Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of AssyriaRagozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna)
History
Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria
Ragozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna)
Babylonia -- History
11. The same could not be said of the Yellow Race. True, its principal
representatives, the nations of the far East of Asia--the Chinese, the
Mongols and the Mandchous,--could not be known to the Hebrews at any
time of antiquity, but there were more than enough representatives of
it who could not be _un_known to them.[AB] For it was both a very old
and extremely numerous race, which early spread over the greater part of
the earth and at one time probably equalled in numbers the rest of
mankind. It seems always to have been broken up into a great many tribes
and peoples, whom it has been found convenient to gather under the
general designation of TURANIANS, from a very ancient name,--TUR or
TURA--which was given them by the white population of Persia and Central
Asia, and which is still preserved in that of one of their principal
surviving branches, the TURKS. All the different members of this great
family have had very striking features in common,--the most
extraordinary being an incapability of reaching the highest culture, of
progressing indefinitely, improving continually. A strange law of their
being seems to have condemned them to stop short, when they had attained
a certain, not very advanced, stage. Thus their speech has remained
extremely imperfect. They spoke, and such Turanian nations as now exist
still speak, languages, which, however they may differ, all have this
peculiarity, that they are composed either entirely of monosyllables,
(the most rudimentary form of speech), or of monosyllables pieced into
words in the stiffest, most unwieldy manner, stuck together, as it
were, with nothing to join them, wherefore this kind of language has
been called _agglutinative_. Chinese belongs to the former class of
languages, the "monosyllabic," Turkish to the latter, the
"agglutinative." Further, the Turanians were probably the first to
invent writing, but never went in that art beyond having one particular
sign for every single word--(such is Chinese writing with its forty
thousand signs or thereabouts, as many as words in the language)--or at
most a sign for every syllable. They had beautiful beginnings of poetry,
but in that also never went beyond beginnings. They were also probably
the first who built cities, but were wanting in the qualities necessary
to organize a society, establish a state on solid and lasting
foundations. At one time they covered the whole of Western Asia, dwelt
there for ages before any other race occupied it,--fifteen hundred
years, according to a very trustworthy tradition,--and were called by
the ancients "the oldest of men;" but they vanish and are not heard of
any more the moment that white invaders come into the land; these drive
the Turanians before them, or bring them into complete subjection, or
mix with them, but, by force of their own superiorly gifted nature,
retain the dominant position, so that the others lose all separate
existence. Thus it was everywhere. For wherever tribes of the three
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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