At this period, Egypt and Chaldea both seem to have sent out colonies on every side, and history and tradition alike point to this period also, as that of the invention of alphabetical writing: or, at any rate, its establishment in a great part of the then civilized world. The claims of the Egyptian Memnon and the Phœnician Cadmus to the invention, appear to be equally and entirely without foundation; and Pliny’s notion that it had existed from the beginning, in Chaldea and the adjacent countries, is supported, by a very remarkable passage in the book of Joshua[7]. On the victorious march of the Israelites, under Joshua himself, to Palestine, we find he took Debir; i.e. the place of an oracle or wise discourse. The name of the town was before Kirjath Sepher, or city of books or of letters; therefore books and letters were ancient, in that country, in Joshua’s time.[8] That pictures and sculpture were so likewise, I infer from the command given in Numbers, xxxiii. 52, to destroy the _pictures_ and molten images of the natives of Palestine. If any reliance is to be placed on the annals of China and of India, civilization and its attendant arts were at least as early with them as with Egypt and Chaldea, each claiming the priority, and each pretending to have been the teacher of the rest of the world, on equally plausible grounds. There is no doubt of the antiquity of Indian civilization. The ancient Greek writers talk of the Indian philosophers, as belonging to a nation highly polished, before a grain of corn had been sown in Greece; and the pretensions of China are supported by the Indians themselves. I have said thus much of the general civilization of these nations, because I could not separate it from the cultivation of the arts. I will now keep closer to my subject, reserving, however, the liberty of digressing wherever I see occasion, or, in other words, whenever it suits my humour. As I take it, the Chinese remain, more nearly than any other people, in the state in which they were two or three thousand years ago, and are, for their age, the veriest babes that inhabit the earth. I will begin with them, and see what their proficiency in art has ever amounted to. It is plain from their written signs, for alphabet they have none: that in early times, they, like the Mexicans, exerted their powers of imitation to represent in painting, events, the memory of which they wished to preserve. On dissecting the hundred and seventeen elementary characters, whose endless combinations represent their language, it is not difficult to trace the rude forms of men, birds, quadrupeds, fish, houses, trees, hills, and so forth; and in the very oldest writings, before the circular forms were rejected altogether, these shapes were still more distinct[9].