If, however, we allow China to have been among the first nations formed after the flood, it does not appear to have kept pace in learning and in arts with the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, or the Egyptians. Before the time of Confucius, its progress in civilization seems to have been very slow. He was the first person who digested any thing like a history of the kings of Loo; for, in his time, the country was divided among a number of petty princes, who lived at the head of their families, much in the same manner as formerly the chiefs of the clans in the Highlands of Scotland; or, perhaps, more properly speaking, like the German princes, whose petty states are so many parts of one great empire. It is now about two thousand years since the several monarchies were consolidated in one undivided and absolute empire. There are several reasons for supposing that, before this period, China made no great figure among the polished nations of the world, although it produced a Confucius, some of whose works demonstrate a vigorous and an enlightened mind. From the commentaries of this philosopher on one of their classical books[39], it would appear that a regular succession of Emperors could be traced near two thousand years back from his time, or more than four thousand years from the present period. The duration of the dynasties, with their several Emperors, which he enumerates, and the detail of occurrences in each reign, make the truth of the history sufficiently plausible, though the chronology, from their total ignorance of astronomy, must necessarily be defective. It is still an extraordinary circumstance, that none of the ancient classical authors should have had the least knowledge of such a nation. Homer neither mentions them nor makes any allusion to such a people; and Herodotus seems to have been equally ignorant of their existence; and yet, according to the best chronologists, Herodotus and Confucius must have been contemporaries. It may fairly be concluded then, that the early Greeks had no knowledge of the Chinese. Even more than a century after the father of history flourished, when the Persian empire was overthrown by Alexander, it does not appear that the Chinese were known to this nation; which in all probability would have been the case, notwithstanding their aversion to any intercourse with foreigners, had they constituted, at that time, a large and powerful empire; perhaps, indeed, the ignorance of the Persians might arise from the intervention of the civilized nations of India, whose numbers might have made it prudent in the former to direct their arms constantly towards the west rather than to the east. [39] The _Shoo-king_.