Chinese and Sumerian

x INTRODUCTION

three houses (strictly, holes or caves) might naturally stand for the multitude of dwellings which make up the whole community (vd. Lex. s.v. ESH, ‘many’, ‘three’, sign of plur.); and the use of the same remarkable symbol for the apparently altogether unconnected idea of mountains may possibly indicate that, in the original home of the inventors of Sumerian writing, the hills and cliffs were, as in modern China, full of holes and caves in which the people lived. At the risk of some repetition, I may allow myself to quote here something to the same effect which I wrote a good many years ago: ‘As caves are among the earliest dwellings, and are usually found in hilly regions, three caves might well symbolize a dwelling-place or inhabited country, and at the same time, by association of ideas, a hill, mountain, or mountainous region. Cave-dwellings are still quite common in parts of China, 2g. in Shan-tung; and holes or pits in the ground, such as Xenophon met with in his march through Asia Minor, are used for the same purpose. The character suggests that the Sumerian writing was not originally invented in Babylonia, which is not a hilly country, but in some mountainous region of the further East.’ (Gen. xi. 2 may possibly preserve a trace of a tradition of primaeval immigration into ShumerShinar ‘from the East’) 1

In D. 287 we have another linear form of +4, which looks more like an outline of mountain peaks, although in use it coincides entirely with D. 479, the symbol we have been discussing. It is figured in our Sign-Uést as No. 102 and, as will be seen, agrees very well with the Chinese parallels or derivatives there given. It is possible, as Dangin has suggested, that it was derived from the Three-hole symbol through the influence of writing on clay, which from the first tended to give a wedgelike form to the characters and their components. (Sze D. 287; 470; 486.) In Chinese writing, vestiges of the primitive three holes or caves may perhaps be recognized in the two (modified) holes of the 4u wén form of 7% hiit, gut (=gur), ‘a cave’, ‘a hole in the earth or side of a hill—used as a dwelling’ , R. 116, the third or lower hole being omitted ; and in the three circles of the Au wén of 4. fou, vu, pu, bu (Amoy hu=ku,

gu), bu-t, gu-t, hill (see S42, II. i. VI. 3), R. 170.

It seems possible, when we consider the truly primitive nature of the reed-wall ideogram for house discussed above, that another House-character, viz. Sey, D. 345, may primarily have figured a pzt-dwelling, with its narrow shaft above leading to the wider living-room below. (See Sign-list, No. 98 b; also No. 99=D. 346.) It is used for AB, ‘the Sea’ (Zémtu); cf. also ZU-AB, later AB- ZU, ‘the Deep’. The archaic form of D. 345, given by Barton, ¥A4OS. xxiii. 19, without the cross-line, and

* One may perhaps hazard a conjecture that at branched off in opposite directions, eastwards and some remote period, considerably prior to 4000 B.c., westwards ; making their way at last to the counthe ancestors of the Chinese and Sumerians dwelt tries where, in historical times, we find them estabtogether, as kindred tribes of a single stock, some- lished. It is a question for the ethnologist to where in the highlands of Central Asia; from which determine.

cradle of the race migratory hordes afterwards