But these annals do not profess to go back further than to about 2500 B.C., or to a period at least 2000 and probably 3000 years later than the commencement of historical annals, confirmed by monuments in Egypt and Chaldæa, and any traditions prior to this period are of the vaguest and most shadowy descriptions. We only know with certainty that prior to Chinese civilization there was an aboriginal, semi-savage race, the Miou-tse, remnants of whom are still to be found in the mountainous western provinces; and it had been conjectured from the form of the hieroglyphics to which the Chinese written characters can be traced back, that they were invented by a pastoral people who roamed with flocks and herds over the steppes of Central Asia. Thus the sheep plays a very prominent part, the idea of "beauty" being conveyed by an ideogram meaning "a large sheep"; that of "right" or "property" by one which means "my sheep," and so on in many other instances. There is a tradition also of a clan of 100 families who came down from the West and descended the valley of the Yang-tse-Kiang, expelling the aboriginal Miou-tse. But for any real information as to Chinese origins we are indebted to recent discoveries of Accadian records. It has been proved by Lacouperie, Bell, and other experts in the oldest forms of the Chinese and Accadian languages, that they are not only closely allied, as both forming part of the Ugrian or Turkish branch of the Turanian family, but almost identical. Thus, by following the well-known philological law by which an initial 'g' is often softened in course of time into a 'y,' it was found that by writing 'g' for 'y' in many Chinese words beginning with the latter letter, pure Accadian words were obtained. Thus "to speak" is in Accadian _gu_, in the Mandarin Chinese _yu_, and in the old form of Chinese spoken in Japan _go_; night is _ye_ in Chinese, _ge_ in Accadian. The very close connection between Accadian and Chinese civilization is still more conclusively shown by the identity in many matters which could not have been invented independently. Thus the prehistoric period of Chaldæa before the Deluge is divided, according to Berosus and the tablets, into ten periods of ten kings, whose reigns lasted for 120 Sari or 432,000 years, a myth which is purely astronomical. The early Chinese writers had a myth of precisely the same number of ten kings and the same period of 432,000 years for their united reigns. Chinese astronomy also, said by their annals to have been invented by the Emperor Yao about 2000 B.C., was an almost exact counterpart of that of the earliest Accadian records. They recognized the same planets, and gave them names with the same meanings; they divided the year into the Chaldæan period of twelve months of thirty days each, making the new year begin, as in Chaldæa, in the third month after the winter solstice; and counting the calendar for the surplus days by the same cycle of intercalary days.