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Certainly, however, they are not lapetic, in the sense of Indo-European ; but possibly of some older stock, or perhaps a strongly localised offshoot of the Mongolian*. '' But it may suffice us at present to have distinguished the two more important Asiatic families from those white-com- plexioned Aryaa of whom the Kig-Veda speaks, who, although they have extended themselves over India, yet have on the * The speaker could not have seen Bunsen's PhUotophy of Universal History, in which the term Tvranian b proposed for the ' Allophyllic ' or Mongolian races ; and which contains many weighty and novel illustrations of the ethnographical subject here sketched independently on narrower data. Oaucaaian means, in com- parative philology, as in geography, the tribes of the Caucasus ; but in Bomanoe, with some colour from physiology, it has been made a general term, compre- hending Shem and Japhet. Compare Latham's VarieUeB of Man, with Bunsen's great work. COMPARATIVE CHRONOLOGY. 257 whole their affinities rather towards Europe. Now, the earliest kingdoms of which we have anything like distinct know- ledge, belonged to that Semitic race, which is of all Asiatic stems the most nearly akin to the people of Africa. It is in Egypt, the middle point, I may say, between the sons of Shem and the descendants of Ham, that we first find a civilisation of higher antiquity than any which can be shewn elsewhere. It was from Sidon, a city which I will here call Semitic, on account of its language, though without disputing whether it might not be attributed more properly to the descendants of Ham, whom I regard as philologically akin* — but anyhow, it was from Sidon that the most famous navigators went forth in remote antiquity. So the earliest kingdoms of Assur, and Babel, and Syria, if not Elam, are shewn by their names and their deities to have been either Hamite or Semitic ; and, in either case, they belonged to races which may be roughly compared with the Dasyus of elder India, rather than closely akin to the white- complexioned A'ryas. We find no lapetic or as it were Aryan kingdom in central Asia, until, at the very earliest, 2234 B. c, even if we accept a broken testimony of Berosus t to so early a date for a Median dynasty in Babylon; while people more sceptical than myself in early Grentile history, would recognise no Median power until that of Deioces in the eighth century before Christ. " Since the Chinese also are said to have a dynasty begin historically about 2205 b. c. we will suppose tlie earlier date for the Medes to be not incredible, and allow Elam to have been a kingdom of the same race. But, even thus, you see that a full two thousand years before your era of Vicram&ditya, is the * Races seem to be classified in Genesis x. according to coloiir, rather than language. — Kenrick's Phoenicia, Ch. ill. t Lassen, Book n. pp. 751, 752, where the Babylonian and Chinese syn- chronism is suggested. Very recently, traces have been imagined or found by Colonel Rawlinson of early Mongolian or Turanian dynasties in Babylon. But such a discovery would be against general probabilities ; and if it were confirmed, it would not weaken the argument as to the Arians. M.P. 17 258 COMPARATIVE CHKONOLOQY. earliest date at which any of your fraternity of nations can make good a place on the stage of history. " Can any reason be shewn why the history of the A'rj-an race in India should be supposed to begin earlier? We have seen that your received chronology is of too arbitrary and legen- dary a kind to be such a reason alone ; and such probabilities as we could extract out of the number of generations, would lead us to place the great conqueror K4ma about the same time as Chedorlaomer and Abraham in Syria, the shepherd kings in Egypt, the supposed Medes in Babylon, and the Hia dynasty in China. " There would be at least a certain air of congruity in our conjectures about your history with what we know elsewhere. For if the Aryan race really radiated, as many learned men believe, from the regions of Iran eastward and westward, there is a general probability that the date of their Indian conquests might be not very remote from that of their establishments else- where. The same sort of probability rather confirms our con- jecture that the Great War (Mahdbh&rata) should be placed about 1200 B. c. For there are many points of sympathy, if not of contact, between the histories of India and Greece, sufficient, at least, to suggest the experiment of comparing their chrono- logics together tentatively, without confounding points essen- tially unlike, I need not repeat here, what Sir William Jones and others have said, perhaps too sanguinely, on the resemblance between mythological stories in the two countries* ; but when I read what is fabled about Ptirdravas, the son of lid, having to choose between Wisdom, Wealtli, and Desire, and being per- * Subsequent in time to this Dialogue is Professor Max Miiller's Essay on Indian and Hdltnic Mythology. Wonderful as is the union in it of depth and beauty, does it not ignore too much the heroic element in legend ? Ought not too Sanscrit to be made so very much the elder sister, as to be ahnost a mother- tongue to Qreek ! The immediate subject did not call for exposition of the radical afl^ty between the Semitic and A'ryan languages, as shewn in words by Gese- nius, and in forms (truly, I believe,) by Ewald. But there is yet room for an analylical comparison of Hebrew with Sanscrit on the one side, and with some African tongues on the other. GREEK ANALOGIES. 259 secuted by the two whom he rejected, I cannot help being re- minded of the fatal choice of Paris the Ilian shepherd. Then I notice too, that Sdkya in India precedes somewhat the move- ment of Pythagoras and the life of Socrates in Greece. Again, the most brilliant period of Hindtl literature is placed by your- selves as somewhat subsequent to the conquests of Alexander, which must have given some kind of impulse; and perhaps something might be said about the same Saracen power, which in its inheritors overthrew the Byzantine empire, having ex- tended itself, with another wave of its tide, over India. It would not, therefore, seem unnatural, if your Great War between the sons of F&ndu and Kuru should be connected with that which the Yavana legends described as having been waged against Troy ; whether the two events really happened in stages of society nearly corresponding ; or whether one was moulded by poets out of dim echoes which had reached them through traditions of the other ; or whether both may have been once parables of some- thing different, but translated by legend into actual wars. In any case, it is to me rather satisfactory than otherwise, that as Ghreek chronologers placed the Trojan war about the twelfth century before Christ, so we have been led by purely Hindd authorities, though treating them in our own way, to place the events of the Mahdbh&rata about the same period. " K now I were to make any use of that grand period of four millions three hundred and twenty thousand years, which is assigned to the aggregate of the Four Ages, it would be only to ask, whether by striking off the last three cyphers, we might not reduce it to a figure, which your earliest chronographers may have intended to denote their conception of the utmost duration of Hindtl history down to the period at which they first began systematically to review it, or perhaps to the era of Vicram&ditya. But the want of a fixed date as a terminus at the lower end of such a speculation forbids me to dwell on so mere a possibility. But I trust you will allow that there is great reason for reducing Hindd chronology in general 17—2 260 HISTORICAL SCECTICISM. to narrower limits than those in which you have represented it." Here Wolff, at whose long silence I had begun to wonder, interposed with some remarks. "It appears to me," he said, " that you have been far too liberal in your concessions. For when once you had shewn the unhistorical character of the Hindu pretensions to records, you had no right afterwards to build upon them, as if they contained something solid. The demolition of part destroys the whole. Or, even if the later genealogies, such as those of Magadhfi,, should have some truth, this proves nothing for the far earlier stages of tradition.