[307] Turanians from Turkestan or Avars from the Caucasus.
[308] There is a good account of Mithraism in C. Bigg’s The Church’s Task in the Roman Empire.—E. B.
[309] Julian was not so much a Mithraist as a syncretist. See Alice Gardner, Julian the Apostate.—E. B.
[310] The Ephthalites on the Oxus produced a coinage in silver and copper consisting of three denominations: heavy silver, light silver, and copper. Thirteen specimens are known to survive, the light silver denomination being represented by two specimens in the British Museum and one at Petrograd, until I was fortunate enough to add two to their number by a trouvaille in Oxford Street.—P. G.
Our illustration shows one of these two coins. It may have been struck in India in some state under Ephthalite dominion. Its interest for us lies in the figure it gives of a Hun horseman. He seems to wear a feather head-dress, reminding one of a Red Indian or a Moscow hotel porter, and his leg gear suggests an American cow-boy. Note his great quiver of arrows.—H. G. W.
[311] I am greatly indebted to Mr. S. N. Fu and to Mr. Duyvendak for much information and criticism upon the matter of this and the next section. They have both been rewritten since the appearance of the Outline in parts.
[312] There were girl slaves who did domestic work and women who were bought and sold.—J.J.L.D.
[313] It is doubtful if the Chinese knew of the mariner’s compass. Hirth, Ancient History of China, p. 126 sqq. comes to the conclusion, after a careful examination of all data, that, although it is probable something like the compass was known in high antiquity, the knowledge of it was lost for a long time afterwards, until, in the Middle Ages, it reappears as an instrument in the hands of geomancers (people who selected favourable sites for graves, etc). The earliest unmistakable mention of its use as a guide to mariners occurs in a work of the 12th century and refers to its use on foreign ships trading between China and Sumatra. Hirth is rather inclined to assume that Arab travellers may have seen it in the hands of Chinese geomancers and applied its use to navigation, so that it was afterwards brought back by them to China as the “mariner’s compass.”—J. J. L. D.
[314] Helmolt.
[315] The reason for the stationariness of China goes, we think, deeper than a script. China has formed a social-economic system which (1) cannot be transplanted, and (2) cannot be changed without tremendous effort. She lives by agriculture—rice-growing. (There is some tea among the foot hills, but it has to grow with rice to support the population.) Towns exist—on the edge of the rice-fields, for their needs. The town is dependent on the country, not, as elsewhere, country on town. There are small properties; all the hands are wanted, and can be absorbed, in old ancestral agricultural jobs. A state of small peasants, tilling, tilling, tilling, has no source of initiative towards change. If coal is to be mined in the future, and China industrialized, then a society that has not fundamentally changed for thousands of years may be changed. China is like an Egypt or Sumeria, so big that the nomads—those terrible agents of change—beat on its mass in vain. What the nomads have not done, modern industrialism may do.—J. L. M. and E. B.