Chinese and Sumerian

THE CHINESE CLASSIFICATION OF CHARACTERS 15

(2uh shu), he invented the system of horary and cyclical notation, and regulated the seasons. He established the laws of marriage, and made lutes and lyres (Az seh). He discovered the arts of metallurgy, and had a female associate or ‘sister’ called Nii-kwa (Nii-kwa shi). Evidently Fuh-hi (the ancient sound of whose name would be something like Bok-ki or Bak-ki: see P. 276 and P. 1006) was a Culture-hero, like the Sumerian Fire-god BIL-GI (BAL-G]), the later GI-BIL, with his companion-goddess NIN-KA-SI, and the Hebrew (Tu)bal-cain (Gen. iv. 22), with his sister Naamah or No’oma, and Volcanus, the Italian god of fire and metallurgy.

But Chinese tradition upon such a subject as the invention of writing is naturally not uniform. The story is also told that, in the time of Hwang-ti, the third successor of Fuh-hi, a minister named Ts‘ang-hieh elaborated the art of forming written characters by imitating the footprints of birds on the sand; upon which basis he produced five hundred and forty characters. Other accounts are that Ts‘ang-hieh first conceived the idea of forming characters from observing the appearance of a certain constellation,' the marks on the shell of a tortoise, and the print of a horse’s foot; or that, having ascended a mountain overlooking the river Loh, he beheld a mysterious tortoise rising out of the waters and displaying the marks on its back, which enabled him to ‘lay bare the permutations of nature, and to devise a system of written records’ (Mayers, p. 228).

Leaving these legendary fancies, which belong really to the realm of Mythology, We arrive at something which may be historical in the account of Pao-shi, a scholar who flourished under Ch‘éng-wang, the second ruler of the Chou Dynasty (1115 B.c.), Pao-shi is considered the Father of Letters, and his work entitled LuA-shu (‘ The Six Scripts’) has been a standard to which all subsequent ages have referred. It is there affirmed that nine-tenths of the Chinese characters were of ‘ hieroglyphic’ or pictorial origin; and that the primitive shapes of the symbols were gradually lost, owing to abbreviation for the sake of convenience or addition for the sake of appearance, Comparison of the old forms of the Chinese characters with the primitive Babylonian symbols had led me to much the same conclusion long before I became acquainted with Pao-shi’s views as interpreted by the illustrious Morrison. Following the latter, we may here enumerate the six classes of ‘writing’ or written characters, called in Chinese S%2z; a term which appears to be identical with the Sumerian SHU, ‘writing’, ‘the scribe’s art’, Assyrian dupiarritu (Br. 8673). They are—

(1) Hing-stang, ‘ forms (and) images’; ze. pictorial characters or ‘hieroglyphs’. These in the ancient forms with which we are chiefly concerned, are rude outlines of visible objects. Thus sun, moon, mountain, fish, ox, dog, are represented by outline pictures of the things themselves or of characteristic parts of the same. (This is as truly the case in Sumerian as it is in Chinese. Thus the ox is represented in both

* Or constellations? Cf the Babylonian phrase ‘writing of heaven’ (Sir Samé'; Sitirti Samédmz), as a description (astrological ?) of the constellations,