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 101 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE OPENING 
 
 OF THE 
 
 NINTH INTERNATIONAL 
 CONGRESS OF ORIENTALISTS 
 
 HELD IN LONDON, SEPTEMBER 5, 1892 
 
 FREDERICK MAX MULLER, K.M. 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE CONGRESS 
 
 California 
 sgional
 
 IT is generally at the end, not at the beginning of 
 scientific meetings that votes of thanks are proposed. 
 But in our case, when we owe our very existence to 
 the valuable help received from so many quarters, it 
 seems but right that we should express our gratitude 
 at the very outset. 
 
 Our first thanks are due to H. K. H. the Duke of 
 York, for having granted us that sympathy and 
 gracious support without which, I am afraid, our 
 Congress would never have drawn its first breath, 
 and our labours might indeed have been in vain. 
 
 We could not venture to disturb a father's grief 
 and ask H. B. H. the Prince of Wales to grant us 
 his royal protection. But His Royal Highness has 
 testified the -warm interest which he feels for our 
 Congress, as for everything that is likely to draw 
 the bonds of friendship between England and her 
 great Indian Empire more closely together, by 
 authorising H. R^ H. the Duke of York to act at 
 the present Congress, as the worthy successor of 
 H. M. the King of Sweden, the Royal Patron of our 
 last Congress. In granting us his royal protection 
 the Duke of York has but proved himself the true 
 son of the Prince of Wales, the worthy grandson 
 of the Queen, and has shown once more to the 
 
 B
 
 world, that nothing which concerns the highest 
 interests of India can ever fail to evoke the warmest 
 sympathies on the part of those to whom a Divine 
 Providence has entrusted the Crown and the care 
 of that glorious Empire. 
 
 We have next to express our thanks to the 
 Secretary of State for India and to the illustrious 
 Members of his Council? for having given us every 
 encouragement in their power for successfully carry- 
 ing out an undertaking which has excited a wide- 
 spread interest in India, and has received powerful 
 approval and support from some of the most respected 
 leaders of public opinion in that country. 
 
 It has been said indeed that, in a free country 
 like England, a scientific Congress should not look 
 for royal favour and protection, or for help from 
 Government. But it seems to me on the contrary 
 that in a country like England, which is called a 
 free country because its Government is truly repre- 
 sentative of the will of the people, and because the 
 Crown is so completely identified with all that is 
 good and noble in the aspirations of science and art, 
 the absence of royal patronage and governmental 
 support would have conveyed a very false impression. 
 
 What would the people of India have thought if 
 this meeting of scholars from all parts of Europe, who 
 have devoted their lives to the improvement and 
 enlargement of our knowledge of the East, after 
 having been recognised and patronised by the
 
 Sovereigns and their Ministers in every country of 
 Europe in which they met before, had been ignored 
 or slighted in England ? And what would those 
 scholars themselves have said who remember the 
 kindness with which they were received in France, 
 Italy, Germany, Holland, Austria, Russia, and last, 
 not least, in Sweden, if in this, the greatest Oriental 
 Empire which the world has ever known, the Gov- 
 ernment, and more particularly the Indian Govern- 
 ment, had declined to give the same hospitable 
 welcome to the Delegates of other countries, which 
 their own Delegates have accepted year after year 
 from foreign Governments \ 
 
 By accepting the Honorary Presidency of our 
 Congress, H. K. H. the Duke of York seems to me to 
 have testified his conviction, and the conviction of the 
 nation at large, that the East can never be foreign 
 to the sympathy of the people of England, and that 
 they consider a scholarlike study of the literature 
 and the antiquities of their great Eastern Empire as 
 deserving of every encouragement, and worthy of the 
 most generous support. Need I add that the presence 
 of the Queen's grandson is but another proof, if any 
 proof were wanted, that Her Majesty the Queen, 
 the first Empress of India, who has so often shown 
 her warm and tender feelings for her Indian subjects, 
 is with us in spirit, and wishes success to our labours. 
 
 We have next to express our gratitude to the 
 Chancellor and Senate of the University of London, 
 
 B 2
 
 to the President and Council of the Royal Society, 
 to the Society of Antiquaries, to the Astronomical 
 and Geographical Societies, for having placed some of 
 their rooms at the disposal of our Congress. The 
 authorities of the British Museum have granted us 
 facilities which will be highly appreciated by the 
 members of our Congress. The valuable Library 
 and collections at the India Office have been thrown 
 open to all our guests. They will find there in Sir 
 George Birdwood a most valuable guide, as well as in 
 Dr. Rost, whose services, I am glad to say, have been 
 retained for the Library of the India Office. 
 
 Nor would it be right for me to open this Congress 
 without giving expression to the warmest feelings of 
 gratitude and admiration, which all who had the good 
 fortune of being present at our last Congress in 
 Sweden must ever entertain for our Royal Patron, 
 His Majesty King Oscar of Sweden and Norway. 
 He too is the ruler of a free country, and in him 
 too we could recognise the true representative of 
 the will and wish of his people. The brilliant suc- 
 cess of our Congress at Stockholm and Christiana 
 was due no doubt to the popular sympathy by 
 which we were greeted everywhere, and the truly 
 Scandinavian hospitality with which we were re- 
 ceived in every town and village through which we 
 passed, whether in Sweden or in Norway, and like- 
 wise to the active participation of the best intellects 
 of the country in our labours. Yet it was an
 
 exceptional good fortune that His Majesty King 
 Oscar should personally have felt so enthusiastic an 
 interest and so warm a love for all that is beau- 
 tiful in the East. Not only did he show himself 
 the most gracious host and most generous patron, 
 but he made time to sit patiently through our 
 lengthy and often tedious meetings. Who can ever 
 forget his noble presence when he stepped in among 
 us, every inch a king, a head and shoulders taller 
 than all the rest ; and who was not surprised on 
 hearing him not only conversing in all the languages 
 of his guests, but delivering eloquent addresses in 
 Swedish, in English, in German, in French, and in 
 Italian, nay, bidding us all farewell in a Latin speech 
 full of vigour and kindliness. I doubt whether at 
 any former Congress so much solid work was done 
 as at Stockholm and Christiana. There are idlers 
 and mere camp-followers at every Congress; but, as 
 President of the Aryan section, I can bear true 
 testimony to the indefatigable industry of our mem- 
 bers, who never allowed the festivities of the evening 
 to interfere with the duties of the next morning. 
 Our minutes and transactions are there to speak for 
 themselves. We learn from a report published by 
 an Indian scholar, Mr. Dhruva, that there were in 
 all 1 06 papers read by 86 members, 48 being in 
 French, 37 in German, 18 in English, 2 in Italian, 
 and several by Orientals in their own languages. 
 This proves once more, if any proof were wanted,
 
 how popular Oriental studies are and always have 
 been in France, how carefully they have been fostered 
 by the French Government, and how much the pro- 
 gress of true scholarship owes to the brilliant genius, 
 and even more, to the indefatigable industry of 
 French Orientalists. 
 
 We are also deeply indebted to a former Patron, 
 H. I. H. the Archduke Eainer, who has never ceased 
 to take an active and powerful interest in the success 
 of our meetings. You know what we owe to him 
 and to his princely liberality in securing the unique 
 treasures of Egyptian papyri which, in the hands of 
 Professor Karabacek and his learned colleagues, have 
 become a monumental landmark in the history of 
 
 / 
 
 Oriental literature. Another of our Patrons, H. K. H. 
 Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg Gotba, might claim his 
 place among us, not simply as a Royal Prince, but as 
 a learned numismatist and a persevering and judicious 
 collector of Eastern coins. 
 
 You will probably expect me to say a few words 
 about some misunderstandings and personal jeal- 
 ousies which broke out after our last Congress. I 
 should much prefer to say nothing about these truly 
 childish squabbles, but I hope I shall be able to 
 explain and justify our position without giving 
 offence to anybody. At the end of our former Con- 
 gresses there was generally an official invitation 
 from some Government or University, asking us to 
 hold oiir next Congress in one or other of the great
 
 capitals of Europe. None had been received when 
 we dispersed after our Scandinavian Congress, though 
 several places had been privately suggested. As we 
 had no permanent Committee, a resolution was 
 passed by the Congress, according to the official 
 Minutes, unanimously ; or, according to the state- 
 ments of certain Members, with one or two dissent- 
 ient voices, that our former Presidents should be 
 requested pro hac vice to form such a Committee for 
 the sole purpose of receiving, and either accepting 
 or rejecting, such invitations as might be sent to them. 
 Nothing could have been more natural, more correct, 
 more business-like in every respect. But M. de 
 Rosny and some of his friends, professing to represent 
 the Founders of our Congresses, and to speak in the 
 name of the Oriental scholars of France, though 
 many of these French scholars have declined to 
 accept M. de Rosny as their spokesman, suddenly 
 protested against this resolution as ultra vires. They 
 appealed to a body of Statutes which had been drawn 
 up in 1873 by M. de Rosny himself and those who 
 called themselves the founders of these Oriental 
 Congresses. These Statutes, it is now admitted, 
 had never been discussed, and never been formally 
 ratified by any subsequent Congress. And how can 
 unratified Statutes claim any legal or binding cha- 
 racter ? But even supposing that these Statutes, 
 unknown to most of the members of our Congress, 
 and never appealed to before when they were
 
 broken year after year by their very authors, could 
 claim any legal force, it can hardly be disputed that 
 every corporate body which has the right of drawing 
 up Statutes has also the right of suspending or 
 over-riding them by a majority of votes. Without 
 such a right no Society could possibly exist and 
 cope successfully with the sudden emergencies that 
 are sure to arise. However, though the members 
 of the Oriental Congress could not recognise the 
 exclusive proprietorship in these international Con- 
 gresses which M. de Rosny and his confederates 
 claimed for themselves, they had no objection what- 
 ever to a friendly separation of elements which had 
 often proved discordant at former Congresses. It 
 seemed to many of us simply a case of what is called 
 development by. differentiation or growth by fission. 
 There were at former Congresses a number of 
 visitors, most welcome in many respects, but whose 
 tastes and interests differed widely from those of the 
 majority; and though we should never have parted 
 with them of our own free will, many of us feel that 
 we shall be better able to maintain the character of 
 our Congresses, if each party follows its own way. 
 There will be in future the so-called Statutory Con- 
 gresses of M. de Rosny and his associates, while we 
 shall try to preserve the old character and the con- 
 tinuity of the International Congress of Orientalists, 
 and shall gladly welcome some of the old members 
 who for a time have deserted our Congress.
 
 What we chiefly want are Oriental scholars, that 
 is to say, men who have proved themselves able to 
 handle their own spade, and who have worked in the 
 sweat of their brow in disinterring the treasures of 
 Oriental literature. We do not wish to exclude 
 mere lovers of Eastern literature, nor travellers, or 
 dragomans, or even intelligent couriers ; they are all 
 welcome: but when we speak of Oriental scholars, 
 we mean men who have shown that they are able 
 at least to publish texts that have never been pub- 
 lished before, and to translate texts which have never 
 been translated before. Of such I am glad to say we 
 have lost hardly any. 
 
 You will be glad to hear that we have received 
 an invitation to hold our next, the tenth Congress, 
 in Switzerland. The names of the Members of the 
 Swiss Committee are the best guarantee that our 
 meeting there will keep up the standard of our 
 former meetings, and will hand down our tradition 
 to those who will continue our work when we are 
 gone. We have also received a most tempting in- 
 vitation from His Majesty the King of Koumania, to 
 hold our eleventh meeting at Bucharest. The 
 present Congress will have to decide on both these 
 proposals. We wish to part with our former col- 
 leagues without any reproach or recriminations. We 
 say indeed with Abraham, ' Let there be no strife ; 
 separate thyself, I pray thee, from me. If thou wilt 
 take the left hand, I will go to the right; and if thou
 
 10 
 
 depart to the right hand, then I will go to the 
 left.' 
 
 Having now disposed of these preliminary matters, 
 I shall try to discharge the duty that falls to the 
 President, in opening this International Congress of 
 Orientalists. No one can feel more deeply than myself 
 how totally unequal I am to the task imposed upon me, 
 how unworthy of the honourable post which you wished 
 me to occupy. I know but too well that there are many 
 Oriental Scholars who would have filled the office of 
 President of this International Congress of Orientalists 
 far more worthily than I can hope to do. If after 
 long hesitation, as you know, I accepted at last your 
 repeated invitation, it was because I saw in it but 
 another proof of that exceeding kindness which I 
 have experienced again and again during my long 
 life in England, and which seems to me to spring 
 chiefly from a wish to make me feel that you do no 
 longer consider me as a stranger, but have accepted 
 me as one of yourselves, as a comrade who has fought 
 now for nearly fifty years in the ranks of the brave 
 army of Oriental scholars in England. Never indeed 
 could a General boast of a more brilliant staff; and if 
 we value those honours most which are bestowed 
 upon us by our peers, believe me that I value the 
 honour which you have conferred on me in electing 
 me your President, as the highest bestowed upon 
 me during the whole of my long life in England, 
 because it has been bestowed on me not only by my
 
 11 
 
 peers, but by my betters, not only by my best 
 friends, but by my best judges. 
 
 But though the Presidential chair is this year so 
 inadequately filled, never, I believe, has our Congress 
 been able to boast of so illustrious an array of Patrons, 
 Vice-Presidents, and Presidents of Sections as on this 
 occasion. We count among our Presidents of Sec- 
 tions one who, by common consent, may be called the 
 most celebrated man of our country, Mr. Gladstone, 
 celebrated alike as a statesman and as a scholar. We 
 are proud of the presence of another statesman, Sir 
 Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, who,as Governor 
 of Madras, has rendered an illustrious name still more 
 illustrious, and whose knowledge often surprises us by 
 its accuracy even more than by its extent and variety. 
 Nor would it be easy to find stronger representatives 
 in their special departments of Oriental scholarship 
 in this country than our Presidents, Sir Thomas Wade, 
 Sir Raymond West, Professor Cowell, Professor Sayce, 
 Professor Le Page Renouf, Professor Robertson Smith, 
 Sir Arthur Gordon, and Dr. Tylor. 
 
 To each and all of them and to their distinguished 
 Secretaries I now express, in the name of the Con- 
 gress, our most respectful and cordial thanks. 
 
 I have thus far explained to you our right to exist; 
 I shall now try to explain the reason of our existence, 
 or the objects which we have in view in holding from 
 time to time these Oriental Congresses in the prin- 
 cipal towns of Europe,
 
 12 
 
 When we wish to express something removed from 
 us as far as it can be, we use the expression ' So far 
 as the East is from the West.' Now what we who 
 are assembled here are aiming at, what may be 
 called our real raison d'etre, is to bring the East, 
 which seems so far from us, so distant from us, nay, 
 often so strange and indifferent to many of us, as 
 near as possible near to our thoughts, near to our 
 hearts. It seems strange indeed that there should 
 ever have been a frontier line to separate the East 
 from the West, nor is it easy to see at what time 
 that line was first drawn, or whether there were any 
 physical conditions which necessitated such a line of 
 demarcation. The sun moves in unbroken continuity 
 from East to West, there is no break in his triumph- 
 ant progress. Why should there ever have been a 
 break in the triumphant progress of the human race 
 from East to West, and how could that break have 
 been brought about \ It is quite true that as long as 
 we know anything that deserves the name of history, 
 that break exists. The Mediterranean with the 
 Black Sea, the Caspian with the Ural Mountains 
 may be looked upon as the physical boundary that 
 separates the East from the West. The whole history 
 of the West seems so strongly determined by the 
 Mediterranean, that Ewald was inclined to include 
 all Aryan nations under the name of Mediterranean. 
 But the Mediterranean ought to have formed not only 
 the barrier, but likewise the connecting-link between
 
 13 
 
 Asia and Europe. Without that high-road leading 
 to all the emporia of the world, without the pure 
 and refreshing breezes, without the infinite laughter 
 of the Mediterranean, there would never have been 
 an Athens, a Home, there would never have been 
 that spirited and never resting Europe, so different 
 from the solid and slowly changing Asiatic conti- 
 nent. Northern Africa, however, Egypt, Palestine, 
 Phenicia, and Arabia, though in close proximity 
 to the Mediterranean, belong in their history to 
 the East, quite as much as Babylon, Assyria, 
 Media, Persia, and India. Even Asia Minor formed 
 only a temporary bridge between East and West, 
 which was drawn up again when it had served its 
 purpose. We ourselves have grown up so entirely 
 in the atmosphere of Greek thought, that we hardly 
 feel surprised when we see nations, such as the 
 Phenicians and Persians, looked upon by the Greeks 
 as strangers and barbarians, though in ancient times 
 the former were far more advanced in civilisation 
 than the Greeks, and though the latter spoke a 
 language closely allied to the language of Homer, 
 and possessed a religion far more pure and elevated 
 than that of the Homeric Greeks. The Romans 
 were the heirs of the Greeks, and the whole of 
 Europe succeeded afterwards to the intellectual 
 inheritance of Rome and Greece. Nor can we dis- 
 guise the fact that we ourselves have inherited 
 from them something of that feeling of strangeness
 
 14 
 
 between the West and the East, between the white 
 and the dark man, between the Aryan and the 
 Semite, which ought never to have arisen, and which 
 is a disgrace to everybody who harbours it. No one 
 would in these Darwinian days venture to doubt the 
 homogeneousness of the human species, the brother- 
 hood of the whole human race; but there remains the 
 fact that, as in ancient so in modern times, members 
 of that one human species, brothers of that one 
 human family, look upon each other, not as brothers, 
 but as strangers, if not as enemies, divided not only 
 by language and religion, but also by what people 
 call blood, whatever they may mean by that term. 
 
 I wish to point out that it constitutes one of the 
 greatest achievements of Oriental scholarship to have 
 proved by irrefragable evidence that the complete 
 break between East and West did not exist from the 
 beginning; that in prehistoric times language formed 
 really a bond of union between the ancestors of 
 many of the Eastern and Western nations, while 
 more recent discoveries have proved that in historic 
 times also language, which seemed to separate the 
 great nations of antiquity, never separated the most 
 important among them so completely as to make all 
 intellectual commerce and exchange between them 
 impossible. These two discoveries seem to me to 
 form the highest glory of Oriental scholarship during 
 the present century. Some of our greatest scholars, 
 some of them here present, have contributed to these
 
 15 
 
 discoveries ; and I thought therefore that they formed 
 the most worthy subject to occupy our thoughts at the 
 beginning of our International Congress of Orientalists. 
 The Presidents of our Sections will probably dwell 
 on the results obtained during the last year in their 
 own more special departments. I was anxious there- 
 fore to show that Oriental scholarship has also made 
 some substantial contributions to the general stock 
 of human knowledge, that it has added in fact a 
 completely new chapter to the history of the world, 
 and has changed another chapter, formerly the oldest 
 but also the most barren, into a living picture, full of 
 human thought, of human fears, and human hopes. 
 
 I begin with the prehistoric world which has 
 actually been brought to light for the first time by 
 Oriental scholarship. 
 
 I confess I do not like the expression prehistoric. 
 It is a vague term and almost withdraws itself from 
 definition. If real history begins only with the 
 events of which we possess contemporaneous wit- 
 nesses, then no doubt the whole period of which we 
 are now speaking and many later periods also, would 
 have to be called prehistoric. But if history means, 
 as it did originally, research, and knowledge of real 
 events based on such research, then the events of 
 which we are going to speak are as real and as truly 
 historical as the battle of Waterloo. It is often 
 supposed that students of Oriental languages and of 
 the Science of Language deal with words only. We
 
 16 
 
 have learnt by this time that there is no such thing 
 as 'words only,' that every new word represented 
 really a most momentous event in the development of 
 our race. What people call 'mere words/ are in truth 
 the monuments of the fiercest intellectual battles, 
 triumphal arches of the grandest victories won by the 
 intellect of man. When man had formed names for 
 body and soul, for father and mother, and not till 
 then, did the first act of human history begin. Not 
 till there were names for right and wrong, for God 
 and man, could there be anything worthy of the name 
 of human society. Every new word was a discovery, 
 and these early discoveries, if but properly under- 
 stood, are more important to us than the greatest 
 conquests of the Kings of Egypt and Babylon. Not 
 one of our greatest explorers has unearthed with his 
 spade or pickaxe more splendid palaces and temples, 
 whether in Egypt or in Babylon, than the etymolo- 
 gist. Every word is the palace of a human thought; 
 and in scientific etymology we possess the charm 
 with which to call these ancient thoughts back to 
 life. It is the study of words, it is the Science of 
 Language, that has withdrawn the curtain which 
 formerly concealed these ancient times and their 
 intellectual struggles from the sight of historians. 
 Even now, when scholars speak of languages and 
 families of languages, they often forget that 
 languages mean speakers of languages, and families 
 of speech presuppose real families, or classes, or
 
 17 
 
 powerful confederacies, which have struggled for 
 their existence and held their ground against all 
 enemies. Languages, as we read in the book of 
 Daniel, are the same as nations that dwell on all the 
 earth. If therefore Greeks and Romans, Celts, 
 Germans, Slavs, Persians, and Indians, speaking dif- 
 ferent languages, and each forming a separate nation- 
 ality, constitute, as long as we know them, a real 
 historical fact, there is another fact equally real and 
 historical, though we may refer it to a prehistoric 
 period, namely, that there was a time when the 
 ancestors of all these nations and languages formed 
 one compact body, speaking one and the same 
 language, a language so real, so truly historical, that 
 without it there would never have been a real Greek, 
 a real Latin language, never a Greek Republic, never 
 a Roman Empire ; there would have been no Sanskrit, 
 no Vedas, no Avesta, no Plato, no Greek New 
 Testament. We know with the same certainty that 
 other nations and languages also, which in historical 
 times stand before us so isolated as Phenician, 
 Hebrew, Babylonian, and Arabic, presuppose a pre- 
 historic, that is an antecedent powerful Semitic 
 confederacy, held together by the bonds of a common 
 language, possibly by the same laws and by a belief 
 in the same gods. Unless the ancestors of these 
 nations and languages had once lived and worked 
 together, there would have been no common arsenal 
 
 c
 
 18 
 
 from which the leading nations of Semitic history 
 could have taken their armour and their swords, the 
 armour and swords which they wielded in their in- 
 tellectual struggles, and many of Avhich we are still 
 wielding ourselves in our wars of liberation from 
 error, and our conquests of truth. These are stern, 
 immovable facts, just as Mont Blanc is a stern, irre- 
 movable fact, though from a distance we must often 
 be satisfied with seeing its gigantic outline only, not 
 all its glaciers and all its crevasses. What I mean is 
 that we must not attempt to discover too much of 
 what happened thousands of years ago, or strain our 
 sight to see what, from this distance in time, we can- 
 not see. 
 
 When we are asked, for instance, in what exact part 
 of the world these ancient consolidations took place, 
 every true scholar, and every honest historian knows 
 that such a question is almost idle, because it does 
 not admit of a definite or positive answer. It is easy 
 to fix on this or that indication in order to assign 
 with the greatest confidence the original home of the 
 Aryas to this or that place in Asia or Europe. The 
 very North Pole has been pointed out by a learned 
 and ingenious American scholar, as the most probable 
 home of the whole of mankind. All true scholars, 
 I believe, admit that we must be satisfied with the 
 general statement that the consolidation of the 
 Aryan speakers took place ' somewhere in Asia,' for
 
 19 
 
 they know that this ' somewhere in Asia ' is not quite 
 so vast and vague as it sounds, there being a number 
 of countries which no scholar would ever dream of as 
 possible homes of the Aryas at that early time, such 
 as Siberia in the North, China in the East, India in 
 the South, Arabia and Asia Minor in the West of the 
 Asiatic continent. 
 
 Nothing has shaken the belief, for I do not call it 
 more, that the oldest home of the Aryas was in the 
 East. All theories in favour of other localities, of 
 which we have heard so much of late, whether in 
 favour of Scandinavia, Russia, or Germany, rest on 
 evidence far more precarious than that which was 
 collected by the founders of Comparative Philology. 
 Only we must remember, what is so often forgotten, 
 that when we say Aryas, we predicate nothing we 
 can predicate nothing but language. We know, of 
 course, that languages presuppose speakers; but when 
 we say Aryas, we say nothing about skulls, or hair, 
 or eyes, or blood, as little as when we say Christians 
 or Mohammedans, English or Americans. All that 
 has been said and written about the golden hair, 
 the blue eyes, and the noble profile of the Aryas, 
 is pure invention, unless we are prepared to say 
 that Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, was not 
 an Arya, but a Mongolian. W^e ought in fact, 
 when we speak of Aryas, to shut our eyes most 
 carefully against skulls, whether dolichocephalic or 
 
 C 2
 
 20 
 
 brachy cephalic, or mesocephalic, whether orthogna- 
 thic, prognathic, or mesognathic. We are completely 
 agnostic as to all that, and we gladly leave it to 
 others to discover, if they can, whether the ancestors 
 of the Aryan speakers rejoiced in a Neanderthal 
 or any other kind of skull that has been discovered 
 in Europe or Asia. Till people will learn this simple 
 lesson, which has been inculcated for years by such 
 high authorities as Horatio Hale, Powell, and Brinton, 
 all discussions on the original home of the Aryas are 
 so much waste of time and temper. 
 
 There is the same difference of opinion as to the 
 original home of the Semites, but all Semitic scholars 
 agree that it was 'somewhere in Asia.' The idea that 
 the Semites proceeded from Armenia has hardly any 
 defenders left, though it is founded on an ancient 
 tradition preserved in Genesis. An eminent scholar 
 who at the last moment was prevented by domestic 
 affliction from attending our Congress, Professor 
 Guidi \ holds that the Semites came probably from the 
 Lower Euphrates. Other scholars, particularly Dr. 
 Sprenger, place the Semitic cradle in Arabia. Professor 
 Noldeke takes much the same view with regard to the 
 home of the Semites, which I take with regard to the 
 home of the Aryas. We cannot with certainty fix 
 
 V 
 
 1 Delia sede primitiva dei Popoli Semitic!, Proceedings of 
 the Accademia dei Lincei, 1878-79.
 
 21 
 
 any particular spot, but that it was somewhere in 
 Asia, no scholar would ever doubt. 
 
 It is well known also that some high authorities, 
 Dr. Hommel, for instance, and Professor Schmidt, 
 hold that the ancestors of the Semites and Aryas 
 must for a time have lived in close proximity, which 
 would be a new confirmation of the Asiatic origin of 
 the Aryas. But we hardly want that additional sup- 
 port. Benfey's arguments in favour of a European 
 origin of the Aryas were, no doubt, very ingenious. 
 But, as his objections have now been answered one by 
 one l , the old arguments for an Asiatic home seem to 
 me to have considerably gained in strength. I, at all 
 events, can no longer join in the jubilant chorus that, 
 like all good things, our noble ancestors, the Aryas, 
 came from Germany. Dr. Schrader, who is often 
 quoted as a decided supporter of a European origin of 
 the Aryas, is far too conscientious a scholar to say more 
 than that all he has written on the subject s}iould be 
 considered 'as purely tentative/ (Preface, p. vi.) 
 
 With regard to time, our difficulties are greater still, 
 and to attempt to solve difficulties which cannot be 
 solved, seems to me no better than the old attempt 
 to square the circle. If people are satisfied with ap- 
 proximate estimates, such as we are accustomed to in 
 geology, they may say that some of the Aryan languages 
 such as Sanskrit in India, Zend in Media, must have 
 
 1 T4iree Lectures on the Science of Language, pp. 60 seq.
 
 22 
 
 been finished and used in metrical form about 2000 B.C. 
 Greek followed soon after. And when it is said that 
 these languages were finished 2000 B.C., that means 
 simply that they had become independent varieties of 
 that typical Aryan language which had itself reached 
 a highly finished state long before it was broken up 
 into these dialects. This typical language has been 
 called the Proto-Aryan language. We are often 
 asked why it should be impossible to calculate how 
 many centuries it must have taken before that Proto- 
 Aryan language could have become so differentiated 
 and so widely divergent as Sanskrit is from Greek, or 
 Latin from Gothic. If we argued geologically, we 
 might say, no doubt, that it took a thousand years to 
 produce so small a divergence as that between Italian 
 and French, and that therefore many thousands of 
 years would not suffice to account for such a divergence 
 as that between Sanskrit and Greek. We might 
 therefore boldly place the first divergence of the 
 Aryan languages at 5000 B.C., and refer the united 
 Aryan period to the time before 5000 B.C. That 
 period again would require many thousands of years, 
 if we are to account for all that had already become 
 dead and purely formal in the Proto-Aryan language, 
 before it began to break up into its six ethnic varie- 
 ties, that is into Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, Greek, 
 Latin, and Indo-Eranic. The whole grammatical 
 framework of that Proto-Aryan language must have
 
 23 
 
 been finished before that time, so that but little had 
 to be added afterwards. Not only was there a com- 
 mon stock of roots, but all thematic suffixes for the 
 formation of nouns, adjectives, and derivative words 
 had been settled, the terminations of declension and 
 conjugation had become fixed, the formation of 
 feminines was recognised as well as the degrees 
 of comparison, and there was a whole treasury of 
 words, many of them already with secondary and 
 tertiary meanings. All this must have been finished 
 before there was a Sanskrit language different from 
 Greek, or a Greek language different from Latin. 
 These common Aryan words have often been used as 
 reflecting the state of thought and civilisation pre- 
 vious to what I call the Aryan separation, previous 
 to 5000 B.C., nowhere more completely than in 
 Schrader's useful work, 'Prehistoric Antiquities.' 
 The original elaboration of that wonderful work of 
 art which we call language must have required even 
 more time than its later differentiation. When I say 
 that the elaboration of a whole system of grammatical 
 forms must have taken more time than its later 
 differentiation, what I mean is that many of the 
 features which distinguish Sanskrit from Greek, and 
 Greek from Latin, need not be considered at all 
 as new creations, but should rather be looked upon 
 as remnants of a great mass of dialectic variety 
 which existed in the common Aryan speech, and
 
 24 
 
 were retained some bv Sanskrit, others bv Greek. 
 
 i / 
 
 It has been clearly established, for instance, through 
 the labours of Brugmann, Osthoff, Collitz, Fick, and 
 others, that the Proto-Aryan language possessed 
 three varieties of the short vowel a, which had been 
 differentiated before the Aryan separation took place 
 into a, e, o. In Sanskrit we have no short e and o, 
 at least not in classical Sanskrit. But it must be 
 remembered that in Sanskrit the short vowel a is 
 never written after consonants, and that we know 
 nothing of its peculiar pronunciation at different 
 times, except, as Pamni says, that it differed from 
 that of ah 1 the other vowels. That in certain cases 
 it was in Sanskrit also pronounced like e, we know 
 by the effect which that palatalised vowel has pro- 
 duced on a preceding k, by imparting to it the palatal 
 character of ch. The fact that in Sanskrit the copula 
 which corresponds to Latin que, and Greek re is ch, 
 and not Jca, shows that the vowel must at one time 
 in Sanskrit also have been pronounced e, and not a 
 or o, as it was in the interrogative pronoun Jca. 
 
 If we find the verbal augment in Sanskrit and 
 Zend and then again in Armenian and Greek, we 
 may be quite certain that these four languages did 
 not invent it independently, but that it existed as an 
 optional element in Proto-Aryan times. 
 
 Even the Greek passive Aorist in 0r/y, which has 
 often been pointed out as a piece of purely Greek
 
 25 
 
 workmanship, has many analogies in other Aryan 
 languages, as Curtius has shown in his excellent 
 work on the Greek Verb. 
 
 If then we must follow the example of geology 
 and fix chronological limits for the growth of the 
 Proto-Aryan language, previous to the consolidation 
 of the six national languages, 10,000 B.C. would by 
 no means be too distant, as the probable limit of 
 what I should call our historical knowledge of the 
 existence of Aryan speakers somewhere in Asia. 
 
 And what applies to those Aryan speakers, applies 
 with even greater force to the Semitic, because the 
 earliest monuments of Semitic speech, differentiated 
 as Babylonian, Phenician, Hebrew, and Arabic go 
 back, as we are told, far beyond the earliest docu- 
 ments of Sanskrit or Greek. Here also we must 
 admit a long period previous to the formation of the 
 great national languages, because thus only can the 
 fact be accounted for that on many points so modern 
 a language as Arabic is more primitive than Hebrew, 
 while in other grammatical formations Hebrew is 
 more primitive than Arabic l . 
 
 Whether it is possible that these two linguistic 
 consolidations, the Aryan and Semitic, came originally 
 from a common source, is a question which scholars 
 do not like to ask, because they know that it does 
 not admit of a scholarlike answer. No scholar would 
 1 See Driver, Hebrew Tenses, p. 132.
 
 26 
 
 deny the possibility of an original community between 
 the two, during their- radical period, and previous to 
 the development of any grammatical forms. But the 
 handling of this kind of linguistic protoplasm is not 
 congenial to the student of language and must be left 
 to other hands. Still, such attempts should not be 
 discouraged altogether, and if they are carried out in 
 the same spirit in which in the last number of the 
 Journal of the German Oriental Society, Professor 
 Erman has tried to prove a close relationship between 
 Semitic and Egyptian, they deserve the highest credit. 
 Another question also which carries us back still fur- 
 ther into unknown antiquity, whether it is possible to 
 account for the origin of languages or rather of human 
 speech in general, is one which scholars eschew, because 
 it is one to be handled by philosophers rather than by 
 students of language. I must confess, the deeper we 
 delve, the farther the solution of this problem seems 
 to recede from our grasp ; and we may here too learn 
 the old lesson that our mind was not made to grasp 
 beginnings. We know the beginnings of nothing in 
 this world, and the problem of the origin of language, 
 which is but another name for the origin of thought, 
 evades our comprehension quite as much as the 
 problem of the origin of our planet and of the life upon 
 it, or the origin of space and time, whether without 
 or within us. History can dig very deep, but, like 
 the shafts of our mines, it is always arrested before it
 
 27 
 
 has reached the very lowest stratum. Students of 
 language, and particularly, students of Oriental lan- 
 guages, have solved the problem of the origin of 
 species in language, and they had done so long before 
 the days of Darwin ; but, like Darwin, they have to 
 accept certain original germs as given, and they do 
 not venture to pierce into the deepest mysteries of 
 actual creation or cosmic beginnings. 
 
 And yet, though accepting this limitation of their 
 labours as the common fate of all human knowledge, 
 Oriental scholars have not altogether laboured in 
 vain. No history of the world can in future be 
 written without its introductory chapter on the 
 great consolidations of the ancient Aryan and 
 Semitic speakers. That chapter may be called pre- 
 historic, but the facts with which it deals are 
 thoroughly historical, and I say once more, in the 
 eyes of the student of language they are as real as 
 the battle of Waterloo. They form the solid founda- 
 tion of all later history. They determine the course 
 of the principal nations of ancient history as the 
 mountains determine the course of rivers. Try only 
 to realize what is meant by the fact that there was 
 a time, and there was a place, where the ancestors of 
 the poets of the Veda and of the prophets of the Zend 
 Avesta shook hands and conversed freely with the 
 ancestors of Homer, nay, with our own linguistic 
 ancestors, and you will see what a shifting of scenery,
 
 28 
 
 what a real transformation-scene Oriental students 
 have produced on the historical stage of the world. 
 They have brought together the most valuable, and 
 yet the least expensive Museum of antiquities, 
 namely, the words which date from the time of an 
 undivided Aryan and an undivided Semitic brother- 
 hood ; relics older than all Babylonian tablets or 
 Egyptian papyri ; relics of their common thoughts, 
 their common religion, their common mythology, 
 their common folk-lore, nay, as has lately been 
 shown by Leist, Kohler, and others, relics of their 
 common jurisprudence also. 
 
 Here too there has been much useless controversy. 
 It is as clear as daylight that when we find a number 
 of words which all Aryan languages share in common, 
 these words and the ideas which they express, must 
 have been known before the Proto- Aryan language 
 was differentiated as Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, 
 and all the rest. It has been possible to put together 
 these fragmentary words into a kind of mosaic 
 picture, giving us an idea of the degree of civilisa- 
 tion reached before the Aryan separation. To some 
 students this picture or this idyll (dSvXXiov), seemed 
 to disclose a much higher advance of civilisation 
 than they expected in such early times. They 
 therefore wrote rapturously of those early Aryas, 
 who called themselves drya, or noble, though 
 originally this self-glorious name need not have
 
 29 
 
 meant more than tillers of the soil. Others, on the 
 contrary, still under the influence of Rousseau's 
 school, claimed these Aryas as true representatives 
 of the Noble Savage, with all the vices as well as 
 the virtues of the Child of Nature. Such a con- 
 troversy is simply barren. What the true scholar 
 values are the linguistic materials brought together 
 and critically sifted by the industry and ingenuity 
 of men such as Bopp, Kuhn, Benfey, and last not 
 least, Dr. Schrader, who have drawn this picture of 
 ancient Aryan civilisation with almost Pre-raphaelite 
 minuteness. Till some one has given us a definition 
 of what is meant by Savage, it does not matter 
 whether we call these undivided Aryas savages or 
 sages. The only important point in the eyes of a 
 scholar is that we should know the words, and 
 therefore the thoughts, which the Aryas shared in 
 common before they broke up from their old 
 common Aryan home. 
 
 At the present moment, when the whole world is 
 preparing for the celebration of the discovery of 
 America, or what is called the New World, let us 
 not forget that the discoverers of that Old, that 
 Prehistoric World of which I have been speaking, 
 deserve our gratitude, as much as Columbus and his 
 companions. The discoveries of Sir William Jones, 
 Schlegel, Humboldt, and of my own masters and 
 fellow-workers Bopp, Pott, Burnouf, Benfey, Kuhn
 
 30 
 
 and Curtius, will for ever remain a landmark in the 
 studies devoted to the history, that is, the know- 
 ledge of our race, and, in the end, the knowledge of 
 ourselves. If others have followed in their footsteps, 
 and have proved that these bold discoverers have 
 sometimes been on a wrong track, let them have 
 full credit for what they have added, for what they 
 have corrected, and what they have rejected but a 
 Moses who fights his way through the wilderness, 
 though he dies before he enters on the full possession 
 of the promised land, is greater than all the Joshuas 
 that cross the Jordan and divide the land. Many 
 travellers now find their way easily to Africa and 
 back, but the first who toiled alone to discover the 
 sources of the Nile, men such as Burton, Speke, and 
 Livingstone, required often greater faith and greater 
 pluck than those who actually discovered them. As 
 long as I live, I shall protest against all attempts to 
 belittle the true founders of the Science of Language. 
 Their very mistakes often display more genius than 
 the corrections of their Epigoni. 
 
 It may be said that this great discovery of a whole 
 act in the drama of the world, the very existence of 
 which was unknown to our forefathers, was due to 
 the study of the Science of Language rather than to 
 Oriental scholarship. But where would the Science 
 of Language have been without the students of 
 Sanskrit and Zend, of Hebrew and Arabic 1 At a
 
 31 
 
 Congress of Orientalists we have a right to claim 
 what is due to them, and I doubt whether anybody 
 here present would deny that it is due in the first 
 place to Oriental scholars, such as Sir W. Jones, Cole- 
 brooke, Schlegel, Bopp, Burnouf, Grirnm, and Kuhn, if 
 we now have a whole period added to the history of 
 the world, if we now can prove that long before we 
 know anything of Homeric Greece, of Vedic India, of 
 Persia, Greece, Italy, and all the rest of Europe, there 
 was a real historical community formed by the speakers 
 of Aryan tongues, that they were closely held together 
 by the bonds of a common speech and common 
 thoughts. It is equally due to the industry and 
 genius of Oriental scholars such as de Sacy, Gesenius, 
 Ewald, and my friend the late Professor Wright, if 
 it can no longer be doubted that the ancestors of the 
 speakers of Babylonian and Assyrian, Syriac, Hebrew, 
 Phenician, and Arabic formed once one consolidated 
 brotherhood of Semitic speech, and that, however 
 different they are, when they appear for the first 
 time in their national individuality on the stage of 
 history, they could once understand their common 
 words and common thoughts, like members of one 
 and the same family. Surely this is an achievement 
 on which Oriental scholarship has a right to take 
 pride, when it is challenged to produce its title to 
 the gratitude of the world at large. 
 
 If we now turn our attention to another field of
 
 32 
 
 Oriental scholarship which has been fruitful of 
 results of the greatest importance to the student 
 of history and to the world at large, we shall be 
 able to show, not indeed that Oriental scholars have 
 created a whole period of history, as in the case of 
 the Aryas and Semites, before their respective 
 separation, but that they have inspired the oldest 
 period in the history of the world with a new life. 
 Instead of learning by heart the unmeaning names 
 of kings and the dates of their battles, whether in 
 Egypt, or Babylon, in Syria and Palestine, we have 
 been enabled, chiefly through the marvellous dis- 
 coveries of Oriental scholars, to watch their most 
 secret thoughts, to comprehend their motives, to 
 listen to their prayers, to read even their private 
 and confidential letters. Think only what ancient 
 Egypt was to us a hundred years ago ! A Sphinx 
 buried in a desert, with hardly any human features 
 left. And now not only do we read the hiero- 
 glyphic, the hieratic, and demotic inscriptions, not 
 only do we know the right names of kings and 
 queens 4000 or 5000 years B.C., but we know their 
 gods, their worship ; we know their laws and their 
 poetry ; we know their folk-lore and even their 
 novels. Their prayers are full of those touches 
 which make the whole world feel akin. Here is 
 the true Isis, here is Human Nature, unveiled. 
 The prayers of Babylon are more formal ; still, how
 
 33 
 
 much more living is the picture they give us of the 
 humanity of Babylon and Nineveh, than all the 
 palaces, temples, and halls. And as to India, think 
 what India was to the scholars of the last century. 
 A name and not much more. And now ! Not only 
 have the ancient inhabitants ceased to be mere 
 idolaters or niggers, they have been recognised as 
 our brothers in language and thought. The Veda 
 has revealed to us the earliest phases in the history 
 of natural religion, and has placed in our hands the 
 only safe key to the secrets of Aryan mythology. Nay, 
 I do not hesitate to say that there are rays of light 
 in the Upanishads and in the ancient philosophy of 
 the Vedanta which will throw new light even to-day 
 on some of the problems nearest to our own hearts. 
 And not only has each one of the ancient Oriental 
 Kingdoms been reanimated arid made to speak to 
 us, like the gray, crumbling statue of Memnon, when 
 touched by the rays of the dawn, but we have also 
 gained a new insight into the mutual relations of 
 the principal nations of antiquity. Formerly, when 
 we had to read the history of the ancient world, 
 every one of the great Kingdoms of the East 
 seemed to stand by itself, isolated from all the rest, 
 having its own past, unconnected with the past 
 history of other countries. 
 
 China, for instance, was a world by itself. It 
 had always been inhabited by a peculiar people, 
 
 i)
 
 34 
 
 different in thought, in language, and in writing 
 even from its nearest neighbours. 
 
 Egypt, in the gray morning of antiquity, seemed to 
 stand alone, like a pyramid in a desert, self-contained, 
 proud, and without any interest in the outside world, 
 entirely original in its language, its alphabet, its 
 literature, its art, and its religion. 
 
 India, again, has always been a world by itself, 
 either entirely unknown to the Northern nations, or 
 surrounded in their eyes by a golden mist of fable 
 and mystery. 
 
 The same applies more or less to the great Mesopo- 
 tamian Kingdoms, to Babylon and Nineveh. They 
 too have their own language, their own alphabet, 
 their own religion, their own art. They seem to owe 
 nothing to anybody else. 
 
 It is somewhat different with Media and Persia, 
 but this is chiefly due to our knowing hardly any- 
 thing of these countries before they appear in conflict 
 with their neighbours, either as conquerors or as 
 conquered on the ancient battle-fields of history. 
 
 In fact if we look at the old maps of the ancient 
 world, we see them coloured with different and 
 strongly contrasting colours, which admit of no 
 shading, of no transition from one to the other. 
 Every country seemed a world by itself, and, so far 
 as we can judge from the earliest traditions which 
 have reached us, each nation claimed even its own
 
 35 
 
 independent creation, whether from their own gods, 
 or from their own native soil. China knows nothing 
 of what is going on in Babylon and Egypt, Egypt 
 hardly knows the name of India, India looks upon 
 all that is beyond the Himalayan snows as fabu- 
 lous, while the Jews more than all the rest felt them- 
 selves a peculiar people, the chosen people of God. 
 
 Until lately, if it was asked whether there was 
 any communication at all between the leading 
 historical nations of the East, the answer was that 
 no communication, no interchange of thought, no 
 mutual influence was possible, because language 
 placed a barrier between them which made communi- 
 cation, and more particularly free intellectual inter- 
 course, entirely impossible. 
 
 If, therefore, it seemed that some of these ancient 
 nations shared certain ideas, beliefs or customs in 
 common, the answer always was that they could not 
 have borrowed one from the other, because there was 
 really no channel through which they could have 
 communicated, or borrowed from each other by 
 means of a rational and continuous converse. Thanks 
 to the more recent researches of Oriental scholars, 
 this is no longer so. One of the first and one of the 
 strongest proofs that there was, in very ancient times, 
 a very active intellectual intercourse between Aryan 
 and Semitic nations is the Greek Alphabet. The 
 Greeks never made any secret of their having 
 
 D 2
 
 36 
 
 borrowed their letters from Pbenician school-masters. 
 They called their letters Phenician, as we call our 
 numerical figures Arabic, while the Arabs called 
 them Indian. The very name of Alphabet in Greek 
 is the best proof that at the time when the Greeks 
 were the pupils of Phenician writing-masters, the 
 secondary names of the Semitic letters, Aleph, Beth, 
 Gimel, Daleth, had already been accepted. Originally 
 the Aleph was the picture of an eagle, Beth of another 
 bird, Gimel of a vessel with a handle, Daleth of 
 a ; stretched out hand. This intercourse between 
 Phenicians and Greeks must have taken place 
 previous to the beginning of any written litera- 
 ture in Greece, previous therefore to the seventli 
 century at least. When we speak of Greeks and 
 Phenicians in general, we must guard against think- 
 ing of whole nations, or of large numbers. The 
 work of humanity in the past, more even than in 
 the present, was carried on by the few, not by the 
 many, by what Disraeli called * the men of light and 
 leading/ the so-called Path-makers of the ancient 
 world. They represent unknown millions, standing 
 behind them, as a Commander-in-chief represents a 
 whole army that follows him. The important point 
 is that in the alphabet we have before us a tangible 
 document, attesting a real communication between 
 these leaders of progress and civilisation in the East 
 and in the West, a bridge between Phenicia and
 
 37 
 
 Greece, between Semitic and Aryan people. The 
 name of the letter alpha in the Greek alphabet is 
 a more irresistible proof of Phenician influence than 
 all the legends about Kadmos and Thebes, about a 
 Phenician Herakles or a Phenician Aphrodite. And 
 having discovered the still standing arches of that 
 ancient bridge in the letters of the alphabet, we can 
 now better understand other traces of Pheuician 
 imports, whether in the religion, the mythology, or 
 the art of Greece. 
 
 But later discoveries have opened even wider 
 vistas. It was one of the most brilliant achievements, 
 due to the genius of the Vicomte de Rouge', to have 
 shown that, though they discovered many things, the 
 Phenicians did not discover the letters of the 
 alphabet. Broken arches of the same bridge that 
 led from Phenicia to Greece, have been laid bare, 
 and they lead clearly from Phenicia to Egypt. It 
 is well known that even the ancients hardly ever 
 doubted that the alphabet was originally discovered 
 in Egypt, and carried from thence by the Phenicians 
 to Greece and Italy. Plato, Diodorus Siculus, 
 Plutarch, and Gellius, all speak of Egypt as the 
 cradle of the alphabet, and Tacitus (Annals xi. 14), 
 who seems to have taken a special interest in this 
 subject, is most explicit on that point. It was 
 supposed for a time that the Egyptians simply took 
 certain hieroglyphic signs, and made them stand for
 
 38 
 
 their initial letters. This was called the akrological 
 theory, but it is no longer tenable. The alphabet 
 was never a discovery, in the usual sense of the 
 word ; it was like all the greatest discoveries, a 
 natural growth. It arose, without any intentional 
 effort, from the employment of what are called com- 
 plementary hieroglyphics 1 . Thus in hieroglyphic 
 writing the wall with battlements expresses the 
 syllable Men ; but with the waved line written 
 under it. This waved line is called the complement 
 of the battlements, and is always to be understood 
 after it, even if it is not expressed. In like manner, 
 the crux ansata has for its complements the waved 
 line and the sieve, and if they are not there, they 
 have to be supplied. This crux ansata means life, 
 and is pronounced anch. It was therefore an almost 
 irresistible conclusion that led the ancient Egyptians 
 to suppose that the battlement, when followed by the 
 waved line stood, not for Men, but only for m, while 
 the waved line stood for n ; or that the crux ansata f 
 seemed to represent the initial A only, while the ncli 
 were figured by the waved line and the sieve. In 
 the end the result is the same ; certain hieroglyphics 
 were accepted as standing for their initial letters, 
 but the process, as I have tried to explain it, is more 
 natural, and therefore, from an historical point of 
 view, more true. 
 
 1 Hincks. Egyptian Alphabet, p. 7.
 
 39 
 
 What the Vicomte de Rougd did was to select 
 the most ancient forms of the Phenician alphabet, as 
 they are found on the sarcophagus of Eshmunezar 
 (or better still, on the Stone of Mesha, which was not- 
 known in his time), and to show how near they came, 
 not indeed to the most ancient hieroglyphics, but to 
 certain hieratic cursive signs which have the same 
 phonetic values as their corresponding Phenician 
 letters. This was a most brilliant discovery, and I 
 still possess a very scarce paper which he sent me in 
 1859. He never published a full account of his 
 discovery himself, but after his death his notes were 
 published by his son in 1874. 
 
 I know quite well that some scholars have re- 
 mained sceptical as to the Egyptian origin of the 
 Phenician letters. My friend Lepsius was never 
 quite convinced. Attempts have been made to derive 
 the Phenician letters from a cuneiform source or from 
 the Cypriote letters, but the result has hitherto been 
 far from satisfactory. The Phenician letters must 
 have had ideographic antecedents. Where are we to 
 look for them, if not in Egypt ? What has always 
 made me feel convinced that Rougd was right, is the 
 fact that we have to deal with a series, and that 1 5 
 out of the 2 3 letters of this series are almost identical 
 in Phenician and in Egyptian. We are perfectly 
 justified therefore in making a certain allowance for 
 some modifications in the rest. These modifications
 
 40 
 
 are certainly not greater than the modification which 
 the Phenician letters underwent later in their travels 
 over the whole civilised world. But there is another 
 argument in Kouge"s favour which has often been 
 ignored, namely, the fact that the Egyptians, when- 
 ever they had to transcribe foreign words, have fixed 
 in many cases on the identical letters which served 
 as the prototypes of the Phenician alphabet. This 
 fact, first pointed out by Dr. Hincks, is one of the 
 many valuable services which that ingenious scholar 
 has rendered to hieroglyphic studies ; and the 
 Vicomte de Kouge has been the first to acknowledge 
 how much his own discovery owes to the labours of 
 Dr. Hincks, particularly to his paper on the Egyptian 
 alphabet published in the Transactions of the Irish 
 Academy in 1847. All the facts concerning the 
 history of the alphabet have been carefully put 
 together in Lenormant's great work : ' Essai sur la 
 Propagation de 1 'Alphabet Phenicien.' Here then 
 we have a clear line of communication between 
 Egvpt, Phenicia, and Greece, which Oriental scholar- 
 ship has laid bare before our eyes. To judge from 
 the character of the hieratic letters as copied by the 
 Phenicians, the copying must have taken place about 
 the nineteenth century B.C. 1 ; according to others, 
 even at an earlier date. It is well known that hiero- 
 
 1 J. de Eouge, Memoire sur 1'Origine Egyptienne de 1'Alphabet 
 Phenicien, 1874, p. 108.
 
 41 
 
 glyphic writing for monumental purposes goes back in 
 Egypt to the Fourth, or even the Second Dynasty 1 , 
 and on these earliest inscriptions we not only find 
 the hieroglyphic system of writing fully developed, 
 but we actually see hieroglyphic pictures of paper 2 
 and books, of inkstands and pens. But here again 
 the beginnings escape us, and the origin of writing, 
 though we know the conditions under which it took 
 place, withdraws itself from our sight, almost as much 
 as the origin of language itself. The question has 
 been asked whether, as the oldest cuneiform writing 
 clearly betrays an ideographic origin, its first germs 
 could be traced back to the ideographic alphabet of 
 Egypt. This would make Egypt the school-master, 
 or at least the older school-fellow of the Mesopotamia!! 
 Kingdoms. But whatever the future may disclose, 
 at present Oriental scholarship has no evidence with 
 which to confirm such a hypothesis. 
 
 The same applies to another hypothesis which has 
 been advocated with great ingenuity by one of the 
 Members of our Congress, M. de Lacouperie. He 
 thinks it possible to show that the oldest cuneiform 
 letters which, as is generally admitted, had an ideo- 
 graphic beginning, like that of the Egyptian hiero- 
 glyphics, owed their first origin to China. It is now 
 
 1 In the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford is a monument of 
 the Second Dynasty. 
 
 2 Kouge, 1. c. p. 103.
 
 42 
 
 generally admitted that the cuneiform alphabet used 
 by the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria 
 was invented by a non-Semitic race, called Sumerians 
 and Accadians, but whether this race can be identified 
 with a race dwelling originally in the North and East of 
 Asia must, as far as I can judge, remain for the present 
 an open question. There are scholars who place the 
 original home of the Accadians on the Persian Gulf, 
 though the evidence for this view also is very weak. 
 We must not forget that ideographs, such as pictures 
 of sun and moon, or of the super-incumbent sky, of 
 mountains and plants, of the mouth arid nose, of eyes 
 and ears, must of necessity share certain features in 
 common, in whatever country they are used for 
 hieroglyphic purposes. The scholar has the same 
 feeling with regard to these very general ideographic 
 pictures which he has with regard to the very in- 
 definite roots of language, which are supposed to be 
 shared in common by the Semitic and Aryan families 
 of speech. Both are too protoplastic, too jellylike, 
 too indefinite for scientific handling. Still no re- 
 searches, if only carried on methodically, should be 
 discouraged a priori, and we must always be willing 
 to learn new lessons, however much they may shock 
 our inherited opinions. It is not so very long ago 
 that the best Semitic scholars stood aghast at the 
 idea that the cuneiform letters were borrowed from a 
 non-Semitic race, and that some of the cuneiform
 
 43 
 
 inscriptions should contain specimens of a non- 
 Semitic or Accadian language. We have got over 
 this surprise, and though there are still some 
 formidable sceptics, the fact seems now generally 
 recognised that there was in very ancient times an 
 intercourse between the Semitic and non-Semitic 
 races of Asia, as there was between the Egyptians 
 and the Phenicians, and between the Phenicians and 
 Greeks, that is between the greatest people of 
 antiquity, and that these non-Semitic people or 
 Accadians were really the school-masters of the 
 founders of the great Mesopotamia!! kingdoms. But 
 though we must for the present consider any connec- 
 tion between Chinese and Babylonian writing as 
 extremely doubtful, there can be no doubt as to the 
 rapid advance of the cuneiform system of writing 
 itself, from East to West. This wonderful invention, 
 more mysterious even than the hieroglyphic alphabet, 
 soon overflowed the frontiers of the Mesopotamian 
 kingdoms, and found its way into Persia and 
 Armenia, where it was used, though for the purpose 
 of inscriptions only, by people speaking both Aryan 
 and non-Aryan languages. Here then we see again 
 an ancient intercourse between people who were 
 formerly considered by all historians as entirely 
 separate, and we are chiefly indebted to English 
 scholars, such as Eawlinson, Norris, Sayce, Pinches, 
 and others for having brought to light some of
 
 44 
 
 the ruins of that long buried bridge on which the 
 thoughts of the distant East may have wandered 
 towards the West. 
 
 Few generations have witnessed so many dis- 
 coveries in Oriental scholarship, and have lived 
 through so many surprises as our own. If any two 
 countries seemed to have been totally separated in 
 ancient times by the barriers both of language and 
 writing, they were Egypt with its hieroglyphic and 
 Babylon with its arrow-headed literature. We only 
 knew of one communication between Egypt and its 
 powerful neighbours and enemies, carried on through 
 the inarticulate and murderous language of war, of 
 spears and arrows, but not of arrow-headed writings. 
 Who could have supposed that the rows of wedges 
 covering the cylinders of Babylonian libraries, which 
 have taxed the ingenuity of our cleverest decipherers, 
 were read without any apparent difficulty by scribes 
 and scholars in Egypt, about 1 500 B. c. Yet we 
 possess now in the tablets found at Tell-el-Amarna 
 in Egypt, a kind of diplomatic correspondence, 
 carried on at that early time, more than a thousand 
 years before the invasion of Greece by Persia, between 
 the Kings of Egypt and their friends and vassals in 
 Babylon, Syria, and Palestine. These letters were 
 docketed in Egypt in hieratic writing, like the de- 
 spatches in our Foreign Office. They throw much 
 light on the political relations then existing between
 
 45 
 
 the Kings of Egypt and the Kings of Western Asia, 
 their political and matrimonial alliances, and likewise 
 on the trade carried on between different countries. 
 They confirm statements known to us from hiero- 
 glyphic inscriptions in Egypt, more particularly those 
 in the temple of Earnak. The spelling is chiefly 
 syllabic, the language an Assyrian dialect. Doubt- 
 ful Accadian words are often followed and explained 
 by glosses in what may be called a Canaanite dialect,, 
 which comes very near to Hebrew. But how did 
 the Kings of Egypt understand these cuneiform 
 despatches I It is true we meet sometimes with the 
 express statement that those to whom these missives 
 were addressed, had understood them 1 , as if this 
 could not always be taken for granted. It is true 
 also that these letters were mostly brought by 
 messengers who might have helped in interpreting 
 them, provided they had learnt to speak and read 
 Egyptian. But what is more extraordinary still, the 
 King of Egypt himself, Amenophis III, when writ- 
 ing to a king whose daughter he wishes to marry, 
 writes a despatch in cuneiform letters, and in a 
 language not his own, unless we suppose that the 
 tablet which we possess was simply a translation 
 sent to the King Kallimma Sin, and as such kept in 
 the archives of the Egyptian Foreign Office. 
 
 It is curious to observe that the King of Egypt, 
 1 See tablets xxvi, Ix, Ixix, Ixxxiv.
 
 46 
 
 though quite willing to marry the daughters of 
 smaller potentates, is not at all disposed to send 
 Egyptian princesses to them. For he writes in one 
 of his letters (p. 29), 'A daughter of the King of the 
 land of Egypt has never been given to a "Nobody".' 
 Whatever else we may learn from these letters, they 
 are not patterns of diplomatic language, if indeed 
 the translation is in* this case quite faithful. In 
 these despatches, dating from 1400 B.C., a number of 
 towns are mentioned, many of which have the same 
 names as those known to us from hieroglyphic in- 
 scriptions. Some of these names have even survived 
 to our own time, such as Misirim for Egypt, Damas- 
 cus, Megiddo, Tyre (Surrii), Sidon (Siduna), Byblos 
 (Guble), Beyrut (Biruta), Joppa (Yapu), and others. 
 Even the name of Jerusalem has been discovered by 
 Sayce in these tablets, as Urusalim, meaning in As- 
 syrian the town of peace, a name which must have 
 existed before the Jews took possession of Canaan. 
 Some of these tablets (eighty-two) may be seen at the 
 British Museum, others (160) at Berlin, most of the 
 rest are in the Museum at Gizeh. We are indebted to 
 Mr. Budge for having secured these treasures for 
 the British Museum, and to Dr. Bezold and Mr. 
 Budge for having translated and published them. 
 
 To us this correspondence is of the greatest im- 
 portance, as showing once more the existence of a 
 literary and intellectual intercourse between Western
 
 Asia and Egypt, of which historians had formerly no 
 suspicion. If we can once point to such an open 
 channel as that through which cuneiform tablets 
 travelled from Babylonia and Syria to Egypt, we 
 shall be better prepared to understand the presence 
 in Egypt of products of artistic workmanship also, 
 from Western Asia, nay, from Cyprus, and even from 
 Mycenae. I possess potsherds sent to me by Schlie- 
 mann from Mycenae, which might have been broken 
 off from the same vessels of which fragments have 
 lately been found in Egypt by Mr. Flinders Petrie. 
 Mr. Flinders Petrie in the Academy, June 25th, 1892, 
 writes : ' Mykenaean vase-types are found in Egypt 
 with scarabs, &c. of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and 
 conversely objects of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in- 
 cluding a royal scarab, are found at Mykenae. And 
 again, hundreds of pieces of pottery, purely Myke- 
 naean in style, have been found in various dateable 
 discoveries in Egypt, and without exception every 
 datum for such lies between 1500 and uoo B.C., 
 and earlier rather than later in that range.' I do not 
 wish to rely on evidence which is contested by some 
 of the best Egyptian scholars ; otherwise I should 
 gladly have appealed to the names of the Mysians, 
 Lycians, Carians, lonians, and Dardanians, discovered 
 in the Epic of Pantaur about 1400 B. c., in the reign 
 of Barneses II; and to the name of Achaeans read 
 by certain Egyptian scholars in an inscription at
 
 48 
 
 Karnak, ascribed to the time of Meneptah, the son of 
 Barneses II. What we shall have to learn more arid 
 more is that the people of antiquity, even though 
 they spoke different languages and used different 
 alphabets, knew far more of each other, even at 
 the time of Amenophis III, or 1400 B.C., than was 
 supposed by even the best historians. The ancient 
 world was not so large and wide as it seemed, and 
 the number of representative men was evidently 
 very small. The influence of Babylon extended far 
 and wide. We know that several of the strange 
 gods worshipped by the Jews, such as Eimmon, 
 Nebo, and Sin, came from Babylon. The authority 
 of Egypt also was felt in Palestine, in Syria, and 
 likewise in Babylon. The authenticity of the cunei- 
 form despatches found at Tell-el-Amarna in Egypt 
 has lately received an unexpected confirmation from 
 tablets found at Tell-el-Hesy, probably the ancient 
 Lachish. Here a letter has been found addressed to 
 Zimrida, who in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets was men- 
 tioned as governor of Lachish, where he was murdered 
 by his people T . In the same place cylinders were 
 found of Babylonian manufacture, between 2000 and 
 1 500 B. c., and copies, evidently made of them in the 
 West. Similar cylinders occur in the tombs of 
 Cyprus and Syria, helping us to fix their dates, and 
 showing once more the intercourse between East 
 1 Academy, July g, 1892.
 
 49 
 
 and West, and the ancient migration of Eastern 
 thought towards Europe. 
 
 Nor should we, when looking for channels of 
 communication between the ancient kingdoms of 
 Asia, forget the Jews, who were more or less at 
 home in every part of the world. We must re- 
 member that they came originally from Ur of the 
 Chaldees, then migrated to Canaan, and afterwards 
 sojourned in Egypt, before they settled in Palestine. 
 After that we know how they were led into 
 captivity and lived in close proximity and daily 
 intercourse with Medians, Persians, Babylonians, and 
 Assyrians. They spoke of Cyrus, a believer in 
 Ormazd, as the anointed and the shepherd of 
 Jehovah, because he allowed them to return from 
 Babylon to Jerusalem. Darius, likewise a follower of 
 Zoroaster, was looked on by them as their patron, 
 because he favoured the rebuilding of the Temple at 
 Jerusalem. When we consider these intimate rela- 
 tions between the Jews and their neighbours and 
 conquerors, we can easily imagine what useful 
 intermediaries they must always have been in the 
 intellectual exchange of the ancient world. 
 
 There are two countries only which really re- 
 mained absolutely isolated in the past, China and 
 India. It is true that attempts have been made to 
 show that the Chinese influenced the inhabitants of 
 India in very ancient times by imparting to them
 
 50 
 
 their earliest astronomy. But Biot's arguments have 
 hardly convinced anybody. And as to Chinese porce- 
 lain being found in ancient Egyptian tombs, this too 
 has long been surrendered for lack of trustworthy 
 evidence. 
 
 Nor have the attempts been more successful which 
 were intended to show that the ancient astronomy 
 of India was borrowed from Babylon. It is well 
 known that the Babylonians excelled in astronomy, 
 and that in later times they became the teachers of 
 the Greeks, and indirectly of the Indians. But the 
 twenty-seven Vedic Nakshatras or Lunar Stations 
 are perfectly intelligible as produced on Indian soil, 
 and require no foreign influences for their explana- 
 tion. If the Indians had in Vedic times been the 
 pupils of the Babylonians, other traces of that inter- 
 course could hardly be absent. It was, indeed, 
 thought for a time that one word at least of Baby- 
 lonian origin had been discovered in the hymns of 
 the Kig-Veda, the Babylonian mand, a certain weight 
 of gold. This word has certainly travelled far arid 
 wide. We find it in the tablets of Tell-el-Amarna, 
 in Hebrew, in Arabic, in Greek, and in Latin 1 , mina, 
 a mine. But the verse in the Kig-Veda in which 
 this mand was supposed to occur, requires a dif- 
 ferent interpretation, nor would one word be sufficient 
 
 1 Possibly in Egyptian, Zeitschrift cler D. Morgenl. Gesells. 
 Vol. xlvi. p. in.
 
 51 
 
 to indicate a real intellectual intercourse between 
 Babylonians and Vedic Indians. On the same ground 
 we can hardly use the word sindhu in the Baby- 
 lonian inscriptions, as proving a commercial inter- 
 course between India and Babylon. Sindhu, as my 
 learned friend, Professor Sayce, informed me, occurs 
 in cuneiform texts as far back as 3000 B. C. as the 
 name of some textile fabric. In Sanskrit saindhava 
 would mean what grows on the Sindhu or the Indus \ 
 and would therefore be a very good name for cotton 
 or linen. But so long as this word stands alone, it 
 would not be safe to build any conclusions on it 
 as to an ancient trade between India and Babylon. 
 
 For the present, therefore, we must continue to 
 look upon China and India as perfectly isolated 
 countries during the period of which we are here 
 speaking. But though in the eyes of the historian 
 the ancient literature of these .two countries loses in 
 consequence much of its interest, it acquires a new 
 and peculiar interest of its own in the eyes of the 
 philosopher. It is entirely home-grown and home- 
 spun, and thus forms an independent parallel to all 
 the other literatures of the world. It has been truly 
 said that the religion and the philosophy of India 
 came upon us like meteors from a distant planet, 
 perfectly independent in their origin and in their 
 character. Hence, when they do agree with other 
 1 M. M., Physical Religion, p. 87. 
 E 2
 
 52 
 
 religions and philosophers of the ancient world, they 
 naturally inspire us with the same confidence as 
 when two mathematicians, working quite inde- 
 pendently, arrive in the end at the same results *. 
 
 It is true that in these days of unexpected dis- 
 coveries we are never entirely safe from surprises. 
 But as far as our evidence goes at present and we 
 can never say more the idea once generally enter- 
 tained, and lately revived by Professor Gruppe, that 
 there was some connection between the ancient 
 religion of India and those of Egypt and Babylon 
 is, from a scholar's point of view, simply impossible. 
 Before the time of Alexander the Great, it would be 
 very difficult to point out any foreign intellectual 
 importation into the land of the Indus or the Seven 
 Kivers. The knowledge of the alphabet may have 
 reached India a little before Alexander's invasion. 
 We know that Darius sent Skylax on a scientific 
 expedition down to the mouth of the Indus. This 
 expedition, like other scientific expeditions, was the 
 forerunner of Persian conquests along the Indus. 
 The people called in the cuneiform inscriptions 
 Gaddra and Hidhu, that is in Sanskrit, Gandhdra 
 and Sindhu, occur among the conquests of Darius, 
 at least in his later inscriptions. It is quite possible, 
 therefore, that even at that early time a knowledge 
 of reading and writing may have been communicated 
 1 Deussen. Die Suhvos des Vedanta, p. vi.
 
 53 
 
 to India. Travellers from India were seen by 
 Ktesias in Persia at the beginning of the fifth 
 century B.C., and he describes some whom he had 
 seen himself, as being as fair, or actually as white, as 
 any in the world. Others he describes as swarthy, 
 not by exposure to the sun, but by nature. This 
 was probably written at the same time when Buddha, 
 in a sermon which he delivered (the Assalayana 
 Sutta), said : ' The Brahmans are the white caste, the 
 other castes are black.' This refers to their colour 
 (vama), not, as has been supposed, to their character. 
 But we have no real evidence of writing, not even of 
 inscriptions, in India before the time of Asoka, in the 
 third century B. c. The Indian alphabets certainly 
 came from a Semitic alphabet, which was adapted 
 systematically to the requirements of an Aryan lan- 
 guage. We can see it still in a state of fermentation 
 in the local varieties that have lately been pointed 
 out by my friend, Professor Biihler, the highest 
 authority on this subject. As to the religion of 
 Buddha being influenced by foreign thought, no 
 true scholar now dreams of that. The religion of 
 Buddha is the daughter of the old Brahmanic 
 religion, and a daughter in many respects more 
 beautiful than the mother. On the contrary, it was 
 through Buddhism that India for the first time 
 stepped forth from its isolated position, and be- 
 came an actor in the historical drama of the world.
 
 54 
 
 A completely new idea in the history of the world 
 was started at the third Buddhist Council in the 
 third century B. c., under King Asoka, the idea of 
 conquering other nations, not by force of arms, but 
 by the power of truth. A resolution was proposed 
 and carried at that Council to send missionaries to 
 all neighbouring nations to preach the new gospel 
 of Buddha. Such a resolution would never have 
 entered into the minds of the ancient Egyptians, 
 Babylonians, Assyrians, not even of the Brahmans. 
 It presupposed quite a new conception of the world. 
 It announced for the first time a belief that the 
 different nations of the world, however separated 
 from each other by language, religion, colour, and 
 customs, formed nevertheless one united family ; that 
 each of its members was responsible for the rest, in 
 fact, that humanity was not an empty word. 
 
 It is a curious coincidence, if no more, that the 
 name of the missionary who, according to the chronicle 
 of Ceylon, was sent to the North, to the Himalayan 
 border-lands, namely, Madhyama, should have been 
 found in a Stupa near Sanchi, as well as that of his 
 fellow-worker, Kasyapa. We read in an inscription : 
 ' These are (the relics) of the good man of the family 
 of Kasapa, the teacher of the whole Haimavata,' that 
 is, the Himalayan border-land l . We seldom find 
 such monumental confirmations in Indian history. 
 1 Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, vol. ii, p. 234, c. xxxix.
 
 55 
 
 This important discovery, like so many others, was 
 due to General Cunningham, in one of his earlier 
 works (The Bhilsa Topes, pp. 119, 187, 317). 
 
 China, the other isolated country of antiquity, was 
 soon touched by the rising stream of Buddhism, and 
 thus brought for the first time into contact with 
 India and the rest of the world. The first waves 
 of Buddhism seem to have reached the frontiers of 
 China as early as the third century (217 B. c.), and 
 so rapid and constant was its progress, that in 6 1 B.C. 
 Buddhism was accepted by the Emperor Mingti as 
 one of the three state-religions of China. We soon 
 hear of Buddhists in other countries also, and if we 
 consider that we have now arrived at a third period 
 in the history of antiquity, which may truly be 
 called the Alexandrian or Alexandrinian period, we 
 need not wonder that the military roads which had 
 been opened from the Indus to the Euphrates and 
 to the Mediterranean, were soon trodden by peaceful 
 travellers also, carrying both industrial and intel- 
 lectual merchandise from East to West. From 
 Kashmir, Buddhist missionaries seem to have pene- 
 trated into Hellenised Bactria. Alexander Poly- 
 histor, who wrote between 80 and 60 B. c., attests l 
 
 1 See Cyrillus, contra Julian, lib. iv, 133 : fcn-opei yow 'AXegavSpog 
 
 6 fTriicXrjv IIoXtiiaTwp ((piXocr6(j)r](Tav 8f /cat (K Ba/crpaw tS)v HfpcriKuiv 
 Sn/Liawitoi /cat Trapa ttepa-ais ot Mayot /cat Trap' 'li/8ot'y of Tvnvotro^icrral. 
 
 Lassen, 1. c. ii, p. 1073.
 
 56 
 
 their presence there under the name of Samanaiot, 
 which stands for the Pdli name Samana, a Buddhist 
 friar. Their presence in Bactria is attested somewhat 
 later, at the beginning of the third century A.D., by 
 Clement of Alexandria 1 , who speaks of the Samanaioi 
 as powerful philosophers among the Bactrians, and 
 again by Eusebius 2 at the beginning of the fourth 
 century, who writes that among the Indians and 
 Bactrians there are many thousands of Brahmans. 
 With regard to Bactria this can refer to Buddhists 
 only, for the old orthodox Brahmans did not leave 
 their country, and Brahman has always been retained 
 by the Buddhists as a title of honour for themselves. 
 Early traces of the Buddhist religion have been 
 discovered likewise in the countries north of 
 Bactria, in Tukhara, and in the towns of Khoten, 
 Yarkand, and Kashyar. M. Darmesteter has shown 
 that in the second century B. c. Buddhist missionaries 
 were hard at work in the western part of Persia, 
 and it is a significant fact that the name of Gautama, 
 the founder of Buddhism, occurs in the Avesta, in 
 the Fravardin Yasht 3 . This shows how closely the 
 
 1 Strom, i, p. 359 : 3>tXo<ro<i'a TO'IWV rraXai fitv JyK/zaae irapa 
 flapftapols Trpofcmjcrav KOI Sa/uaraloi BfunryM** 'lv85>v re ol Tvp.vo<ro- 
 (pto-Tai. Lassen, 1. c. ii, p. 1075 ; Schwanbeck, Megasthenis 
 Indica, p. 139. 
 
 2 Praep. Ev. vii. IO : Hap' 'Iv8o1s KOI Bdicrpois flul %i\ia8fs TToXXni 
 
 rmv \tyofiV(i>v 'Bpa^p.dvav. Lassen, 1. c. ii, p. io75- 
 
 3 Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii, p. 184.
 
 57 
 
 most distant parts of the world had been brought 
 together by the genius of Alexander the Great, and by 
 the genius of that still greater conqueror, Gautama 
 /Sakyamuni. Here, again, it is mainly due to the 
 labours of Oriental scholars that so many traces of 
 the work done by Alexander and his successors have 
 been rediscovered. With Alexander we have entered 
 a new period in the history of the world, a period 
 marked by the first strong reaction of the West 
 against the East, inaugurated in the fifth century 
 B.C. by the victories of Marathon, Thermopylae, and 
 Salamis, which were almost contemporary with the 
 first conquests of Buddha, who is still the ruler of 
 the majority of mankind. 
 
 If now, after having reached a period which 
 is illuminated by the bright daylight of well- 
 authenticated history, we turn our eyes back once 
 more to the two preceding periods, we may assert 
 without fear of contradiction that our knowledge of 
 the very existence of the first period is entirely due 
 to Oriental scholarship, while it is equally due to the 
 discoveries of Oriental scholars that the second period 
 has been invested for the first time with a truly 
 human interest. The ancient history of the world 
 may be said to have assumed, under the hands of 
 Oriental scholars, the character of a magnificent 
 dramatic trilogy. The first drama tells us of the 
 fates of the Aryan and Semitic races, as compact
 
 58 
 
 confederacies before their separation into various 
 languages and historical nationalities. The second 
 drama is formed by the wars and conquests of the 
 great Eastern Empires in Egypt, Babylon, and 
 Syria, but it shows us that besides these wars and 
 conquests, there was a constant progress of Eastern 
 culture towards the West, towards the shores and 
 islands of the Mediterranean, and lastly towards 
 Greece. 
 
 The third drama represents the triumphant 
 progress of Alexander, the Greek far more than 
 the Macedonian, from Europe through Persia, Pales- 
 tine, Phenicia, Egypt, Babylon, Hyrcania, and Bactria 
 to India, in fact through all the great empires of the 
 ancient East. Here we see the first attempt at 
 re-establishing the union between East and the 
 West. It is said 1 that among the papers of Alex- 
 ander, a plan was found how to unite all these 
 conquered nations into one Greek Empire by a 
 mixture of families and manners, and by colonies, 
 and thus to raise humanity to a higher level. 
 Common religious services and commercial unions 
 were meant to teach Europeans and Asiatics to look 
 upon each other as fellow-citizens. Though this 
 plan, worthy of the pupil of Aristotle, was never 
 realised, his wars and victories have certainly drawn 
 the most distant nations closely together, and enabled 
 
 a See Johannes von Mtiller, Allgemeine Geschichte, p. 63.
 
 59 
 
 them to pour the stores of their ancient wisdom into 
 one common treasury. The rays from the Pharos of 
 Alexandria may be said to have pierced across 
 Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, and Bactria into the dark 
 shades of Indian forests, while the name of the 
 dwellers in these Indian forests, the Samanas or 
 Semnoi, the Venerable, as they were called by the 
 Greeks, might be heard in the halls of the Alexan- 
 drian Library. The very name of Buddha (BOVTTO) 
 was not unknown to the later philosophers of 
 Alexandria, for we see that the mind of Clement 
 of Alexandria 1 , in the second century A.D., was 
 occupied with the question whether Buddha really 
 deserved to be worshipped as a God, though we 
 know now that this was the very last thing that 
 the real Buddha would ever have desired. Clement 
 knew also that the Buddhists built some kind of 
 temple or JCaityas in which they preserved the 
 bones and other relics of Buddha and his disciples, 
 the earliest specimens of stone architecture in India, 
 some of them preserved to the present day 2 . 
 
 After the seeds which Alexander had transplanted 
 
 1 Strom, i, p. 131, Sylb. : EtVl 8e TU>V 'Iv8a>v ol TOIJ BOUTTO 
 
 apayyf\p.a(Tij>, ov 81 v7T6p/3oX^' (Tep.voTT)TOs wy Bfbv 
 
 possibly resting on Megasthenes ; see Megasthenis Indica, ed. 
 Schwanbeck, p. 46. 
 
 2 Clem. Alex. Strom, i, 3, p. 539, ed. Potter: Oi KuXou/^i/oi 
 8e 2f/ifot (i. e. Samana) T>V 'lv8>v afftovai nva Trvpa/Lit'Sa v<' fjv oorea
 
 60 
 
 from Greece to Egypt and the different parts of the 
 East had begun to grow and abound, Alexandria 
 became more and more the centre of gravitation of 
 the ancient world, the point to which all the streams 
 of ancient thought converged. Here in Alexandria 
 the highest aspirations of Semitic thought, embodied 
 in the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews, became blended 
 with the sublime speculations of Aryan thought, as 
 taught in the Platonist and Neo-Platonist schools of 
 Philosophy, so that Alexandria may truly be called, 
 after Jerusalem, the second birthplace of that religion 
 of universal love, which more than any other religion 
 was meant to re-unite all the members of the human 
 race, scattered in the East and in the West, into one 
 universal brotherhood. In this way the whole 
 history of the world becomes indeed a Pre- 
 paratio Evangelica, if only we have eyes to see 
 in Christianity not a mere refacimento of an ancient 
 Semitic faith, but a quickening of that religion by 
 the highest philosophical inspirations of the Aryan, 
 and more particularly of the Greek mind. 
 
 I have so far tried to show you what Oriental 
 scholarship has done for us in helping us to a right 
 appreciation of the historical development of the 
 human race, beginning on the Asiatic continent and 
 reaching its highest consummation on this Asiatic 
 peninsula of ours, which we call Europe, nay, on this 
 very spot where we are now assembled, which has
 
 61 
 
 truly been called the centre of the whole world. It 
 is due to Oriental scholarship that the gray twilight 
 of ancient history has been illuminated as if by the 
 rays of an unsuspected sunrise. We see continuity 
 and unity of purpose from beginning to end, when 
 before we saw nothing but an undecipherable chaos. 
 With every new discovery that is made, whether in 
 the royal libraries of Babylonia, or in the royal tombs 
 of Egypt, or in the sacred books of Persia and India, 
 the rays of that sunrise are spreading wider and 
 wider, and under its light the ancient history of 
 our race seems to crystallize, and to disclose in the 
 very forms of its crystallization, laws or purposes 
 running through the most distant ages of the world, 
 of which our forefathers had no suspicion. Here it 
 is where Oriental studies appeal not to specialists 
 only, but to all who see in the history of the human 
 race the supreme problem of all philosophy, a pro- 
 blem which in the future will have to be studied, 
 not as heretofore, by a priori reasoning, but chiefly 
 by the light of historical evidence. The Science of 
 Language, the Science of Mythology, the Science of 
 Religion, aye, the Science of Thought, all have 
 assumed a new aspect, chiefly through the discoveries 
 of Oriental scholars who have placed facts in the 
 place of theories, and displayed before us the 
 historical development of the human race, as a 
 worthy rival of the natural development displayed
 
 62 
 
 before our eyes by the genius and patient labours of 
 Darwin. 
 
 But before I conclude, may I be allowed to tax 
 your patience a few minutes longer, and to ask one 
 more question, though I know that many here 
 present are far more competent to return an authori- 
 tative answer to it than your President. Is the 
 benefit to be derived from Oriental studies confined 
 to a better understanding of the past, to a truer in- 
 sight into that marvellous drama, the history of the 
 human race in the East and in the West, whether in 
 historic or prehistoric times ? May not our Oriental 
 studies call for general sympathy and support, as 
 helping us to a better understanding of the present, 
 nay, of the future also, with regard to the ever in- 
 creasing intercourse between the East and the Wesf? 
 Why should so many practical men, so many states- 
 men, and rulers and administrators of Eastern 
 countries, have joined our Congress, if they did 
 not expect some important practical advantages 
 from the study of Eastern languages and Eastern 
 literature ? 
 
 If the old pernicious prejudice of the white man 
 against the black, of the Aryan against the Semitic 
 race, of the Greek against the Barbarian, has been 
 inherited by ourselves, and there are few who can 
 say that they are entirely free from that damnosa 
 haereditas, nothing, I believe, has so powerfully
 
 63 
 
 helped to remove, or at least to soften it, as a more 
 widely spread study of Oriental languages and 
 literature. 
 
 England is at present the greatest Oriental 
 Empire which the world has ever known. England 
 has proved that she knows not only how to conquer, 
 but how to rule. It is simply dazzling to think of 
 the few thousands of Englishmen ruling the millions 
 of human beings in India, in Africa, in America, and 
 in Australasia. England has realised, and more than 
 realised, the dream of Alexander, the marriage of the 
 East and the West, and has drawn the principal 
 nations of the world together more closely than they 
 have ever been before. But to conquer and rule 
 Eastern nations is one thing, to understand them is 
 quite another. In order to understand Eastern 
 nations, we must know their languages and their 
 literature, we must in a certain sense become 
 Orientalised, students of the East, lovers of the 
 East. In this respect much remains to be done. I 
 believe that the small Kingdom of Saxony, counting 
 fewer inhabitants than the city of London, does more 
 for encouraging the study of Eastern languages and 
 literature than England, It is quite true that when 
 new and really important discoveries had to be made, 
 English scholars, men of true genius, have always 
 been in the van of the victorious progress of Oriental 
 scholarship. Their work has always been what in
 
 64 
 
 German is called Bahnbrechend, breaking the first 
 road through a dark and impervious forest. But it 
 has long been felt that we are deficient in providing 
 instruction in Eastern languages, such as is offered 
 to young men in Russia, France, Italy, and Germany, 
 at the expense of the State. We have lately made 
 one step in the right direction. Under the personal 
 patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, a School of 
 Modern Oriental Studies has at last been established 
 at the Imperial Institute. This is the realisation of 
 a plan for which I pleaded forty years ago, and 
 which was warmly advocated at the time by that 
 most far-sighted statesman, the late Prince Consort. 
 But we want help, we want much larger funds, 
 if this excellent scheme is to grow and bear fruit. 
 If the public at large could only be made to see the 
 practical advantages that would accrue to English 
 commerce from a sufficient supply of young men 
 qualified to travel in the East and to carry on a 
 correspondence in Eastern dialects, we should prob- 
 ably get from our rich merchants that pecuniary 
 support which we want, and which in other countries 
 is supplied from the general taxation of the country. 
 But far higher interests than the commercial supre- 
 macy of England are at stake. The young rulers 
 and administrators who are gent every year to the 
 East, ought to be able to keep up much more in- 
 timate relations with the people whom they are
 
 65 
 
 meant to rule and to guide, than exist at present. 
 It is well known that one of our Boyal Dukes, during 
 his stay in India, acquired a knowledge of Hindustani 
 in order to be able to converse freely with his 
 soldiers. It is no secret that even our Queen, as 
 Empress of India, has devoted some of her very 
 limited leisure to a study of the language and 
 literature of India. Here are bright examples to 
 follow. Without an intimate knowledge and an 
 easy conventional command of a common language, a 
 real intimacy between rulers and ruled is impossible. 
 It has been truly said by the Times (July 9, 1892), 
 that if the Transatlantic Cable had been available in 
 1858, there would have been no Trent Affair. One 
 may say with the same truth, that if there had been 
 a more free and friendly intercourse between the 
 rulers and the ruled, between officers and soldiers 
 in India, an intercourse such as can only be kept 
 up by the electric current of a common language, 
 there would have been no Indian Mutiny. 
 
 When I accepted the honourable post of President 
 of this Congress, it was chiefly because I hoped that 
 this Congress would help to kindle more enthusiasm 
 for Oriental scholarship in England. But that 
 enthusiasm must not be allowed to pass away with 
 our meeting. It should assume a solid and lasting 
 form in the shape of a permanent and powerful 
 Association for the advancement of Oriental learning,
 
 66 
 
 having its proper home in the Imperial Institute. 
 If the Members of this Congress and their friends will 
 help to carry out this plan, then our Congress might 
 hereafter mark an important epoch in the history of 
 this the greatest Eastern Empire, and I should feel 
 that, in spite of all my shortcomings, I had proved 
 not quite unworthy of the confidence which my 
 friends and fellow-labourers have reposed in me. 
 
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