Types of mankind, or, Ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history / illustrated by selections from the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by additional contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson ; by J.C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon.

  • Nott, Josiah C. (Josiah Clark), 1804-1873.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Types of mankind, or, Ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history / illustrated by selections from the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by additional contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H.S. Patterson ; by J.C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    700/800 (page 644)
    of the Asi [supra, MaGUG, p. 471]. A powerful interest, however, incited these last to withhold correct information on western countries from the Chinese officer; viz.: that, hitherto, they had held the monopoly of the raw silk trade, by caravan, between China and the West; which silk, dyed and woven into then-priceless raiments by the Parthians, found its way occasionally to the grandees of Europe; and, on the other hand, one of the prac- tical motives which carried Roman eagles to the Tigris, was a hope to discover the un- known source whence the crude material of these exquisite fabrics had reached Persia. It was during this, the most distant military expedition ever undertaken before Genghis- Khan, that the Chinese heard, for the first time, of the existence, far west from the Asi, of the Roman Empire. Deterred from advance for its conquest by the discouraging report of the Parthians that his commissariat ought to be supplied for three years, the Chinese General renounced the enterprise, and returned to headquarters at Khotan. From the opposite direction, the arms of Rome had not been turned towards Persia until, about b. c. 53, Pro-Consul Crassus perished by Parthian arrows on the western fron- tier of Persia; some 155 years before the Chinese had penetrated to its south-eastern pro- vinces. Within four years after the retrograde march of the Chinese armies, Parthia was invaded by Trajan, a. d. 106; and it was about that generation, a few years more or less, that the Romans first heard, through the Persians, of the remote country whence the silk came.(278) In a. d. 166, Antoninus sent the first Roman embassy to China; the hospitable reception of which is chronicled, by contemporary Chinese annalists, in the reign of their Emperor IIouan-Ti. No nations, then, situated to the north-west of Persia, so far as history or monuments relate, had ever heard of China; nor had the Chinese known anything about such nations until after the Christian era. Surmises to the contrary require, nowadays, to be justified by something more substantial than the ipse dixit of moderns, however erudite, whose opinions were formed before geographical criticism had fixed the boundaries of antique intercommunicational possibilities. With this historical basis, let us take up the only word in the entire canon of Soripture, upon which living theologists have erected a fable, that the Chinese are mentioned in the Old Testament. Even king James’s version suffices for this discussion : — “ Behold these [the Jewish Babylonian exiles] shall come from far; and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.” (279) “ Our modern litterati,” says the Em- peror Houng-Wou, “write a great deal; ” and sustain that Sinim means the Chinese; be- cause, after stripping away the Hebrew plural IM, there remains the word SIN; and the native name of China is TIISIN. Now, the whole context of the prophet refers to the return of the Jews from bondage in Babylonia. It must, therefore, be in Mesopotamian vicinities that the SIN«—“ inhabitants of SIN;” or, otherwise, “ cities, districts, localities of” SIN—should be sought for, before traversing Central Asia, in such impassable ages, to recall from China unknown Jewish fugitives who might have escaped thither from Babylonia. The root SIN of Isaiah is not SINI; (280) and, furthermore, that SINmn was a Ca- naanite. Nor is it either of the “wildernesses of SIN” familiar to the Mosaic Israelites; because the first, (281) spelt with the letter sameq, lay close to Egypt: and the second(282) was T.fiN, near the Dead Sea. Far less could it have meant the Egyptian city of Felvsmm; called Sin, (283) or dialectically TAIN, anciently, as Teen now by the Arabs. Why travel to China, when Mesopotamia itself offers to every eye, in an excellent map, (284) at the (278) On “ Serica,” and the fact that little or nothing was known about it by writers antecedent to Claudius Ptolemy, in the second century after Christ; compare the excellent critique of Antuon, Class. Diet,, voce “Seres.” (279) Isaiah : xlix. 12. (280) Genesis; x. 17; supra, p. 531. (281) Exodus; xvi. 1; xvii. 1. (282) Numbers; xiii. 21; — Deuteronomy; xxxii. 51; &c. (283) Ezekiel: xxx. 15,16.