In justification of these views, some considerations should here be advanced as briefly as may be, and although details may have the aspect of being antiquarian, I anticipate that they will help the general readers to the better understanding of the place of music in Chinese history, and in the daily life of the people inhabiting the land modernly known as China.
When I started the enquiry I had no idea where the quest would lead me. It was only afterwards that, prompted by a wider interest in the subject, I found that independently, I had come to a conclusion identical with that of modern research in ethnology, philology, and archæology. My study of the matter is but a simple venture over an untrodden course, seeking the earliest sources of music, and the identity of view of learned authorities may, I think, fairly be taken as strengthening my own.
A few hints concerning these will answer our purpose.
In that southern valley of the Euphrates, the first people named in history were the Akkadians and Sumerians, they came down from the mountains and built cities; the unnamed settlers earlier than these had occupied the region and were without bond of union sufficient to give them a name in common, yet it should not be forgotten that they, too, had a past, remote in time, though unrecorded as history.
How then do we connect the Chinese with these? The Chinese constitute one of the numerous branches of the Mongolian race. Historians state that the ancient empire of Medea was founded by Mongols. When the first immigrants of this race entered China colonising the fertile valley of the Yellow River, they brought with them evidences of a civilization which it must have taken many, many centuries to have arrived at. Agriculture they were proficient in; astronomy they possess records of, that point to events thousands of years earlier; masonry, and canalization also, in well-developed systems immediately applicable to their new surroundings; and my argument is that they brought also a primitive system of music arising from or out of a simple pipe adoption, having a series of four or five sounds, such as we have found to be the original basis of Egyptian and Greek music. Ancestor worship they also brought with them. A formulated religion they had not, neither had they a priesthood.
Where can be found a common centre, where a population had existed in prehistoric times, at which these chief evidences of civilization had been grouped together in communal or in civic life?
Research can shew but one—and that, the southern valley of the Euphrates.
In his work, “Primitive Civilizations,” Mr. E. J. Simcox writes:—
“That the Chinese themselves did not learn agriculture in China is beyond a doubt; the family life of the Chinese does not go back to a time when the black-haired people were not agricultural.”