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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
# T
28 11i:1I:('O l'Ol,c ) PRoi..
had gone, and that the Prince in consequence held them
for no better than fools and dolts, and would say : " I
bad far Hever hearken about the strange things, and the
manners of the different countries you have seen, than
merely be told of the business you went upon ; "—for he
took great delight in hearing of the affairs of strange
countries. Mark therefore, as he went and returned,
took great pains to learn about all kinds of different
matters in the countries which he visited, in order to be
able to tell about them to the Great Kaan.3
•
11
4
No rr r. — The word Emperor stands here for Sci,)-lncz: r.
What the four characters acquired by Marco were is open to discussion.
The Chronicle of the Mongol Emperois rendered by Gaubil mentions, as characters used in their Empire, the Uíghúr, the Persian and Arabic, that of the Lamas (Tibetan), that of the Niuché, introduced by the hin Dynasty, the Khitán, and the Bdshpah character, a syllabic alphabet arranged, on the basis of the Tibetan and Sanskrit letters chiefly, by a learned chief Lama so-called, under the orders of
Kublai, and established by edict in 1269 as the official character. Coins bearing
this character, and dating from 1308 to 1354, are extant. The forms of the Niuché
and Khitán were devised in imitation of Chinese writing, but are supposed to be syllabic. Of the Khitán but one inscription was known, and no key. " The Khitan had two national scripts, the ` small characters ' (hsiao tali) and the ` large characters ' (ta tzzi)." S. W. Bushell, base. in the jucchen and Allied Scripts, Cong. des Orientalistes, Paris, 1897.—Die Sprache ?rand Schrift der firchen, von Dr W, Grube, Leipzig, 1896, from a polyglot MS. dictionary, discovered by Dr F. IIirth and now kept in the Royal Library, Berlin.—II. Y. and H. C.
Chinghiz and his first successors used the Uíghúr, nd sometimes the Chinese
character. Of the Uíghúr character we give a specimen in Bk. IV. It is of Syriac
origin, undoubtedly introduced into Eastern Turkestan by the early Nestorian missions, probably in the 8th or 9th century. The oldest known example of this character so applied, the h-udatknc Bilik, a didactic poem in Uíghúr (a branch of Oriental Turkish), dating from A.D. 1069, was published by Prof. Vámbéry in 1870. A new edition of the Kardatiu Bilik was published at St. Petersburg, in 1891, by Dr.
W. Radloff. Vámbéry had a pleasing illustration of the origin of the Uíghúr char-
acter, when he received a visit at Pesth from certain Nestorians of Urumia on a
begging tour. On being shown the original MS. of the Kudatku Bilik, they read
the characte-: easily, whilst much to their astonishment they could not understand a
word of what was written. This Uíghúr is the basis of the modern Mongol and
Manchu characters. (Cf. E. Bretschneider, 11TEdicez'al Researches, L pp. 236, 263.) ---II. Y. and H. C.
[At the village of Kcuyung hwan, 40 miles north of Peking, in the sub-prefecture of Ch'ang Ping, in the Chih-li province, the road from Peking to Kalgan runs beyond the pass of Nankau, under an archway, a view of which will be found at the end of this volume, on which were engraved, in 1345, two large inscriptions in six different languages : Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongol, Bcrshpah, Uíghúr, Chinese, and a language unknown till recently. Mr Wylie's kindness enabled Sir Henry Yule to present a specimen
of this. (A much better facsimile of these inscriptions than Wylie's having since
been published by Prince Roland Bonaparte in his valuable Recited des Docuwe'm's de
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