ΤΟ

SIR HENRY C. RAWLINSON, K.C.B., F.R.S.

It was once the fashion for authors to dedicate their works to patrons from whose bounty some advantage was expected, and few things are more humbling in literary history than the servile addresses which sycophancy under these circumstances has produced. We now live in more dignified times; and may place on the threshold of our work the name of some friend whom we reverence and respect without degrading our pens to such mercenary uses.

I feel it a privilege to be permitted to dedicate this the first-fruits of not inconsiderable toil and exertion, to one who has raised very high the reputation of England for wide and cultured scholarship, and for brilliant fertility in discovery. Your kind and considerate notice of my efforts when a boy encouraged me to persevere in an arduous task, of which this is the outcome. It is probable that you will find something to object to and much to correct, besides the errors inevitable in such a work; but I shall feel gratified if you conclude that I have in some measure thrown light on a difficult and perplexing subject.

PREFACE.

NE can conceive few things more melancholy than an author reading his own work. A man may easily overrate the virtues and be blind to the vices of his children, but unless he be singularly isolated and unaccustomed to the searching breezes of criticism, he cannot avoid feeling sober and sad as he turns over the pages of his own book. One can school oneself into treating mankind, the world, the critics, contemporary opinion, or even posterity with cynical disregard, but it is hardly possible to be cynical with one's own product; and yet, unless steeped to the finger-ends in vanity, even the most accurate and careful author must feel that many sentences might have been better written, that mistakes, the results of careless writing and careless correcting-some due to the author, some to his unsuspecting friend the printer-feeble logic, slovenly English, and other faults mar the product at every turn; and although the book itself, has worried him and caused him endless anxiety and trouble, he will see the blemishes more distinctly than all the rest. If this be true of most authors, it is assuredly true of those who have to deal with a vast mass of facts and inferences, to thread their way through tortuous quagmires in which authorities are at variance, and to march over some of those arid tracts of human literature in which the heaps of shingle have few rhetorical flowers to grace them, and yet every pebble of which has a separate and individual existence, and marks a truth or an error. It is in such a wilderness that we have been wandering, and we know that what we have done is very imperfect, and is as remote from our ideal as the rude efforts of Theodoros from the marbled flesh of Phidias. We know too well that those who wish to use a critical lash upon us may find a knot of scorpions in every page. We are not afraid of those, however, who have traversed the same path. They will know how the thorns prick and how hard it is to come out with a whole skin; and if they are as candid to us as they would be to their own work, they will at least do justice to the difficulty of the way. But let that pass. The book is writ, and who will care to read it? It is hard to say. What excuse then for writing it? Are there not books enough and to spare in the huge lumber-room of the world? Does not the future groan by anticipation at the burden we are piling upon it? Most true; and yet it is not merely the cacoethes scribendi, the mania for writing that has stirred us. Like others, many others whom we know, we have looked along

that fascinating road which leads back towards the cradle of human progress. Looked with longing eyes at those great banks of cloud and mist and darkness behind which the sun of human history first rose, to try and dispel some of them, and help to solve the riddle of whence it came, why it came, and whither it hastens. It is a romantic and a stirring problem, only to be solved, if it ever can be solved, by a dreary process, namely, that of mapping out accurately the nearer vistas of the landscape, and from that vantage making a further conquest of the land beyond. Taking up the intertangled and crooked skein, the thousand twisted threads into which the story has been ravelled, and following each one up to the beginning to reach at last, may be, the fountain source" whence Bushman and Englishman, Fetishman and Pope, black and red and white all came. Like others who have gone before, we too started ambitiously, our object having been to give a conspectus of ethnological facts, to write a treatise in which the human race and its various varieties should figure as it does in Pritchard's great work, with such additions as fresh discoveries have necessitated. But our purpose fell through; the work was too great. We next essayed a narrower field, in which our early reading had delighted, namely, to treat of the nomade races of Asia, a field very much unexplored and very confused, upon which we have written and printed sundry papers, some worthless and some otherwise may be. But our hobby grew bigger as we tended it, it outgrew our resources, and we had once more to restrain our coat within the limits of our cloth; our last resolve has resulted in these 800 pages, and more which may follow. And now as to our fitness for the work, a question often a stumblingblock to a vain man, who dreams he is exceptionally qualified to do what he has done, and that none could have done it better, but no stumblingblock to us, who know how much better it might have been done by friends whom we could name. The field was singularly unoccupied. Amidst the myriad volumes which the press turns out, few indeed touched even the skirts of our question. Like the Sahara in Africa, or like the Saharas which occur in large libraries where ancient folios lie asleep amidst dust and cobweb, our subject has a forbidding aspect, a dry and arid look which might well frighten any traveller who looked across it, and will doubtless scare many readers who are not aware that even the Sahara has some oasês, and almost every elephant folio some few paragraphs to lighten up the rest. Dry and repulsive a good deal of Mongolian history undoubtedly is, but it forms a vast chapter in human annals, which we may not evade without seriously marring our historic knowledge. In the absence of better guides, an inferior traveller may find a great work to his hand, which he may do in the hope that when he has reduced it somewhat to order, and traced out its topography rudely, others may follow who shall have the lighter task of correcting his mistakes, of filling in the canvas with more attractive