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Upon The Antiquity Of The Arabians, Their Language And Letters, And The Origin Of The Chinese A^'D Their Empire.
UPON THE ANTIQUITY OF THE ARABIANS , THEIR LANGUAGE AND LETTERS , AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE A ^ 'D THEIR EMPIRE .
BY MRS . COLONEL HARTLEY . I _ f TWO PARTS . —PART I . AVHY the most ancient records are lost is a question often demanded by modern inquirers . Time is said to be the devourer of his children . This observation should be also extended to the art .-sciencesand even
, , languages of antiquity . Thus it is very difficult for modern investigators to arrive at the shrine of ancient truth . The Sabians produced a book which they pretend was written by Adam . Origen reports that certain books , written by Enoch , were found iu Arabia Felix , in the dominions of the Queen of Saba . Tertullian roundly affirms that he
saw and read several of them . In his treatise , de Habitui Mulierum , he places these books among tbe canonical ; but St . Jerome and St . Austin look upon them as apocryphal . William Postellus pretended to compile his work , De Originibus , from the book of Enoch . Thomas Bagnius published at Copenhagen , in 1657 , a work which contains many singular relations concerning the manner of writing among the antediluvians , wherein are contained several pleasant tales concerning the book of Enoch . Moses is silent upon the subject . After the deluge , we perceive at a very early period , that the second son of Amyn , or JHam , named Mizraim , seated himself near the entrance of Egypt , at Zoar . Taaut , his son , had then invented letters , in
Phoenicia ; and if this invention took place ten years before the migration of his father into Egypt , we can trace letters as far back as the year 2178 before Christ , which would be one hundred and fifty years after the deluge , according to ordinarily received chronological computation . Though the written annals of mankind hitherto transmitted to us fail to trace the origin of letters through the want of materials , there is no proof that they were not known until a century ancl a half after the deluge . That the modern Arabians were not the inventors of letters hath
ap peared by the confession of their own authors . AA e know that the Arabs have inhabited the country they at present possess for upwards of three thousand seven hundred years , without having been intermixed with other nations , or being subjugated by any foreign power . Their language must be very ancient . The two principal dialects of it , were those spoken by the Hamyarites and other genuine Arabs , ancl that of the Koreish , in which Mahomet wrote the Koran . The first is styled ,
by the oriental writers , the Arabic of Hamyra ; and the other , the pure or defecated . Mr . Richardson , in his Arabic grammar , observes as a proof of the richness of this language , that it consists of two thousand radical words . The old Arabic characters are said to be of high antiquity , for Ebn Hashem relates , that an inscription in it was found in Yamau as old as the time of Joseph . Sir Isaac Newton supposes that Moses learnt the alphabet from the Midianites , who were Arabians . 'I'he Arabian alphabet consists of twenty-eight letters , which are somewhat similar to the ancient Kufic , in which characters the first copies of the Alcoran were
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
Upon The Antiquity Of The Arabians, Their Language And Letters, And The Origin Of The Chinese A^'D Their Empire.
UPON THE ANTIQUITY OF THE ARABIANS , THEIR LANGUAGE AND LETTERS , AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE A ^ 'D THEIR EMPIRE .
BY MRS . COLONEL HARTLEY . I _ f TWO PARTS . —PART I . AVHY the most ancient records are lost is a question often demanded by modern inquirers . Time is said to be the devourer of his children . This observation should be also extended to the art .-sciencesand even
, , languages of antiquity . Thus it is very difficult for modern investigators to arrive at the shrine of ancient truth . The Sabians produced a book which they pretend was written by Adam . Origen reports that certain books , written by Enoch , were found iu Arabia Felix , in the dominions of the Queen of Saba . Tertullian roundly affirms that he
saw and read several of them . In his treatise , de Habitui Mulierum , he places these books among tbe canonical ; but St . Jerome and St . Austin look upon them as apocryphal . William Postellus pretended to compile his work , De Originibus , from the book of Enoch . Thomas Bagnius published at Copenhagen , in 1657 , a work which contains many singular relations concerning the manner of writing among the antediluvians , wherein are contained several pleasant tales concerning the book of Enoch . Moses is silent upon the subject . After the deluge , we perceive at a very early period , that the second son of Amyn , or JHam , named Mizraim , seated himself near the entrance of Egypt , at Zoar . Taaut , his son , had then invented letters , in
Phoenicia ; and if this invention took place ten years before the migration of his father into Egypt , we can trace letters as far back as the year 2178 before Christ , which would be one hundred and fifty years after the deluge , according to ordinarily received chronological computation . Though the written annals of mankind hitherto transmitted to us fail to trace the origin of letters through the want of materials , there is no proof that they were not known until a century ancl a half after the deluge . That the modern Arabians were not the inventors of letters hath
ap peared by the confession of their own authors . AA e know that the Arabs have inhabited the country they at present possess for upwards of three thousand seven hundred years , without having been intermixed with other nations , or being subjugated by any foreign power . Their language must be very ancient . The two principal dialects of it , were those spoken by the Hamyarites and other genuine Arabs , ancl that of the Koreish , in which Mahomet wrote the Koran . The first is styled ,
by the oriental writers , the Arabic of Hamyra ; and the other , the pure or defecated . Mr . Richardson , in his Arabic grammar , observes as a proof of the richness of this language , that it consists of two thousand radical words . The old Arabic characters are said to be of high antiquity , for Ebn Hashem relates , that an inscription in it was found in Yamau as old as the time of Joseph . Sir Isaac Newton supposes that Moses learnt the alphabet from the Midianites , who were Arabians . 'I'he Arabian alphabet consists of twenty-eight letters , which are somewhat similar to the ancient Kufic , in which characters the first copies of the Alcoran were