Without saying that all argument upon the antiquity of the Chinese Empire is of this sort, it may fairly be said that much of it has been so—so much as to make Confucius as mythological a character as Minos, and to bring the earliest reasonable records to an epoch subsequent to the introduction of Buddhism from India. Even this antiquity is only probable.
A square block of land between the Ganges and Upper Irawaddi is occupied by one dominant, and upwards of thirty subordinate sections of one and the same population—the Burmese. Some of these are mountaineers, and have retreated before the Indians from the south and west—encroachers upon the originally Burmese countries of Assam, Chittagong and Sylhet. Others are themselves intruders, or (what is much the same) consolidators of conquered countries. Such are the Avans of the Burmese Empire, properly so called, who seem to have followed the course of the Irawaddi, displacing not only small tribes akin to themselves, but the Môn of Pegu, as well. Lastly, the Kariens emulate the Tʻhay in the length of their area and in its north-and-south direction, being found in the southern part of the Tenasserim Provinces (in 11° N. L.) and on the very borders of China (in 23° N. L.).
No great family has its distribution so closely coincident with a water-system as the one in question. The plateau of Mongolia and the Himalayas are its boundaries. It occupies the whole[31] of all the rivers which rise within these limits, and fall into either the Bay of Bengal or the Chinese Sea; whereas (with the exception of the Himalayan portions of the Indus and the Ganges) it occupies none of the others. The lines of migration with the Indo-Chinese populations have generally followed the water-courses of the Indo-Chinese rivers; and civilization has chiefly flourished along their valleys. Yet, as these lead to an ocean interrupted by no fresh continent, the effect of their direction has been to isolate the nations who possess them. I imagine that this has much more to do with peculiarities of the Chinese civilization than aught else. Had the Hoang-ho fallen into a sea like the Mediterranean, the Celestial Empire would, probably, have given and taken in the way of social and political influence, have acted on the manners of the world at large, and have itself been reacted on. Differences should only be attributed to so indefinite and so impalpable a force as race when all other things are equal.
Upon the principle of taking the questions in the order of complexity, so as to dispose of the simplest first, I pass over, for the present, the connexion between Africa and South-Western Asia, and take the easier of the two European ones.
The Turanians.—The line which, beginning at Lapland, and, after exhibiting the great Turanian affiliations, ends at the wall of China, comprising the Ugrians, Samoeids[32], Yeniseians[32], Yukahiri[32], Turks, Mongols, and Tungusians[33], is connected with the area of the monosyllabic languages in different degrees of clearness according to the criterion employed. The physical conformation is nearly identical. The languages differ—the Turanian, like the Oceanic and the American, being inflected and polysyllabic[34]. With this difference, the complexities of the affiliation begin and end. Their amount has been already suggested.
A great part of Northern Europe, Independent Tartary, Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet, China, and the Transgangetic Peninsula, has now been disposed of. Nevertheless, India, Persia, Asia Minor, and Caucasus remain; in size inconsiderable, in difficulty great—greatly difficult because the points of contact between Europe and Asia, and Africa and Asia, fall within this area; greatly difficult because the displacements have been enormous; greatly difficult because, besides displacement, there has been intermixture as well. Lest any one undervalue the displacement, let him look at Asia Minor, which is now Turk, which has been Roman, Persian and Greek, and which has no single unequivocal remnant of its original population throughout its whole length and breadth. Yet, great as this is, it is no more than what we expect à priori. What families are and have been more encroaching than the populations hereabouts—Turks from the north, Arabs from the south, and Persians from the east? The oldest empires of the world lie here—and old empires imply early consolidation; early consolidation, premature displacement. Then come the phænomena of intermixture. In India there is a literary language of considerable age, and full of inflexions. Of these inflexions not one in ten can be traced in any modern tongue throughout the whole of Asia. Yet they are rife and common in many European ones. Again, the words of this same language, minus its inflexions, are rife and common in the very tongues where the inflexions are wanting; in some cases amounting to nine-tenths of the language. What is the inference from this? Not a very clear one at any rate.
Africa has but one point of contact with Asia, i.e. Arabia. It is safe to say this, because, whether we carry the migration over the Isthmus of Suez or the Straits of Babel-Mandeb, the results are similar. The Asiatic stock, in either case, is the same—Semitic. But Europe, in addition to its other mysteries, has two; perhaps three. One of these is simple enough—that of the Lap line and the Turanian stock. But the others are not so. It is easy to make the Ugrians Asiatic; but by no means easy to connect the other Europeans with the Ugrians. The Sarmatians, nearest in geography, have never been very successfully affiliated with them. Indeed, so unwilling have writers been to admit this relationship, that the Finnic hypothesis, with all its boldness, has appeared the better alternative. Yet the Finnic hypothesis is but a guess. Even if it be not so, it only embraces the Basks and Albanians; so that the so-called Indo-Europeans still stand over.
For reasons like these, the parts forthcoming will be treated with far greater detail than those which have preceded; with nothing like the detail of minute ethnology, but still slowly and carefully.
All that thus stands over for investigation is separated from the area already disposed of by that line of mountains which is traced from the Garo Hills in the north-east of Bengal to the mouth of the Kuban in the Black Sea. First come the Eastern Himalayas, which, roughly speaking, may be said to divide the Indian kingdoms and dependencies from the Chinese Empire. They do not do so exactly, but they do so closely enough for the present purpose.
They may also be said, in the same way, to divide the nations of the Hindu from those of more typically Mongolian conformation.