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are many reasons which induce me to believe, that the Runic alphabet is Oriental, and of a very remote antiquity, or at any rate some of the sixteen letters of which it is composed. Sir William Jones, in his Discourse on the Tartars, informs us, on the authority of Arabshah, the author of the Life of Tamerlane, that in Yaghatai, the people of Oighur have a system of fourteen letters only, denominated from themselves Oighuri, and that those are the characters which the Mongols are supposed by most authors to have borrowed. Abulghazi tells us only, that Chingiz employed the natives of Eighur as excellent penmen; but the Chinese assert that he was forced to employ them, because he had no writers at all among his natural-born subjects; and we are assured by many that Kublaikhan ordered letters to be invented for his nation by a Tibetian, whom he rewarded with the dignity of chief Lama. The small number of Eighuri letters, continues Sir William Jones, might induce us to believe that they were Zend, or Pahlavi, which must have been current in that country, when it was governed by the sons of Feridun; and if the alphabet ascribed to the Eighurians by M. des Hautesrayes be correct, we may safely decide that in many of its letters it resembles both the Zend and the Syriac, with a remarkable difference in the mode of connecting them; but as we can scarce hope to see a genuine specimen of them, our doubt must remain in regard to their form and origin: the page exhibited by Hyde as Khatayan writing, is evidently a sort of broken Cufic, and the fine manuscript at Oxford from which it was taken, is more probably a Mendean work on some religious subject, than, as he imagined, a code of Tartarean laws. (Sir William Jones's Works, vol. iii. p. 82.)

x. In connection with this subject, Mallet, the author of the History of Denmark, or rather Bishop Percy, his judicious translator, says: What are we to think of those inscriptions in the Runic character, which travellers assure us they have seen in the deserts of Tartary? Tartary has never yet been converted to Christianity: from this and the circumjacent countries issued those swarms which peopled Scandinavia; nor have the Scandinavians ever made any expedition into

their mother country since they embraced the Christian faith. If, then, the account given us by these travellers is true, we must necessarily conclude that the Runic writing was an art which had its rise in Asia, and was carried into Europe by the colonies who came to settle in the north. This is also confirmed by all the old chronicles and poems which I have so often quoted. They universally agree in assigning to the Runic characters a very remote antiquity, and an origin entirely Pagan. They attribute the invention of them to Odin himself; who, they add, was eminently skilled in the art of writing, as well for the common purposes of life as for the operations of magic. Many of these letters even bore the names of the gods, his companions; and in a very ancient ode quoted by Bartholinus, the poet thus speaks of the Runic characters, "The letters which the Great Ancient traced out, which the gods composed, which Odin, the sovereign of the gods, engraved." (Northern Antiquities, vol. i. p. 371.)

XI. It is quite clear to my mind that no human being of the name of Odin ever existed, and that the name of the Northern Woden is derived from the Indian Budha, by reading the initial letter as V or W, and adding a final N ; which in Sanskrit is frequently Anuswarah, a mere dot. Much of what is related of Odin is explicable from Indian sources, and made up of Indian ideas. There are said to have been two Odins, and we also find two Budhas in the Hindu mythology. The name of one of them is said to have been Sigge; and Sakya, or Sacya, is one of the Hindu names of Budha, a very probable etymology of Saxons in the sense of his worshippers or followers. Odin is described as having one eye, and the Arimaspians mentioned by Herodotus were probably some of the most devoted of his adorers; not that they had fewer eyes than their neighbours, but that they worshipped Budha, or the Sun, under the name of the Eye of the Universe. The Indian Budha was the son of Maia, and the regent of the planet Mercury; and the Greek Mercury was also the son of Maia, and the inventor of letters, a benefit to mankind which we have just seen was also ascribed to the Northern Woden.

XII. To return, however, to the Runic letters. In the fourth volume of Conyers Middleton's Miscellaneous Works, we find the representation of a gem bearing the effigies of a monarch, said to be Parthian, with an inscription in characters which no one hitherto I believe has succeeded in decyphering. I will first translate what he says on the subject, and then make a few remarks on the legend. The third gem, says he, exhibits the likeness of some king of the Parthians, adorned with the dress and ornaments with which we usually find those princes engraved, as well on gems as on medals. I remark that Baudelet has already brought to light another gem resembling, and almost identical with ours, engraved on agate, with an inscription in Parthian letters, made in the form of a ring, which he declares to have been among the most valuable and beautiful he had ever seen of that description. It is a well-known fact that the kings of the ancient Medes and Parthians were more delighted with the splendour of royal robes, and a minuteness of decoration, almost feminine, than any other race of monarchs. For we read that they were accustomed to paint the face and eye-lids, to wear false hair, twisted into innumerable curls, together with earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. Thus Xenophon describes the Mede, Astyages; and Plutarch Surena, the Parthian leader, adding that the Parthians had contracted their taste for such ornaments from the Medes. That the effigies of the Parthian kings were frequently engraved on gems, and in the very dress which they really wore, we learn from Pliny; who, writing to Trajan from Bithynia, says that he had with him a slave who had deserted from Pacorus, king of the Parthians, bringing with him a gem engraved with the likeness of Pacorus, in the royal insignia which he commonly wore; that the gem had been abstracted from the slave by force, or fraud; and Pliny says, that he was making diligent inquiries for it, that he might transmit it to Trajan. Thus our gem, adds Middleton, appears to be valuable, not so much for the beauty of the engraving, which nevertheless might fairly constitute a theme for praise, as from its extreme rarity, when we remark that Roman proconsuls were anxious to pro

cure such, and regarded them as presents worthy of the emperor. (Works, vol. iv. p. 153, tab. 21.)

Now, two of the letters in this legend, or inscription, appear to me to be Runic, and one Phoenician, or Samari

tan.

↑ Tyr, the letter t. (Mallet's Northern Antiquities, vol. i. p. 370.)

Yr, power yr. (Ibid.)

Samechs. (Dutens's Phoenician Medals, second form of the letter.)

If the letter Tyr had formed the commencement of the inscription, it would have been highly probable that the whole name was Tiridates, as there were several kings of that name. But it does not do so, being preceded by two other characters, one of which is partially obliterated, and the other of them I cannot decypher; and until the whole inscription is made out, we cannot be certain as to the power of the letters, and the above must be regarded as merely conjectural, and I offer it as such. It is remarkable, however, that Parthia has an historical, or at any rate traditional, connection with Scythia. Justin commences the 41st book of his History by saying: "The Parthians, in whose hands the empire of the East is at present placed, as if they had divided the globe with the Romans, were originally Scythian exiles, as indeed is proved by their name, for, in the language of Scythia, Parthi is equivalent to exiles." Whatever may be thought of the History, I feel strongly disposed to contest the etymology of this passage, believing the name of the Parthians to be essentially the same as that of the Persians, the latter being the Hebrew word Pharash, a horseman, and the former the Chaldee form of the same word, changing sh into th, according to the general rule; and it is clear from history, that both were originally Nomades, and nations of cavalry, and indeed the Parthians were hardly ever anything else. My own opinion is, as I have explained at greater length in another work, that the earliest seats of civilization must be sought for in the southern countries of Asia, China, Hindostan, Persia, and Assyria; whence the original inhabitants were constrained to

emigrate, in a northerly direction, by the pressure of population against the means of subsistence, the great instrument in covering the face of the earth with inhabitants. The emigrants, no doubt, carried with them whatever arts and sciences they had acquired; and if we could find indubitable proof of the existence of the Runic letters in Persia, or Parthia, it would hardly be possible to doubt that they were carried into the north of Europe in the course of those emigrations which are ascribed to Odin.

XIII. There is another strong presumption of the Asiatic origin of the Runic alphabet, as the names of two of its letters are Persic words; I do not mean conjectural words, such as etymologists are so much in the habit of dealing with, and which they are often accused of manufacturing, but words which are to be found in every dictionary of the language.

In the Runic alphabet we find

↑ Tyr, the name of the letter t. But Tir in Persic sig

nifies an arrow, and we have only to look at the Runic form of the letter, to be convinced that it forms a connecting link between hieroglyphics and alphabets, and that it is one of the very oldest among the elements of the latter. In the northern mythology we also find a god Tyr, about whom their authors can relate little, except that he was a military deity; and as Tir in Persic is the name of the planet Mercury, as well as of an arrow, Tyr was probably another name of Odin or Woden himself.

B Biarkan, the name of the letter b. Barkhanah in Persic signifies a tent, and it is quite clear that two are represented, so that it is at once an hieroglyphic and a letter. It may perhaps be analysed into Bar, son, and Khanah, house, a tent being a small house. The Runic is the oldest form of the Greek Beta in Dutens's medals, and also in a modern work of high authority, Inscriptiones Græcæ Vetustissimæ, by H. I. Rose, M.A. It is remarkable that in many of the Shemitic languages, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac and Samaritan, the

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