very few of them were in blossom, as 1 should then have had leisure to examine them. Curiosity led front hill to hill; and I came at last to the sources of a ri- vulet, which we had passed near the shore, and from which the ship was to be supplied with excellent wa- . ter, I saw no birds on the mountains but Gui-- . nea-fowl, which might have been easily caught? - no insects were troublesome to me but mosqui- ‘tos; and I had no fear of venomous reptiles, having been assured that the air was too pure for any to exist in it; but I was often unwillingly a cause of fear to the gentle and harmless lizard, who ran among the shrubs. On my return I missed the path by which [I had ascended; but, having met some blacks laden with yams and plantains, I was by them directed to another, which led me round, through a charming grove of cocoa-trees, to the Governor’s country-seat, where our entertainment was closed by a’syllabub, which the English had taught the Muselmans to make for them. ©
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. $7
We received no answer from Salim; nor, indeed, expected one; since we took- for granted that he could not but approve our intention of visiting his ‘father ; and we went on shore before sun-rise, in full expectation of a pleasant excursion to Domoni: but we were happily disappointed. ‘The servants, at the prince’s door, told us coolly, that their master was in- disposed, and, as they believed, asleep; that he had given them no orders concerning his palanquins, and that they durst not disturb him. 4/27 soon came to pay us his compliments, and was followed by his eldest son, Ahmed, with whom we walked to the gar- dens of the two princes Salim and Hamdullah: the situation was naturally good, but wild and desolate ; and, in Salim’s garden, geet y we entered through a miserable hovel, we saw a convenient bathing-place, well-built with stone, but then in great disorder, and a shed, by way of summer-house, like that under which we dined at the Governor’s, but smaller and less neat. On the ground there lay a kind of cradle, about six feet long, and alittle more than one foot in breadth, made of cords twisted in a sort of clumsy net-work, with a long thick bambu fixed to each side of it: this, we heard with surprize, was a royal pa- Janquin, and one of the vehicles in which we were intended to have been rocked on mens shoulders over the mountains. I had much conversation with Ahmed, whom | tound intelligent and communica- tive: he told me that several of his countrymen com- posed songs and tunes; that he was himself a passion- ate lover of poetry and music; and that, if we would dine at his house, he would play and sing tous. We declined his invitation to dinner, as we had madea conditional promise, if ever we passed a day at Ma/- samudo, to eat our custy with Bana Gibu, an honest man, of whom we purchased eggs and vegetables, and to whom some Englishmau had giyen the title of Lord, which made him iat vain: we could therefore
4
88 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
make Sayyad Ahmed only a morning visit. He sung a hymn or twoin Arabic, and accompanied his drawl- ing, though pathetic, psalmody with a kind of man- doline, which he touched with an awkward quill: the instrument was very imperfect, but seemed to give him delight. The names of the strings were written on itin Arabian or Indian figures, simple and com- pounded; but I could not think them worth copying, He gave Captain Williamson, who wished to present some literary curiosities to the library at Dublin, a small roll containing a hymn in Arabic letters, but in the language of Mombaza, which was mixed with Arabic; but it hardly deserved examination, since the study of languages has. little intrinsic value, and is only useful as the instrument of real knowledge, which we Can scarce expect from. the poets of the Mozam- bigue. Ahmed would, | believe, have heard our Eu. ropean airs (1 always except French melody) with rap- ture, for his favourite tune was a common Jrish jig, with which he seemed wonderfully affected. 4
~ On our return to the beach I thought of visiting old A4/wi, according te my promise, and prince Salim, whose character I had not then discovered: J resolved for that purpose to stay on shore alone, our dinner with Gibw having been fixed at an early hour. dhwi showed me his manuscripts, which chiefly related, to the ceremonies and ordinances of his own religion; and one of them, which I had formerly seen in Move rope, was a collection of sublime and elegant hymns in praise of Mohammed, with explanatory notes in the margin. I requested him to read one of them after the manner of the 4rabs ; and he chanted it in a strain by no means unpleasing; but Iam persuaded that he understood it very imperfectly: The room, which was open ‘to the street, was presently crowded with vi- siters, most of whom were Mauftis, or Expounders,
of the Law; and lwi, desirous perhaps tQ display
OF HINZUAN, OR) JOHANNA, 89
his zeal before them at the expence of good. breed- ing, directed my attention to a passage'in a commen- tary on the Koran, which I found levelled. at thé Christians. The commentator, haying related with some additions (but on the whole not inaccurately) the circumstances of the temptation, puts this speech into the mouth of the tempter: ‘* Though I am un- ** able to delude thee, yet 1 will mislead, by thy s¢ means, more human creatures than thou wilt set ** right.” <‘ Nor was this menace vain, (says the Mohammedan writer) * for the inhabitants of a region ‘ many thousand leagues in extent, are still so deluded * by the Devil. shat they impiously call fsa the son of * God! Heaven preserve us,’ he adds, ‘ from blas- ¢ pheming Christians as well as blaspheming Jaws, Although a religious dispute with those obstinate zea- Jots would have been unreasonable and fruitless, yet they <eserved, I thought, a slight reprehension, as the attack seemed to be concerted among them. ‘¢ The ¢ commentator,’ said I, * was much to blame for passing so indiscriminate atid, hasty a censure: the title, which * gave your legislator and gives you such offence, was © often applied in Judea (by a bold figure agreeable ‘ to the Hebrew idiom, though unusual in Arabic) ‘ to angels, to holy men, and even to all mankind, who * are commanded to call God their Father ; and in * this large sense the apostle, to the Romans, calls e elect the children of God, and the Messiah the rer. born among many brethren ;, but the words only © begotten are applied transcendently and incompa- * rably to him alone *; and, as for me who believes ‘the scriptures, which you also profess to believe, § though you assert without proof that we have Mil: é tered them, I cannot refuse him an appellation, *« though far surpassing our reason, by which he is
te * Rom. viii. 29 Seer Johnii, 1. I, Barrow, 231, 232, 25%. a
go- REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
‘ distinguished in the Gospel; and the believers in’ * Muhammed, who expressly name him the Messiah, “and pronounce him to have been born of a virgin, ‘which alone might. fully justify the phrase con- * demned by this-author, are themselves condemn- € able for cavilling at words, when they cannot ob- « ject to the substance of our faith consistently with ‘ their own.’ The Muselmans had nothing to any in
reply ; and the conversation was changed,
I was astonished at the neerions which Akwi put to me concerning the late peace and the independence of America; the several powers and resources of Bri- tain and France, Spain and Hollan., the character and supposed views of the Emperor, the compara- tive strength of the Russian, Imperial, and Othman armies, and their respective modes of bringing their forces to action. 1] answer him without reserve, ex- cept on the state of our possessions in India; nor were my answers lost, for I observed, that all dies. company were variously affected by them, generally with amazement, often with concern, especially when I described to them the great force and admi- rable discipline of the Aurian army, and the stupid prejudices of the Furks, whom nothing can induce to” abandon their old Fartarian habits ; and exposed the weakness of their empire in Africa, and even in. ar more distant provinces of sia. In return, he ga me clear but general information concerning the O-" vernment and commerce of his island: ** His coun=" “try,” he said, © was poor, and produced few articles’ “¢ ¥ trade ; but if-they could get money, which they
ow preferred to play-things,”’ those were his words, ‘< they might easily,” he added, ‘ procure foreign® ‘€ commodities and exchange them advantageously’ « with their neighbours in the islands and. on the ‘< continent. Thus with a little money,” said he, _“ we purchase muskets, powder, balls, cuagaty»
\
€¢
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. gt
knives, clothes, raw cotton, and other articles brought from Bombay, and with those we trade to Madagascar for the natural produce of the country or dollars, with which the French buy cattle, honey, butter, and so forth, in that island... With gold, which we receive from your ships, we can procure elephants teeth from the natives of Mo- zambique. who barter them also for ammunition and bars of iron; and the Portugueze in that country give us clothes of various kinds in ex- change for our cominodities ; these cloths we dis- pose of luctatively inthe threeneighbouring islands, ‘whence we bring rice, cattle, a kind of bread-fruit, which grows in Comara, and slaves, which we buy -also at other places to which we trade ; and we carry on this trafic in our own vessels.”
Here I could not help expressing my abhorrence of
their s/ave-trade, and asked him by what law they
cl
aimed a property in rational beings, since our Cre-_
ator had given our species a dominion, to be mode- rately exercised, over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, but none to man over man. ** By no
law,” answered he, ‘‘ unless necessity be a law. There are nations in Madagascar and in Africa, who know neither God nor his prophet, nor Moses, nor David, nor the Messiah: those nations are in
erpetual war and take many captives, whom, if Mey could not sell, they would certainly kill. ine dividuals among them are in extreme poverty, ‘and have numbers of children, who, if they can- not be disposed of, must perish through hunger, together with their miserable parents. By purchas- ing these wretches we preserve their lives, and, perhaps, those of many others whom our money relieves. The sum of the argument is this: If we “buy them they will live; if they become valuable seyvants, they will live comfortably ; bur, if they are not sold, they must die miserably.” ¢ There
2 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
« may be,’ said J, * suchcases; but you fallaciously draw
« a general conclusion from afew particular instances ;
“ and this is the very fallacy which, on a, thousand
* other occasions, deludes mankind. It is not to be
« doubted, that a constant and gainful craffic in hu-
“ man creatures foments war, in which captives are
‘ always made, and keeps up that perpetual enmity
‘ which you pretend to be the cause of a practice im « itself reprehensible, while in truth it isits‘efect. The * same traffic encourages laziness in some parents,
‘ who might in general. support their families by pro-+
‘oiper industry, and seduces others to stifle their na-
* tural feelings. At most, your redemption of those
* unhappy children can amount only to a. personal
“ contract implied between you, for gratitude and rea~
* sonable service on their part, for kindness and.
* humanity on yours; but can you think your part
“ performed by disposing of them against their wills,
* with as much indifference as if you were selling
‘ cattle, especially as they might become readers of the. * Koran, and pillars of your faith * “* The law,” said
he, “ forbids our selling them, when they are be-
“ lievers in the Prophet ; and little children only are
«* sold ; nor they often, or by all masters.” * You,
« who believe in Muhanimed, said I, * are bound
‘ by the the spirit and letter of his laws to. take pains,
‘ that they also may believe in him ; and if you nex
« glect so important a duty for sordid gain, I do
* not see how you can hope for prosperity in this world, “or for happiness in the next.’ My old friend and
the Muftis assented, and muttered a few prayers; but
probably forgot my ‘preaching before many aio
had passed.
So: much time had lighed away in this conversa- tion, that I could make but a short visit to, Prince Salim ; and my view in visiting him was to fix the time of our journey to Domoni as early as possible on the next morning. His appearance was more savage
OF HINZUAN, OF JOHANNA. 93
than ever, and I found him in a disposition to com- plain bitterly against the fxglish: No acknow- ledgement, he said, had been made for the kind attentions of himself, and the chief men of his country to the officers and people of the Brilliant, though a whole year had elapsed since the wreck. I really wondered at the forgetfulness, to which alone such a neglect could be imputed, and assured him that I would express my opinion both in Bengal and in letters to Hughind. “ We have little,” said he, * tohope from letters ; for, when we have been paid “ with them instead of money, and have shewn ‘© them on board your ships, we have commonly « been treated with disdain, and often with impreca- * tions.” I assured him, that either those letters must have been written coldly and by very obscure pefsons, or shown to very ill-bred men, of whon there were too many in all nations; but that a few imstances of rudeness ought not to give him a general prejudice against our national character. ** But you,” said he, ‘* area wealthy nation, and we are indigent, “yet, though all our groves of cocoa-trees, our fruits, and our cattle, are ever at your service, you *¢ always try to make hard bargains with us for what “you chuse to dispose of ; and frequently will neither “¢ sell nor give those things which we principally ¢¢ want.” © To form,” said [, ‘ a just opinion of © Englishmen, you must visit us in our own island, © or at least India; here we are strangers and travel- © lers: many of us have no. design’ to trade in any “country, and none of us think of trading in Ainzuan, where we stop only for’ refreshment. * The clothes, arms, of instruments, which you may want, are commonly necessary or convenient to us; but, if Savyad Alwi or his sons were to be ‘strangers in our country, you would have no rea- *’son to boast of superior hospitality.” He then showed me, a second time, a part of an old silk vesr, ‘with the star‘of the Order of the Thistle, and bez.
«¢
O4. REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
ged me to explain the motto ; expressing a wish, that the order might be conferred on him by the King of England, in return for his good offices to the English. I represented to him the impossibility of his being gratified, and took occasion to say, that there was more true dignity in their’own native titles, than in those of prince, duke,'and Jord, which had_ been idly given them, but had no conformity to their manners or the constitution of their government. a This conversation being agreeable to neither of us,
I changed it, by desiring that the palanquins and -bearers might be ready next morning as. early as possible. He answered, that his palanquins were at our service for nothing, but that we must pay him’ ten dollars for each set of bearers; . that it was the stated price, and that Mr. Hastings had paid it when-he went to visit the king. This, as I learned afterwards, was false; but, at all events, i knew that he would keep the dollars himself, and give nothing to the bearers, who deserved them better, and whom he would compel to leave their cottages, and toil for his profit. ‘* Can you imagine,” I re- plied, ‘* that we would employ four-and-twenty men ‘66 to bear us so far on their shoulders without reward- <‘ ing them amply? But since they are freemen (so ‘he had assured me) ‘‘.and not your slaves, we will pay ‘< them in proportion to their diligence and good beha- <¢ viour ; and it becomes neither your dignity nor ours -$© to make a previous bargain.” I showed him an ele- gant copy of the Koran, which I destined for his father, and described the rest of my present; but he coldly asked, ‘¢ if that was all?”’? Had he been king, a purse of dry dollars would have given him more pleasure -than the finest or holiest manuscript. Finding him, in conversing ona variety of subjects, utterly void of in- _telligence or principle, I took my leave, and saw him no more; but promised to let him know for certain whe- ther we should make our intended excursion. |
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. 95
We dined in tolerable comfort, and had occasion, in the course of the day, to observe the manners of the natives in the middle’rank, who are called Banas, all of whom have slaves constantly at work for them. We visited the mother of Combomadi, who seemed in a station but little raised above indigence; and her husband, who. was a mariner, bartered an Arabic ‘treatise. on astronomy and navigation, which he had read, for a sea-compass, of which he well knew the use.
In the morning I had conversed with two very*old Arabs of Yemen, who had brought some articles of ~ trade to Hinzuan ; and in the afternoon I met another, who had come from Maskat (where at that time there ‘was a civil war) to purchase, if he could, an hundred stand of arms. I told them all that I loved their na- tion; and they returned my compliment with great warmth, especially the two old_ men, who were near “fourscore, and reminded me of Zohair arid Hareth.
So badan account had been given me of theroad over the mountains, that I dissuaded my companions from thinking of the journey, to which the captain became rather disinclined; but as 1 wished to be fully ac- ‘quainted with a country which I might never see again, I wrote the next day to Saim,. requesting him. ‘to lend me one palanguin and to order a sufficient ‘number of men. He sent me no written answer, which - Lascribe rather to his incapacity than to rudeness ; ‘but the Governor, with 4/7 and two of his sons, came
» on board in the evening, andsaid, that they had seea my letter; that all should be ready; but that I could not pay less for the men than ten-dollars. I said I _would pay more, but it should be to the men them- selves, according to their behaviour. They return- »ed somewhat dissatisfied, after 1 had played at chess
96 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
with A/wi’s younger son, in whose manner and ad- dress there was something remarkably pleasing.
Before sun- risé, On the 2d of August, I went alone
onshore, with a small basket of such provisions as I might want in the course of the day, and with some cushions to make the prince’ 's palanquin at least a tolers able vehicle ; but the prince was resolved to receive the dollars to which his men were entitled; and he knew that, as 1 was eager for the journey, he could prescribe his own terms. Old Akvi met me on the beach, and brought exctses from Salim, who he said was indisposed.. He conducted me to his house, and seemed rather desirous of persuading me to abandon my design “of visiting the king; but I assured him, that, if the prince would not supply me with proper attendants, T would walk to Domonz with my own ser- vants and a guide. Shaikh Salim, he said, was miserably avaricious, and that he was ashamed of a kinsman with such a disposition; but that he was no less obstinate than covetous; and that, without ten dollars paid in hand, it would be impossible to procure bearers. I then gave him three guineas, which he carried, or pretended to carry to Sam; but returned without the change, alleging that he had no
silver, and promising to give me on my return the.
few dollars that remained. In about an hour the ridi- culous vehicle was brought by nine sturdy blacks, who
could not speak a word of Arabic, so that I expected.
no information concerning the country through which I was totravel ; but 4/2 assisted mein a | point of the utmost consequfence. ‘You cannot go,” said he, ‘ without an interpreter, for the king speaks only * the language of this island; but I have a servant,
‘ whose name is Tumuni, a sensible and worthy man, -
‘who understands English, and is much esteemed ‘by the king; he is known and valued all ovet
; a eS eer a ee Le
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. 97
‘ Hinzuan...'This' man shall attend you; and you g wail soom be schaible of his, worth.’
.. Tumuni desired to ‘aut my basket; and we set out with a prospect of fine weather, but some hours later than I had intended. I walked, by the gardens of the two princes, to the skirts of the town, and came to,a little village consisting of several: very neat huts made. chiefly with the leaves of the cocoa-tree;. but the road a little farther was so stony, that I sat in the palanguin, and was borne with perfect safety over some rocks.. I then desired my guide to assure the men that I would pay them liberally; but the poor peas sants, who had: been brought from their farms on the hills, were not perfectly acquainted with the use of, money, and treated my promise with indifference. About five miles from Matsamudo lies the town. of Wan, where Shaikh Abdullah, who has already been mentioned, usually resides; 1 saw it at a distance, and it seemed to be agreeably situated. When I had in the rocky part of the road, I came to a stony where the sea appeared to have lost some ground, since there was a fine sand to the left, and beyond it a beautiful: bay, which. resembled that of Weymouth, and seemed equally convenient for bath- ing; but it did not appear to me. that the stones over which I was carried had been recently covered with water. Here I saw the frigate, and, taking leave _ of it for two days, turned.from the coast into a.fine country very neatly cultivated, and consisting partly of hillocks exquifitely green, partly of plains, which were-then in a gaudy dress of rich yellow blossoms. My guide informed me they were plantations, of a kind of vetch,. which was eaten by the natives. . Cot- tages and farms were interspersed all over this. gay champaign, and the whole scene was delightful ; 3 but it was soon changed for beauties of a peer kind. Vor. Il. > Ber
98 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
We descended’into a cool valley, through which ran a rivulet of perfectly clear water ; and there, find- ing my vehicle uneasy, though from the laughter and merriment of my bearers I concluded’them to be quite at their ease, I bade them set me down, and- walked before them all the rest of the way. Moun- tains, clothed with fine trees and flowering flirubs, presented themselves on our ascent from the vale; and we proceeded for half an hour through pleasant wood=" walks, where 1 regretted the impossibility of loi- tering a while to examine the variety of new blossoms, which succeeded one another at every step, and the ¥jrtues, as well as names, of which seemed familiar to Fumuni. At length we descended into a valley of greater extent than the former: a river or large wintery torrent ran through it, and fell down a steep declivity at the end of it, where it seemed to be lost among rocks. Cattle were grazing on the banks of the river, and the huts of their owners appeared on the hills: a more agreeable spot I had not before seen even in Swisserland or Mertonethshire ; but it was followed by an assemblage of natural beauties, which I hardly expected to find in a little island twelve de- grees to the south of the Line. I was not sufficiently pleased with my solitary journey to discover charms which had no actual existence, and the first effect of the contrast between S¢. Jago and Hinzuwan had ceased; but, without any disposition to give the landscape a high colouring, I may truly say, what I thought at the time, that the whole country which next presented itself, as far surpassed Ermenonville, or Blenheim, or any other imitations of nature, which f had seen in France or England, as the finest bay sur- passes an artificial piece of water. Two very high mountains, covered to the summit with the richest verdure, were at some distance on my right hand, ~ and separated from me by meadows diversified with cottages and herds, or by vallies resounding with tor-
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA. 09
tents and waterfalls ; on my left was the sea, to which there were beautiful openings from the hills and woods; and the road was a smooth path naturally winding through a forest of spicy shrubs, fruit-trees, and palms. Some high trees were spangled with white biossoms, equal i in fragrance to orange-flowers : my guide cal- led them Monongos ; but the day was declining so fast that ic was impossible to examine them: the variety of fruits, flowers, and birds, of which | had a tran- sient view in this magnificent garden, would have supplied a. naturalist with amusement for a month ; but I saw no remarkable insect, and no reptile of any kind... The woodland was diversified by a few plea-y sant glades, and new prospects were continually opened : ai length a’noble view of the sea burst upon me unexpectedly ; ; and, having. passed a hill or two, ‘we came to the beach, beyond which were several hills and cottages. We turned from the shore; and, on the next eminence, I saw the town of Domoni at a little distance below us. I was met by a number of natives, a few of whom spoke -4radic, and thinking © it a convenient place for repose, | sent my guide to apprize the king of my intended visit. He “returned in half an. hour with a polite message; and I walked into the town, which seemed large and populous. A great crowd accompanied me ; and I was conducted to a house built on the same: plan with the best houses at Matsamudo. In the middle of the court- yard stood a large Monongo-tree, which perfumed the air ; the apartment on the left was empty ; and in that on the right sat the king on a sofa or bench, covered with an ordinary carpet. He rose when I entered, and grasping my hands, placed me near him on the right ; ; but as he could speak only the language of Hinzuan, I had recourse to my friend Tumunz, than whoma rea- dier or more accurate interpreter could not have been found. I presented the king with a very hand- some Indian dress of Rie silk with golden flowers, 2
roo REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
which had been worn only once at a masquerade, and with a beautiful copy of the Koran, from which I read a few verses to him. He took them with great complacency, and said, he wished I had come by sea, that he might have loaded one of my_ boats with fruit, and with some of his finest cattle. - He had seen me, he said, on board the frigate, where he had been, according to his custom, in disguise, and had heard of me from his son Shaikh Ham- dullah. 1 gave-him an account of my journey, and extolled the beauties of his country: he put many questions concerning mine, and professed great regard for our nation. ‘¢ But I hear,” said he, ‘‘ that you are ‘© 4 magistrate, and consequently profess peace: why “* are you armed with a broad sword?” ‘ Iwas a * man,’ I said, ¢ before I was a magistrate; and, if it ‘ should ever happen that law could not protect < me, | must protect myself. He seemed about sixty years old, had a very cheerful countenance, and great appearance of good-nature mixed with a certain dignity, which distinguished him from the crowd of ministers and officers who attended him. Our con- versation was interrupted by notice, that it was the time for evening prayers; and, when he rose, he said ‘* this house is yours, and I will visit you in it, after ‘* you have taken some refreshment.” Soon after, ‘his servants brought a roast fowl, a tice pudding, and some other dishes, with papayas and very good pome- granates; my own basket supplied the rest of my supper. The room was hung with old red cloth, and decorated with pieces of porcelain and festoons of English bottles ; the lamps were placed on the ground in large sea-shells ; and the bed-place was a recess, concealed by a chintz hanging, opposite to the sofa, on which we had been sitting. Though it was not a place that invited repose, and the gnats were inex-_ pressibly troublesome, yet the fatigue of the day pro- cured me very comfortable slumber. I was waked
‘
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA, Io!
by the return of the king and his train ; some of whom were -4rabs, for I heard one of them'say huwa rakid, or, he is sleeping. There was immediate silence, and I passed the night with little disturbance, except from the unwelcome songs of the mosquitos. In the morning all was equally silent and solitary ; the house appeared to be deserted ; and I began to wonder what had become of Tumuni: he came at length with con- cern on his countenance, and told me thar the béarers had run away in the night; but that the king, who wished to’see me in another of his houses, would supply me with bearers, if he could not prevail on me to stay till a boat could be sent for. I went imme- diately to the king, whom I found sitting on a raised sofa in a large room, the walls of which were adorned with sontences from the Koran in very legible cha- racters: about fifty of ‘his subjects were seated on the ground in a semicircle before him; and. my inter- preter to his place in the midst of them. The good old king laughed heartily, when he heard the adven- ture of the night, and said, <* you will now be my <¢ guest for a week, I hope; but, seriously, if you s* must return soon, I will send into the country for *€ some peasants to carry you.” He then apologized for the behaviour of Shaikh Salim, which he had heard from Zumuni, who told me afterwards that he was much.displeased with it, and would not fail to express his displeasure. He concluded with a long harangue on the. advantage which the English might derive from sending a ship every year from Bombay to trade with his subjects, and on the wonderful cheap- ness of their commodities, especially of their cowries. Ridiculous as this idea might seem, it showed an en- largement of mind, a desire of promoting the interest of -his people, and a sense of the benefits arising from trade, which could hardly have been expected from a petty lia chief, and which, if ar had
H 3.
+
102 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
been sovereign of Yemen, might have been expanded into rational projects proportioned to the extent of his dominions. I answered, that I was imperfectly acquainted with the commerce of India; but that I would report the substance,of his conversation, and would ever bear testimony of his noble zeal’ for the good of his country, and to the mildness with which he govetned it. As I had no inclination to pass a second night in the island, I requested leave ro return without waiting for bearers: he seemed very sincere in pressing me to lengthen my visit, but. had too much drabian politeness to be impor- tunate. We therefore parted; and at the request of Tumuni, who assured me that little’'time would be lost in showing attention to one of the wor- thiest men in Hinzuan, 1 made a visit to the Go- vernor of the town, whose name was Mutekka: his manners were very pleasing, and he showed’ me some letters from the officers of the Brilhant, which appeared to flow warm from the heart, and contained the strongest e/oge of his courtesy and liberality. He insisted on filling my basket with some of the finest pomegranates I had ever seen ; and ‘I left the town, impressed with a very favourable opinion of the king and his governor. When
reascended the hill, attended by many of the na- tives, one of them told me in Arabic, that IT was going to receive the highest mark of distinction that it was in the king’s power to show me; and he had scarce ended, when J heard the report of a single gun: Shaikh Ahmed had saluted me with the whole of his ordnance.” I waved my hat, and said Allah Achar: the people shouted, and 1 continued my journey, not without fear of inconve- nience from excessive heat, and the fatigue of climb- ing rocks. The walk, however, was not on the whole unpleasant : I sometimes rested in the valleys, ‘and forded all the rivulets,‘ which refreshed me with
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA, 103
their coolness, and supplied me with exquisite water to mix with the juice of my pomegranates, and occasion- ally with brandy, We were overtaken by some pea- sants, who came from the hills by anearer way, and brought the king’s present of a cow with her calf; and a she-goat with two kids: they had apparently been selected for their beauty, and were brought safe to Bengal. The prospects, which had so greatly de- lighted me the preceding day, had not lost their charms, though they wanted the recommendation of novelty ; ; but I must confess, that the most delightful object in that day’s walk, of near ten miles, was the Black Frigate, which I ‘discerned at sunset from a rock, near “the prince’s gardens. Close to the town I was met by a native, who, perceiving me to be weary, opened a very fine cocoa-nut, which afforded a delici- ous draught: he informed me, that one of his coun- trymen had been punished that afternoon for a theft on board the Crocodile, and added, that, in his opi- nion, the punishment was no less just than the offence was disgraceful to his country. The offender, as I afterwards learned, was a youth of good family, who had married a daughter of old d/w, but, being left alone for a moment in the cabin, and seeing a pair of blue Morocco slippers, could not resist the tempta- tion, concealed them so ill under his gown, that he was detected with the mainer. This proves, that no principle of honour is instilled by education into the gentry of this island: even A/y, when he had observed that, ‘‘ in the month of Ramadan, it was « not lawful to paint with Aina, or to tell /ies,” and when I asked, whether both were lawful allthe rest of the year, answered, that * lies were innocent, if no ‘¢ man was injured ‘by them.’ Tumuni took his leave, as well satisfied as myself with our excursion. I told him, before his master, that I transferred also to him the dollars, which were due to me out of the three guineas ; and that, if _ever they should part, i should M4
104 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
be very glad to receive him into ey service in India. Mr. Roberts, the master of the ship, had passed the day with Sayyad Ahmed, and had learned from him a few curious circumstances concerning the govern- ment of Hinzuan; which he found to be a monarchy limited by aristocracy.. The king, he was told, had Mo power of making war by his own authority ; but, if the assembly of nobles, who were from time “to time convened by him, resolved on a war with any of the neighbouring islands, they defrayed the’ charges of it by voluntary contributions, in return for which they\ claimed as their own all the booty and captives that might be taken. The'hope of gain or the want of bhves'A is usually the real motives : for such enter- prizes, and ostensible pretexts are easly found. At that very time he understood they meditated a war, be- éause they wanted hands for the following harvest. Their ficet consisted of sixteen or seventeen sinall ves- sels, which they manned with about two thousand five hundred islanders armed with muskets and cutlasses, ér with bows and arrows. Near two years had elaps- ed before they had possessed themselves of two towns in Mayata; which they still kept and garrisoned. The ordinary expences. of the =r were defrayed’ by a tax from‘two hundred villages; but the three principal towns Were exempt from all taxes, except that they paid annually to the chief Mit a fortieth part of the value of all their moveable property ; and_ from that payment ‘neither the king nor the nobles claimed an exemption. The kingly authority, by the principles of their consitution, was considered elective, though the line of succession had not been altered since - the first election of asultan. ‘He was informed that a wandering Arab, who had settled ‘in the island, had, by his intrepidity in several wars, acquired the tank of a chieftain, and afterwards of aking with limited powers; and that he was the grandfather of Shaikh Ahmed, “er been, assured that Queen
OF HINZUAN, OR JOHANNA, 10$
Halimah was his grandmother 5 -and, that he was the sixth king; but it must be Hs Ue ae that the words jedd and jeddah in Arabic are used for a male and female ancestor indefinitely; and, without a cor- tect pedigree of .dhmed’s family, which I expected to procure but was disappointed, it would scarce be possible to ascertain the time when his. forefather ob- _ tained the highest rank in the government. In the year 1600 Captain John Davis, who has written an ac- count of his voyage, found Mayata governed by a king, and dnsuame, or Hinzuan, by a queen, who showed him great marks of friendship. - He anchored before the town of Demos (does he mean Domoni?) which was as large, he says, as Plymouth; and he concludes, from the ruins around it, that it had once been a place of strength and grandeur. I can only say, that | observed no such ruins. Fifteen years after, Captain Peyton and Sir Thomas Roe touched at the Comara is\ands ; and, from their several accounts, it appears that an old -sultaness at that time resided in imzuan, but hada dominion paramount over all the isles, three of her sons governing Mohi/a in her name. if this be true, Sohail and the successors of Halimak must have lost their influence over the other islands ; ‘and, by renewing their dormant claim as it suits their convenience, they may always be furnished with a pretence for hostilities. . Five generations of eldest sons would account for an hundred and seventy of the years which~ have elapsed since Davis and Pey- ton found Hinzuan ruled by a sultaness; and Ahmed was of such an age, that his reign may be reckoned equal to a generation. It is probable, on the whole, that Halimah was the widow of the first radian king, and that her mosque has been, continued in repair by his descendants; so that we may reasonably suppose two centuries to have passed since a single ‘Arab had the courage and address to establish. in that beautiful islanda form of government, which,
106 REMARKS ON THE ISLAND
though bad enough in itself, appears to have been ad- ministered with advantage to the original inhabitants. _ We have lately heard of civil commotions in Hin- suan, which, we may venture to pronounce, were not excited by any cruelty or violence of Ahmed, but were probably occasioned by the ingolence of an oli- garchy naturally hostile to king anji people. That the mountains in the Comara islands contain dia- monds, and the precious metals, which are studiously concealed by the policy of the several governments, may be true, though I have no reason to believe it, and have only heard it asserted without evidence ; but I hope, that neither an expectation of such trea- sures, nor of any other advantage, will ever induce an European power to violate the first principles of justice by assuming the sovereignty of Hinzuan, which cannot answer a better purpose than that of supplying our fleets with seasonable refreshment ; and,. although the natives have an interest in receiv- ing us with apparent cordiality, yet, if we wish their attachment to be unfeigned and their dealings just, we must set them an example of strict honesty in the erformance of our engagements. In truth, our nation is not cordially loved by the inhabitants of Hinzwan, who, as it commonly happens, form a- general opinion from a few instances of violence or breach of faith. ‘Not many years ago an European, who had been hospitably received and liberally supported. at Matsamudo, behaved rudely to a young married woman, who, being of low degree, was walking veiled through a street in the evening. Her husband ran to protect her, and resented the rudeness, pro- bably with menaces, possibly with actual force; and the European is said to have given him a mortal wound with a knife or bayonet, which he brought, after the scuffle, from his lodging. This foul mur- der, which the Jaw of nature would have justified ‘the magistrate in punishing with, death, was reported
OF HINZUANW, OR JOHANNA, 107
to the king, who told the governor (and I use the
very words of Alwi) that “* » would be wiser to hush it up.” dA‘: mentioned a civil case of his own, which ought not to be concealed. When he was on the coast of 4frica, in the dominions of a very savage prince, a smiill European vessel was wrecked; and the pr.nce not only seized all that could be saved from thé wreck, but claimed the captain and the crew as his slaves, and treated them with ferocious insolence. Alwi assured me, that, when he heard of the acci- dent, he hastened to the prince, fell prostrate before him, and by tears and importunity prevailed on him to give the Europeans their liberty; that he supported them at his own expence, enabled them to build ano- ther vessel, in which they sailed to Hinzwan, and de- parted thence for Europe or India. He showed me the Captain’s promissory notes for’sums, which to an African trader must be a considerable object, but which are no price for liberty, safety, and, perhaps, life, which his good though disinterested offices had procured. I lamented that, in my situation, it was wholly out of my power to assist 4/27 in obtaining justice; but he urged me to deliver an Arabic letter from him, inclosing the notes, to the Governor Ge- neral, who, as he said, knew him well: and I com- plied with his request. Since it is possible that a substantial defence may be made by the person thus accused of injustice, I will not name either him or _ the vessel which he had commanded; but, if he be living, and if this paper should fall into his hands, he may be induced to refiect how highly it imports our nationa| honour, that a people whom we call savage, but who administer to our convenience, may have no just cause to reproach us st a violation of our contracts, .
Vi.
\
ON THE BAYA, OR INDIAN GROSS-BEAK.
BY AT’HAR ALI KHAN OF DEHLI.
HE little bird, called Baya in Hindi, Berbera in Sanscrit, Babui in the dialect of Bengal, Cibuin Persian, and Tenawwit in Arabic, from his remark- ably pendent nest, is rather larger than a sparrow, with yellow-brown plumage, a yellowish head and feet, a light coloured breast, and a conic beak, very thick in proportion to his body. This bird is exceed- ingly common in Hindustan : he is astonishingly sensi- ble, faithful, and docile, never voluntarily deserting the place where his young were hatched, nowise averse, like most other birds, to the society of mankind, and easily taught to perch on the hand of his master. Ina state of nature he generally builds his nest on the highest tree that he can find, especially on the Pal- myra, or on the Indian fig-tree ; and he prefers thar which happens to overhang a well or a rivulet: he makes it of grass, which he weaves like cloth, and shapes like a large bottle, suspending it firmly on the branches, but so as to rock with the wind ; and plac- ing it with its entrance downwards, to secure it from birds of prey. His nest usually consists of two or three chambers; and it is the popular belie that he lights thém with fire-flies, which he catches live at night and confines with moist clay, or with cow- -dung: that such flies are often found in his nest, where pieces of cow-dung are also stuck, is indubit- able; but, as their light could be of little use to him, it seems probable that he only feeds on them. He may be taught with ease to fetch a piece of paper,
{ 110 ]
or any small thing that his master points out to him. It is an attested fact, that, if a ring be dropped into a deep well, and a signal given to him, he will fly down with amazing celerity, , catch the ring before it touches the water, and bring it up to his master with apparent exultation ; and it is confidently asserted, that, if a house or any other place be shown to him once or twice, he will carry a note thither immediately on a proper signal being made. One instance of his docility I can myself mention with confidence, having often been an eye-witness of it: the young Hindu women at Banares and in other places wear very thin plates of gold, called ticas, slightly fixed, by way of ornament, between their eye-brows; and, when they pass through the streets, it is not uncommon for the youthful libertines, who amuse themselves. with. train- ing Bayas, to give them a sign which they under- stand, and send them to pluck the pieces of gold from. the forebeads of their mistresses, which they bring in triumph to. the lovers. The Baya feeds naturally on grasshoppers and other insects, but will subsist, when tame, on pulse macerated in water. His flesh is warm and drying, of easy digestion, and recommended, in medical books, as a solvent of stone in the bladder or kidneys ; but of that virtue there is no sufficient proof. The female lays many beautiful eggs, resembling large pearls: the white of them, when they are boiled, is transparent, and the flavour of them is exquisitely delicate. When many Bayas are assembled on a high tree, they make a lively din, but. it is. rather) chirping than singing ; their want of musical talents is, however, amply supplied by their wonderful sagacity, in which they are not excelled by a3 feathered inhabitants of the forest.
VII.
ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE HINDUS.
WRITTEN IN JANUARY 1788,
BY THE PRESIDE NT.
*
4)
HE ereat antiquity of the Hindus is believed so
fi firmly by themselves, and has been the subject of so much conversation among Europeans, that a short view of their Chronological System, which has not yet been exhibited from certain authorities, may be accept- able to those who seek truth without partiality to re- ceived opinions, and without regarding any consequen- ces that may result from their inquiries. The conse- quences, indeed, of truth cannot but be desireable, and no reasonable man will apprehend any danger to society from a general diffusion of its light; but __ we must not suffer ourselves to be dazzled by.a false glare, nor mistake enigmas and allegories for histori- cal verity. Attached to no system, and as much disposed to reject the Mosaic history, if it be proved erroneous, as to believe it, if it be confirmed by sound reasoning from indubitable evidence, I pro- pose to lay before you a concise account of Indian Chronology, extracted from Sanscrit books, or col- jected from conversations with Pandits, and to sub- join a few remarks on their system, without attempt- ing to decide a question, which I shall venture to start, “* Whether it is not in fact the same with our ** own, but embellished and obscured by the fancy
-s* of their poets and the riddles of their astro- nomers ?”” | ;
-
112 ON THE CHRONOLOGY Thy
One of the most curious books in Sanscrit, and one of the oldest after the Vedas, is a tract on reij- gious and civil duties, taken, as it 1s believed, from the oral instructions of Menu, son of Brahma, to the . first inhabitants of the earth. An exceeding well- cqllated copy of this most interesting law-tract is now before me; and I begin my dissertation with a few couplets from the first chapter of it: ** Thé sun << causes the division of day and night, which are << of two sorts, those of men and those of the “© Gods ; the-day, for the labour of a// creatures in <¢ their several employments; the night for their ‘© slumber. A month is a-day and night of the ‘6 patriarchs; and it is divided into two parts; the ‘© bright half is thezr day for laborious exertions ; the «¢ dark half, ¢eir night for sleep. A year.is a day «¢ and night of the Gods; and that is also divided «© into two halves; the day 1s, when the sun moves «* toward the north; the night, when it moves to- ‘© ward the south. Learn now the duration of a «¢ night and day of Brahma