Chapter XXIV: Section 5: Asia

A considerable number of petroglyphs found in Asia are described and illustrated under other headings of this work. The following are presented here for geographic grouping:

CHINA.

Prof. Terrien de Lacouperie (_c_) says:

It is apparently to the art of the aboriginal non-Chinese that
the following inscription [not copied] belongs, should it be proved
to be primitive; and it is the only precise mention I have ever
found of the kind in my researches.

Outside of Li-tch’eng (in N. Shangtang), at some 500 li on the
west towards the north, is a stone cliff mountain, on the upper
parts of which may be seen marks and lines representing animals and
horses. They are numerous and well drawn, like a picture.

JAPAN.

Prof. Edward S. Morse (_a_) kindly furnishes the illustration, reduced from a drawing made by a Japanese gentleman, Mr. Morishima, which is here reproduced (1/30 original size) as Fig. 145 _a_:

Prof. Morse in a letter gives further information as follows: “The inscriptions are cut in a rough way on the side of the cliff on the northwestern side of the bay of Otaru. Otaru is a little town on the western coast of Yezo. The cliffs are of soft, white tufa about 100 feet high, and the inscriptions were cut possibly with stone axes, and were 1 inch in width and from 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch in depth. They are about 4 feet from the ground.”

Prof. John Milne (_a_) remarks upon the same petroglyph, of which he gives a rude copy, as follows:

So far as I could learn the Japanese are quite unable to
recognize any of the characters, and they regard them as being the
work of the Ainos.

I may remark that several of the characters are like the runic
_m_. It has been suggested that they have a resemblance to old
Chinese. A second suggestion was that they might be drawings of the
insignia of rank carried by certain priests; a third idea was that
they were phallic; a fourth that they were rough representations of
men and animals, the runic m being a bird; and a fifth that they
were the handicraft of some gentleman desirous of imposing upon the
credulity of wandering archæologists.

I myself am inclined to think that they were the work of the
peoples who have left so many traces of themselves in the shape of
kitchen middens and various implements in this locality. In this
case they may be Aino.

Another illustration from Japan is presented in Pl. LII.

INDIA.

Mr. Rivett-Carnac, in Archæologic Notes on Ancient Sculpturings on Rocks in Kumaon, India (_a_), gives a description of the glyphs copied in Fig. 146:

At a point about two miles and a half south of Dwara-Hath, and
twelve miles north of the military station of Ranikhet in Kumaon,
the bridle-road leading from the plains through Naini Tal and
Ranikhet to Baijnath, and thence on to the celebrated shrine of
Bidranath, is carried through a narrow gorge at the mouth of which
is a temple sacred to Mahadeo, ... which is locally known by the
name of Chandeshwar.

About two hundred yards south of the temple, toward the middle
of the defile, rises a rock at an angle of forty-five degrees
presenting a surface upon which, in a space measuring fourteen
feet in height by twelve in breadth, more than two hundred cups
are sculptured. They vary from an inch and a half to six inches in
diameter and from half an inch to an inch in depth, and are arranged
in groups composed of approximately parallel rows.

The cups are mostly of the simple types and only exceptionally surrounded by single rings or connected by grooves.

SIBERIA.

N. S. Shtukin (_a_) referring to certain picture-writings on the cliffs of the Yenesei river, in the Quarterly Isvestia of the Imperial Geographical Society for 1882, says: “These are figured, but are not particularly remarkable, except as being the work of invaders from the far south, perhaps Persians. Camels and pheasants are among the animals represented.”

Philip John von Strahlenberg, in An Historico-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia, etc., reported inscriptions relating to the chase, on the banks of the river Yenesei. He says of one: “It takes its characteristic features from the natural history of the region; and we may suppose it to embrace rude representations of the Siberian hare, the cabarda or musk deer and other known quadrupeds.”

He also furnishes a transcript of inscriptions found by him on a precipitous rock on the river Irtish. This rock, which is 36 feet high, is isolated. It has four sides, one of which faces the water and has a number of tombs or sepulchral caves beneath. All of the four faces have rude representations of the human form, and other unintelligible characters are drawn in red colors in a durable kind of pigment, which is found to be almost indestructible and is much used for rock inscriptions.

Prof. Terrien de Lacouperie, op. cit., makes the following remarks:

Symbolical marks, incised or drawn graffitti, not properly
speaking inscriptions, have been found in Siberia, but they are not
the expected primitive remains of ancient writings. Some are purely
Tartar, being written in Mongolian and Kalmuck; others, obviously
the work of common people, may be Arabic, while some others found
on the left bank of the Jenissei river are much more interesting.
They seem to me to be badly written in Syriac, from right to left
horizontally, before the time of the adaptation of this writing to
the Uigur and Mongol. The characters are still separated one from
the other. On one of these graffitti found at the same place several
Chinese characters, as written by common people, are recognizable.

Some hieroglyphical graffitti have been discovered on rocks
above Tomsk, on the right bank of the Tom river, in Siberia. They
are incised at a height of more than 20 feet. They are very rude,
and somewhat like the famous Livre de Sauvages of merry fame in
palæography. Quadrupeds, men, heads, all roughly drawn, and some
indistinct lines, are all that can be seen. It looks more like
the pictorial figures which can be used as a means of notation by
ignorant people at any moment than like an historical beginning of
some writing. There is not the slightest appearance of any sort of
regularity or conventional arrangement in them.

The last we have to speak of are quite peculiar and altogether
different from the others. The signs are painted in red. They are
made of straight lines, disposed like drawings of lattices and
window shades, and also like the tree characters of the Arabs and
like the runes. They are met with near the Irtisch river, on a rock
over the stream Smolank.

Figs. 513, 721, 722, and 723, infra, have relation to this geographic region.

It is to be remarked that some of the Siberian and Tartar characters, especially those reproduced by Schoolcraft, I, Pls. 65 and 66, have a strong resemblance to the drawings of the Ojibwa, some of which are figured and described in the present work, and this coincidence is more suggestive from the reason that the totem or dodaim, which often is the subject of those drawings, is a designation which is used by both the Ojibwa and the Tartar with substantially the same sound and significance.