“The Seres” was the name given by the ancients to the nation which produced silk; and it was undoubtedly that accepted for the distant region now called China, including Corea, and later, the kingdom of Khotan. The first mention of these people as a distinct nation is by Mela (iii. 7), who speaks of them as an “honest people, who bring what they have to sell, and return for their payments.”[230]
The prevailing idea amongst the Greeks was that silk was combed from the trees. Seneca says:—
“Nor with Mæonian needle mark the web,
Gathered by Eastern Seres from the trees.”
Seneca the Tragedian, “Herc. Ætæus,” 644.[231]
This was, till lately, believed to be only a fiction, intended to hide the truth and enhance the value of the new Coan material. But it is now ascertained that some of the wild silk in China is carried by the silkworm round the trees, wrapping them up, as it were, in large, untidy cocoons; so that, as usual, tradition had truth for its foundation.
There was always much mysterious report about the new material. Dionysius Periegetes tells of a barbarous people called the Seres, who “renounce the care of sheep and oxen, but who comb the coloured flowers of the desert, and with them produce woven precious stuffs, of which they make figured garments, resembling the flowers of the field in beauty, and in texture the web of the spider.”[232]
There is no doubt that as Egypt was the first to weave linen, and India to produce cotton textiles, so in China originated the material of silk and its manufacture.
M. Terrien de la Couperie, who has deciphered the Archaic books of the Chinese Records, sees there excellent linguistic proofs that the Chinese nation was originally a fragment of the first Babylonian civilization. He there finds that when these Accadians arrived on the furthest eastern coast of Asia, they met with and enslaved an aboriginal race, who already cultivated the silkworm, and wove and worked its produce, and were called by them “the Embroiderers.”[233]
This is supposed to have been an historical event contemporary with the life of Abraham, and, therefore, 5000 years old.
The Chinese say that Tekin or Sin, the son of Japhet, instructed his children in painting, sculpture, and embroidery, and in the art of preparing silk for different woven fabrics.[234]