On the Tartars

Delivered 21 February 1788.

At the close of my last address to you, Gentlemen, I declared my design of introducing to your notice a people of Asia, who seemed as different in most respects from the Hindus and Arabs, as those two nations had been shown to differ from each other; I meaned the people, whom we call Tartars: but I enter with extreme diffidence on my present subject, because I have little knowledge of the Tartarian dialects; and the gross errours of European writers on Asiatick literature have long convinced me, that no satisfactory account can be given of any nation, with whose language we are not perfectly acquainted. Such evidence, however, as I have procured by attentive reading and scrupulous inquiries, I will now lay before you, interspersing such remarks as I could not but make on that evidence, and submitting the whole to your impartial decision.

Conformably to the method before adopted in describing Arabia and India, I consider Tartary also, for the purpose of this discourse, on its most extensive scale, and request your attention, whilst I trace the largest boundaries that are assignable to it: conceive a line drawn from the mouth of the Oby to that of the Dnieper, and, bringing it back eastward across the Euxine, so as to include the peninsula of Krim, extend it along the foot of Caucasus, by the rivers Cur and Aras, to the Caspian lake, from the opposite shore of which follow the course of the Jaihún and the chain of Caucasean hills as far as those of Imaus; whence continue the line beyond the Chinese wall to the White Mountain and the country of Yetso; skirting the borders of Persia, India, China, Corea, but including part of Russia, with all the districts which lie between the Glacial sea, and that of Japan. M. De Guignes, whose great work on the Huns abounds more in solid learning than in rhetorical ornaments, presents us, however, with a magnificent image of this wide region; describing it as a stupendous edifice, the beams and pillars of which are many ranges of lofty hills, and the dome, one prodigious mountain, to which the Chinese give the epithet of Celestial, with a considerable number of broad rivers flowing down its sides: if the mansion be so amazingly sublime, the land around it is proportionably extended, but more wonderfully diversified; for some parts of it are incrusted with ice, others parched with inflamed air and covered with a kind of lava; here we meet with immense tracts of sandy deserts and forests almost impenetrable; there, with gardens, groves, and meadows, perfumed with musk, watered by numberless rivulets, and abounding in fruits and flowers; and, from east to west, lie many considerable provinces, which appear as valleys in comparison of the hills towering above them, but in truth are the flat summits of the highest mountains in the world, or at least the highest in Asia. Near one fourth in latitude of this extraordinary region is in the same charming climate with Greece, Italy, and Provence; and another fourth in that of England, Germany, and the northern parts of France; but the Hyperborean countries can have few beauties to recommend them, at least in the present state of the earth's temperature: to the south, on the frontiers of Iràn are the beautiful vales of Soghd with the celebrated cities of Samarkand and Bokhárà; on those of Tibet are the territories of Cashghar, Khoten, Chegil and Khátà, all famed for perfumes and for the beauty of their inhabitants; and on those of China lies the country of Chín, anciently a powerful kingdom, which name, like that of Khátà, has in modern times been given to the whole Chinese empire, where such an appellation would be thought an insult. We must not omit the fine territory of Tancùt, which was known to the Greeks by the name of Serica, and considered by them as the farthest eastern extremity of the habitable globe.

Scythia seems to be the general name, which the ancient Europeans gave to as much as they knew of the country thus bounded and described; but, whether that word be derived, as Pliny seems to intimate, from Sacai, a people known by a similar name to the Greeks and Persians, or, as Bryant imagines, from Cuthia, or, as Colonel Vallancey believes, from words denoting navigation, or, as it might have been supposed, from a Greek root implying wrath and ferocity, this at least is certain, that, as India, China, Persia, Japan, are not appellations of those countries in the languages of the nations, who inhabit them, so neither Scythia nor Tartary are names, by which the inhabitants of the country now under our consideration have ever distinguished themselves. Tátáristàn is, indeed, a word used by the Persians for the south-western part of Scythia, where the musk-deer is said to be common; and the name Tátàr is by some considered as that of a particular tribe; by others, as that of a small river only; while Túràn, as opposed to Iràn, seems to mean the ancient dominion of Afraˊsiaˊb to the north and east of the Oxus. There is nothing more idle than a debate concerning names, which after all are of little consequence, when our ideas are distinct without them: having given, therefore, a correct notion of the country, which I proposed to examine, I shall not scruple to call it by the general name of Tartary; though I am conscious of using a term equally improper in the pronunciation and the application of it.

Tartary then, which contained, according to Pliny, an innumerable multitude of nations, by whom the rest of Asia and all Europe has in different ages been over-run, is denominated, as various images have presented themselves to various fancies, the great hive of the northern swarms, the nursery of irresistible legions, and, by a stronger metaphor, the foundery of the human race; but M. Bailly, a wonderfully ingenious man and a very lively writer, seems first to have considered it as the cradle of our species, and to have supported an opinion, that the whole ancient world was enlightened by sciences brought from the most northern parts of Scythia, particularly from the banks of the Jenisea, or from the Hyperborean regions: all the fables of old Greece, Italy, Persia, India, he derives from the north; and it must be owned, that he maintains his paradox with acuteness and learning. Great learning and great acuteness, together with the charms of a most engaging style, were indeed necessary to render even tolerable a system, which places an earthly paradise, the gardens of Hesperus, the islands of the Macares, the groves of Elysium, if not of Eden, the heaven of Indra, the Peristàn, or fairy-land, of the Persian poets, with its city of diamonds and its country of Shádcàm, so named from Pleasure and Love, not in any climate, which the common sense of mankind considers as the seat of delights, but beyond the mouth of the Oby, in the Frozen Sea, in a region equalled only by that, where the wild imagination of Dante led him to fix the worst of criminals in a state of punishment after death, and of which he could not, he says, even think without shivering. A very curious passage in a tract of Plutarch on the figure in the Moon's orb, naturally induced M. Bailly to place Ogygia in the north, and he concludes that island, as others have concluded rather fallaciously, to be the Atlantis of Plato, but is at a loss to determine, whether it was Iseland or Grænland, Spitzberg or New Zembla: among so many charms it was difficult, indeed, to give a preference; but our philosopher, though as much perplexed by an option of beauties as the shepherd of Ida, seems on the whole to think Zembla the most worthy of the golden fruit; because it is indisputably an island, and lies opposite to a gulph near a continent, from which a great number of rivers descend into the ocean. He appears equally distressed among five nations, real and imaginary, to fix upon that, which the Greeks named Atlantes; and his conclusion in both cases must remind us of the showman at Eton, who, having pointed out in his box all the crowned heads of the world, and being asked by the schoolboys, who looked through the glass, which was the Emperor, which the Pope, which the Sultan, and which the Great Mogul, answered eagerly, ‘which you please, young gentlemen, which you please.’ His letters, however, to Voltaire, in which he unfolds his new system to his friend, whom he had not been able to convince, are by no means to be derided; and his general proposition, that arts and sciences had their source in Tartary, deserves a longer examination than can be given to it in this discourse: I shall, nevertheless, with your permission, shortly discuss the question under the several heads, that will present themselves in order.

Although we may naturally suppose, that the numberless communities of Tartars, some of whom are established in great cities, and some encamped on plains in ambulatory mansions, which they remove from pasture to pasture, must be as different in their features as in their dialects, yet, among those who have not emigrated into another country and mixed with another nation, we may discern a family likeness, especially in their eyes and countenance, and in that configuration of lineaments, which we generally call a Tartar face; but, without making anxious inquiries, whether all the inhabitants of the vast region before described have similar features, we may conclude from those, whom we have seen, and from the original portraits of Taimuˊr and his descendants, that the Tartars in general differ wholly in complexion and countenance from the Hindus and from the Arabs; an observation, which tends in some degree to confirm the account given by modern Tartars themselves of their descent from a common ancestor. Unhappily their lineage cannot be proved by authentick pedigrees or historical monuments; for all their writings extant, even those in the Mogul dialect, are long subsequent to the time of Muhammed; nor is it possible to distinguish their genuine traditions from those of the Arabs, whose religious opinions they have in general adopted. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Khwájah Rashiˊd, surnamed Fadˊluˊllah, a native of Kazvìn, compiled his account of the Tartars and Mongals from the papers of one Puˊlaˊd, whom the great grandson of Holacuˊ had sent into Tátáristàn for the sole purpose of collecting historical information; and the commission itself shows, how little the Tartarian Princes really knew of their own origin. From this work of Rashiˊd, and from other materials, Abuˊˊlghaˊziˊ, King of Khwárezm, composed in the Mogul language his Genealogical History, which, having been purchased from a merchant of Bokhárà by some Swedish officers, prisoners of war in Siberia, has found its way into several European tongues: it contains much valuable matter, but, like all Muhammedan histories, exhibits tribes or nations as individual sovereigns; and, if Baron De Tott had not strangely neglected to procure a copy of the Tartarian history, for the original of which he unnecessarily offered a large sum, we should probably have found, that it begins with an account of the deluge taken from the Korán, and proceeds to rank Turc, Chiˊn, Tataˊr, and Mongal, among the sons of Yaˊfet. The genuine traditional history of the Tartars, in all the books that I have inspected, seems to begin with Oghuˊz, as that of the Hindus does with Raˊma: they place their miraculous Hero and Patriarch four thousand years before Chengiz Khaˊn, who was born in the year 1164, and with whose reign their historical period commences. It is rather surprizing, that M. Bailly, who makes frequent appeals to Etymological arguments, has not derived Ogyges from Oghuˊz and Atlas from Altai, or the Golden mountain of Tartary: the Greek terminations might have been rejected from both words; and a mere transposition of letters is no difficulty with an Etymologist.

My remarks in this address, gentlemen, will be confined to the period preceding Chengiz; and, although the learned labours of M. De Guignes and the fathers Visdelou, Demailla, and Gaubil, who have made an incomparable use of their Chinese literature, exhibit probable accounts of the Tartars from a very early age, yet the old historians of China were not only foreign, but generally hostile, to them, and for both those reasons, either through ignorance or malignity, may be suspected of misrepresenting their transactions: if they speak truth, the ancient history of the Tartars presents us, like most other histories, with a series of assassinations, plots, treasons, massacres, and all the natural fruits of selfish ambition. I should have no inclination to give you a sketch of such horrors, even if the occasion called for it; and will barely observe, that the first king of the Hyumnu's or Huns began his reign, according to Visdelou, about three thousand five hundred and sixty years ago, not long after the time fixed in my former discourses for the first regular establishments of the Hindus and Arabs in their several countries.

I. Our first inquiry, concerning the languages and letters of the Tartars, presents us with a deplorable void, or with a prospect as barren and dreary as that of their deserts. The Tartars, in general, had no literature: (in this point all authorities appear to concur) the Turcs had no letters: the Huns, according to Procopius, had not even heard of them: the magnificent Chengiz, whose Empire included an area of near eighty square degrees, could find none of his own Mongals, as the best authors inform us, able to write his dispatches; and Taiˊmuˊr, a savage of strong natural parts and passionately fond of hearing histories read to him, could himself neither write nor read. It is true, that Ibnu Arabshah mentions a set of characters called Dilberjìn, which were used in Khátà: ‘he had seen them, he says, and found them to consist of forty-one letters, a distinct symbol being appropriated to each long and short vowel, and to each consonant hard or soft, or otherwise varied in pronunciation;’ but Khátà was in southern Tartary on the confines of India; and, from his description of the characters there in use, we cannot but suspect them to have been those of Tibet, which are manifestly Indian, bearing a greater resemblance to those of Bengal than to Dévanágarì. The learned and eloquent Arab adds, ‘that the Tatàrs of Khátà write, in the Dilberjín letters, all their tales and histories, their journals, poems, and miscellanies, their diplomas, records of state and justice, the laws of Chengiz, their publick registers and their compositions of every species:’ if this be true, the people of Khátà must have been a polished and even a lettered nation; and it may be true, without affecting the general position, that the Tartars were illiterate; but Ibnu Arabshaˊh was a professed rhetorician, and it is impossible to read the original passage, without full conviction that his object in writing it, was to display his power of words in a flowing and modulated period. He says further, that in Jaghatäï the people of Oighùr, as he calls them, ‘have a system of fourteen letters only, denominated from themselves Oighúrì;’ and those are the characters, which the Mongals are supposed by most authors to have borrowed: Abuˊlˊghaziˊ tells us only, that Chengiz employed the natives of Eighùr as excellent penmen; but the Chinese assert, that he was forced to employ them, because he had no writers at all among his natural-born subjects; and we are assured by many, that Kublaikhaˊn ordered letters to be invented for his nation by a Tibetian, whom he rewarded with the dignity of chief Lama. The small number of Eighúrì letters might induce us to believe, that they were Zend or Pahlavi, which must have been current in that country, when it was governed by the sons of Feriduˊn; and, if the alphabet ascribed to the Eighurians by M. Des Hautesrayes be correct, we may safely decide, that in many of its letters it resembles both the Zend and the Syriack, with a remarkable difference in the mode of connecting them; but, as we can scarce hope to see a genuine specimen of them, our doubt must remain in regard to their form and origin: the page, exhibited by Hyde as Khatáyan writing, is evidently a sort of broken Cúfick; and the fine manuscript at Oxford, from which it was taken, is more probably a Mendean work on some religious subject than, as he imagined, a code of Tartarian laws. That very learned man appears to have made a worse mistake in giving us for Mongal characters a page of writing, which has the appearance of Japanese, or mutilated Chinese, letters.

If the Tartars in general, as we have every reason to believe, had no written memorials, it cannot be thought wonderful, that their languages, like those of America, should have been in perpetual fluctuation, and that more than fifty dialects, as Hyde had been credibly informed, should be spoken between Moscow and China, by the many kindred tribes or their several branches, which are enumerated by Abuˊˊlghaˊziˊ. What those dialects are, and whether they really sprang from a common stock, we shall probably learn from Mr. Pallas, and other indefatigable men employed by the Russian court; and it is from the Russians, that we must expect the most accurate information concerning their Asiatick subjects: I persuade myself, that, if their inquiries be judiciously made and faithfully reported, the result of them will prove, that all the languages properly Tartarian arose from one common source; excepting always the jargons of such wanderers or mountaineers, as, having long been divided from the main body of the nation, must in a course of ages have framed separate idioms for themselves. The only Tartarian language, of which I have any knowledge, is the Turkish of Constantinople, which is however so copious, that whoever shall know it perfectly, will easily understand, as we are assured by intelligent authors, the dialects of Tátáristàn; and we may collect from Abuˊlghaˊziˊ, that he would find little difficulty in the Calmac and the Mogul: I will not offend your ears by a dry catalogue of similar words in those different languages; but a careful investigation has convinced me, that, as the Indian and Arabian tongues are severally descended from a common parent, so those of Tartary might be traced to one ancient stem essentially differing from the two others. It appears, indeed, from a story told by Abuˊˊlghaˊziˊ, that the Viràts and the Mongals could not understand each other; but no more can the Danes and the English, yet their dialects beyond a doubt are branches of the same Gothick tree. The dialect of the Moguls, in which some histories of Taimuˊr and his descendants were originally composed, is called in India, where a learned native set me right when I used another word, Turcì; not that it is precisely the same with the Turkish of the Othmánlú's, but the two idioms differ, perhaps, less then Swedish and German, or Spanish and Portuguese, and certainly less than Welsh and Irish: in hope of ascertaining this point, I have long searched in vain for the original works ascribed to Taimuˊr and Baˊber; but all the Moguls, with whom I have conversed in this country, resemble the crow in one of their popular fables, who, having long affected to walk like a pheasant, was unable after all to acquire the gracefulness of that elegant bird, and in the mean time unlearned his own natural gait: they have not learned the dialect of Persia, but have wholly forgotten that of their ancestors. A very considerable part of the old Tartarian language, which in Asia would probably have been lost, is happily preserved in Europe; and, if the groundwork of the western Turkish, when separated from the Persian and Arabick, with which it is embellished, be a branch of the lost Oghúzian tongue, I can assert with confidence, that it has not the least resemblance either to Arabick or Sanscrit, and must have been invented by a race of men wholly distinct from the Arabs or Hindus. This fact alone oversets the system of M. Bailly, who considers the Sanscrit, of which he gives in several places a most erroneous account, as ‘a fine monument of his primeval Scythians, the preceptors of mankind and planters of a sublime philosophy even in India;’ for he holds it an incontestable truth, that a language, which is dead, supposes a nation, which is destroyed; and he seems to think such reasoning perfectly decisive of the question, without having recourse to astronomical arguments or the spirit of ancient institutions: for my part, I desire no better proof than that, which the language of the Bráhmans affords, of an immemorial and total difference between the Savages of the Mountains, as the old Chinese justly called the Tartars, and the studious, placid, contemplative inhabitants of these Indian plains.

II. The geographical reasoning of M. Bailly may, perhaps, be thought equally shallow, if not inconsistent in some degree with itself. ‘An adoration of the sun and of fire, says he, must necessarily have arisen in a cold region: therefore, it must have been foreign to India, Persia, Arabia; therefore, it, must have been derived from Tartary.’ No man, I believe, who has travelled in winter through Bahàr, or has even passed a cold season at Calcutta within the tropick, can doubt that the solar warmth is often desirable by all, and might have been considered as adorable by the ignorant, in these climates, or that the return of spring deserves all the salutations, which it receives from the Persian and Indian poets; not to rely on certain historical evidence, that Antarah, a celebrated warriour and bard, actually perished with cold on a mountain of Arabia. To meet, however, an objection, which might naturally be made to the voluntary settlement, and amazing population, of his primitive race in the icy regions of the north, he takes refuge in the hypothesis of M. Buffon, who imagines, that our whole globe was at first of a white heat, and has been gradually cooling from the poles to the equator; so that the Hyperborean countries had once a delightful temperature, and Siberia itself was even hotter than the climate of our temperate zones, that is, was in too hot a climate, by his first proposition, for the primary worship of the sun. That the temperature of countries has not sustained a change in the lapse of ages, I will by no means insist; but we can hardly reason conclusively from a variation of temperature to the cultivation and diffusion of science: if as many female elephants and tigresses, as we now find in Bengal, had formerly littered in the Siberian forests, and if their young, as the earth cooled, had sought a genial warmth in the climates of the south, it would not follow, that other savages, who migrated in the same direction and on the same account, brought religion and philosophy, language and writing, art and science, into the southern latitudes.

We are told by Abuˊˊlghaˊziˊ, that the primitive religion of human creatures, or the pure adoration of One Creator, prevailed in Tartary during the first generations from Yaˊfet, but was extinct before the birth of Oghuˊz, who restored it in his dominions; that, some ages after him, the Mongals and the Turcs relapsed into gross idolatry; but that Chengiz was a Theist, and, in a conversation with the Muhammedan Doctors, admitted their arguments for the being and attributes of the Deity to be unanswerable, while he contested the evidence of their Prophet's legation. From old Grecian authorities we learn, that the Massagetæ worshipped the sun; and the narrative of an embassy from Justin to the Khákàn; or Emperor, who then resided in a fine vale near the source of the Irtish, mentions the Tartarian ceremony of purifying the Roman Ambassadors by conducting them between two fires: the Tartars of that age are represented as adorers of the four elements, and believers in an invisible spirit, to whom they sacrificed bulls and rams. Modern travellers relate, that, in the festivals of some Tartarian tribes, they pour a few drops of a consecrated liquor on the statues of their Gods; after which an attendant sprinkles a little of what remains three times toward the south in honour of fire, toward the west and east in honour of water and air, and as often toward the north in honour of the earth, which contained the reliques of their deceased ancestors: now all this may be very true, without proving a national affinity between the Tartars and Hindus; for the Arabs adored the planets and the powers of nature, the Arabs had carved images, and made libations on a black stone, the Arabs turned in prayer to different quarters of the heavens; yet we know with certainty, that the Arabs are a distinct race from the Tartars; and we might as well infer, that they were the same people, because they had each their Nomades, or wanderers for pasture, and because the Turcmans, described by Ibnuarabshˊah and by him called Tatár's, are, like most Arabian tribes, pastoral and warlike, hospitable and generous, wintering and summering on different plains, and rich in herds and flocks, horses and camels; but this agreement in manners proceeds from the similar nature of their several deserts and their similar choice of a free rambling life, without evincing a community of origin, which they could scarce have had without preserving some remnant at least of a common language.

Many Lamas, we are assured, or Priests of Buddha, have been found settled in Siberia; but it can hardly be doubted, that the Lamas had travelled thither from Tibet, whence it is more than probable, that the religion of the Bauddha's was imported into southern, or Chinese, Tartary; since we know, that rolls of Tibetian writing have been brought even from the borders of the Caspian. The complexion of Buddha himself, which, according to the Hindus, was between white and ruddy, would perhaps have convinced M. Bailly, had he known the Indian tradition, that the last great legislator and God of the East was a Tartar; but the Chinese consider him as a native of India, the Bráhmans insist, that he was born in a forest near Gayá, and many reasons may lead us to suspect, that his religion was carried from the west and the south to those eastern and northern countries, in which it prevails. On the whole we meet with few or no traces in Scythia of Indian rites and superstitions, or of that poetical mythology, with which the Sanscrit poems are decorated; and we may allow the Tartars to have adored the Sun with more reason than any southern people, without admitting them to have been the sole original inventors of that universal folly: we may even doubt the originality of their veneration for the four elements, which forms a principal part of the ritual introduced by Zerˊatusht, a native of Rai in Persia, born in the reign of Gushtasp, whose son Pashˊuten is believed by the Pársi's to have resided long in Tartary at a place called Cangidiz, where a magnificent palace is said to have been built by the father of Cyrus, and where the Persian prince, who was a zealot in the new faith, would naturally have disseminated its tenets among the neighbouring Tartars.

Of any Philosophy, except natural Ethicks, which the rudest society requires and experience teaches, we find no more vestiges in Asiatick Scythia than in ancient Arabia; nor would the name of a Philosopher and a Scythian have been ever connected, if Anacharsis had not visited Athens and Lydia for that instruction, which his birthplace could not have afforded him: but Anacharsis was the son of a Grecian woman, who had taught him her language, and he soon learned to despise his own. He was unquestionably a man of a sound understanding and fine parts; and, among the lively sayings, which gained him the reputation of a wit even in Greece, it is related by Diogenes Laertius, that, when an Athenian reproached him with being a Scythian, he answered: ‘my country is, indeed, a disgrace to me, but thou art a disgrace to thy country.’ What his country was, in regard to manners and civil duties, we may learn from his fate in it; for when, on his return from Athens, he attempted to reform it by introducing the wise laws of his friend Solon, he was killed on a hunting party with an arrow shot by his own brother, a Scythian Chieftain. Such was the philosophy of M. Bailly's Atlantes, the first and most enlightened of nations! We are assured, however, by the learned author of the Dabistàn, that the Tartars under Chengiz and his descendants were lovers of truth; and would not even preserve their lives by a violation of it: De Guignes ascribes the same veracity, the parent of all virtues, to the Huns; and Strabo, who might only mean to lash the Greeks by praising Barbarians, as Horace extolled the wandering Scythians merely to satirize his luxurious countrymen, informs us, that the nations of Scythia deserved the praise due to wisdom, heroick friendship, and justice; and this praise we may readily allow them on his authority, without supposing them to have been the preceptors of mankind.

As to the laws of Zamolxis, concerning whom we know as little as of the Scythian Deucalion, or of Abaris the Hyperborean, and to whose story even Herodotus gave no credit, I lament, for many reasons, that, if ever they existed, they have not been preserved: it is certain, that a system of laws, called Yásác, has been celebrated in Tartary since the time of Chengiz, who is said to have republished them in his empire, as his institutions were afterwards adopted and enforced by Taimuˊr; but they seem to have been a common, or traditionary, law, and were probably not reduced into writing, till Chengiz had conquered a nation, who were able to write.

III. Had the religious opinions and allegorical fables of the Hindus been actually borrowed from Scythia, travellers must have discovered in that country some ancient monuments of them, such as pieces of grottesque sculpture, images of the Gods and Avatárs, and inscriptions on pillars or in caverns, analogous to those, which remain in every part of the western peninsula, or to those, which many of us have seen in Bahàr and at Banáras; but (except a few detached idols) the only great monuments of Tartarian antiquity are a line of ramparts on the west and east of the Caspian, ascribed indeed by ignorant Muselmans to Yájúj and Májúj, or Gog and Magog, that is to the Scythians, but manifestly raised by a very different nation in order to stop their predatory inroads through the passes of Caucasus. The Chinese wall was built or finished, on a similar construction and for a similar purpose, by an Emperor, who died only two hundred and ten years before the beginning of our era; and the other mounds were very probably constructed by the old Persians, though, like many works of unknown origin, they are given to Secander, not the Macedonian, but a more ancient Hero supposed by some to have been Jemshiˊd. It is related, that pyramids and tombs have been found in Tátáristàn, or western Scythia, and some remnants of edifices in the lake Saisan; that vestiges of a deserted city have been recently discovered by the Russians near the Caspian sea, and the Mountain of Eagles; and that golden ornaments and utensils, figures of elks and other quadrupeds in metal, weapons of various kinds, and even implements for mining, but made of copper instead of iron, have been dug up in the country of the Tshúdès; whence M. Bailly infers, with great reason, the high antiquity of that people: but the high antiquity of the Tartars, and their establishment in that country near four thousand years ago, no man disputes; we are inquiring into their ancient religion and philosophy, which neither ornaments of gold, nor tools of copper, will prove to have had an affinity with the religious rites and the sciences of India. The golden utensils might possibly have been fabricated by the Tartars themselves; but it is possible too, that they were carried from Rome or from China, whence occasional embassies were sent to the Kings of Eighùr. Towards the end of the tenth century the Chinese Emperor dispatched an ambassador to a Prince, named Erslaˊn, which, in the Turkish of Constantinople, signifies a lion, who resided near the Golden Mountain in the same station, perhaps, where the Romans had been received in the middle of the sixth century; the Chinese on his return home reported the Eighùris to be a grave people, with fair complexions, diligent workmen, and ingenious artificers not only in gold, silver, and iron, but in jasper and fine stones; and the Romans had before described their magnificent reception in a rich palace adorned with Chinese manufactures: but these times were comparatively modern; and, even if we should admit, that the Eighúris, who are said to have been governed for a period of two thousand years by an Iˊdecùt, or sovereign of their own race, were in some very early age a literary and polished nation, it would prove nothing in favour of the Huns, Turcs, Mongals, and other savages to the north of Pekin, who seem in all ages, before Muhammed, to have been equally ferocious and illiterate.

Without actual inspection of the manuscripts, that have been found near the Caspian, it would be impossible to give a correct opinion concerning them; but one of them, described as written on blue silky paper in letters of gold and silver not unlike Hebrew, was probably a Tibetian composition of the same kind with that, which lay near the source of the Irtish, and of which Cassiano, I believe, made the first accurate version: another, if we may judge from the description of it, was probably modern Turkish; and none of them could have been of great antiquity.