Old Babylonian and Chinese Characters

Abstract

PROF. TERRIEN DELACOUPERIE has long been known as the advocate of a theory which would bring the ancestors of the Chinese from Western Asia, and see in. the characters they employed derivatives from the cuneiform symbols once in use in Babylonia. The proofs of his theory have been gradually placed before the learned world. In two articles published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society he has endeavoured to trace the history of the Yh-King, the oldest and most mysterious of Chinese books, and to show that its earliest portions contain lists of characters and their meanings, ancient poems and similar fragments of antiquity, misunderstood and misinterpreted by successive generations of commentators. Elsewhere he has given us for the first time a rational account of the vicissitudes undergone by the Chinese system of writing, based upon the statements of the Chinese writers themselves. Lately he has communicated to the Philological Society an interesting and exhaustive description of the languages spoken in China before the arrival of the “Bak”tribes or Chinese proper as well as of the modern dialects which are descended from them. Now we have the last instalment of his-proofs in the shape of a comparison between the primitive forms of the Chinese characters and the pictorial forms out of which the cuneiform script subsequently developed. Prof, de Lacouperie claims to have proved in a typical number of instances that the correspondence is exact, or fairly so, as regards form, signification, and phonetic value; and that consequently an early connection between Chinese and Babylonian must be assumed. Since the Babylonian forms can be shown to presuppose those of China, we must bring the Chinese from the West, and not conversely the Babylonians from the East.

The Old Babylonian Characters and their Chinese Derivates.

By Terrien de Lacouperie. (London: Nutt, and Trübner and Co., 1888.)