ORDINARY MEETING.*

DAVID HOWARD, ESQ., V.P., IN THE CHAIR.

The following candidates were elected :

ASSOCIATES.-W. R. Preston, Esq., 37, Gloucester Place, W. Harold Peirce, Esq., Philadelphia, U.S.A.

The following lecture was delivered :

ON THE

Ο

EVIDENCE OF MALAY, JAVANESE, ARABIAN AND PERSIAN ADMIXTURE IN THE INCA OR KESHUA LANGUAGE OF PERU, AMONGST THE AYMARA LANGUAGE OF THE PEASANT CLASS. By F. W. CHRISTIAN, Esq., B.A.

VER twenty years ago, whilst a schoolboy at Eton, I read with deep interest those two splendid books, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, and The Conquest of Peru. It fired me with a most ardent ambition to explore that strange and picturesque domain of the history of Pre-Columbian man in America, and if possible to trace the migrations of Asiatic Columbuses from the Pacific side, and at the same time to endeavour to throw some light upon the settling of the little dots of lands scattered on the broad bosom of the great Hai-Nan, as the Chinese call the vast South Sea.

How the study and patient labour of the best years of my life has succeeded, this evening's lecture may in some sort set forth. I ask for a patient consideration of the evidences bit by bit, upon which is built up the theory of an Asiatic origin of the dynasty of the Incas which the Spaniards found nearly four hundred years ago established in the upper and lower valleys of Peru and along the coast-line facing Asia, from Quito or Ecuador to the desert of Atacama and the river Maule on the Chilian border.

* Monday, May 18th, 1908.

On coming of age, and leaving Oxford, I took the earliest opportunity of visiting Australia and New Zealand, where I became a corresponding member of the Polynesian Society, and at once armed myself with the Polynesian Liddell and Scott's Lexicon, The Comparative Maori Dictionary, in the pages of which by the labours of my friend and fellow-worker, Mr. E. Tregear, of Wellington, legion-like hosts of closely-related words stand side by side in serried ranks.

To make sure of my foundation I plunged with all speed into the study of these Polynesian dialects, beginning with the Samoan, which with all its vowel-sweetness deserves to be called the Italian of the South Seas.

Thence, by an easy transition, I passed to the Maori of New Zealand, the soft Tahitian, the queer Paumotan, the fearfully abraded and moribund dialect of the Marquesas, and the quaint diphthong-haunted language of the Caroline Islands and other rugged and harsh sounding tongues of Micronesia; the half-way houses between that vast busy hive of population the Malay Archipelago, and the further islands of the Pacific lying under the sunrise. The two last of these South Sea languages that I succeeded in conquering, tabulating, bringing into the domain of Comparative Philology, and forcing to yield up some of their secrets, were (1) the dialect of the Gilbert or Line Islands, and (2) that of Rarotonga, an island in the newly-annexed Cook or Harvey Group which Lord Ranfurly, then Governor of New Zealand, at the earnest desire of the natives and at the urgent representation of myself and other travellers and students, has now brought safely under the ægis of the Union Jack.

There I have taken many important key-words from these languages and have compared them with their equivalents in the two principal languages of Peru, the Inca,* Keshua or language of

* Before I go any further I must explain the terms_Inca, Runa, Runa-Simi, Keshua and Aymara. The word Inca means a Prince of the Blood Royal or reigning house and is cognate with Javanese unka, a chief. Runa is the collective name of the upper class of the Peruvian nation, the men or warriors; it is cognate with the Mortlock word, Ro, Ron, a man, and with the Hindu Dron, which means a warrior. Simi means mouth, also speech, dialect, and is the Malay Simut, Sumut, the mouth, and possibly is akin to the Persian Sima, face. Keshua of noble birth, princely descent. Arabic, Khass. Polynesian, Kese, Ese, wonderful, extraordinary. Japanese Kassi, Kesi, polite, elegant, beautiful. Aymara is the Arabic Aima-dar, a man who holds Aima-land, a feoffee vassal like the peasantry of India, Java and Hawaii, who hold lands like William the Conqueror's tenant farmer Vavasour by the feudal system of tenure under military service and public works.

the King and Nobles and the language of the Aymara, the peasant class, or inhabitants of the upper villages, which Dr. Middendorf of Leipzig has laboriously, and with true German industry and patience, tabulated in his two great works the Grammar and Dictionary of (1) the Runa-Simi or KeshuaSprache, and (2) of the Aymara-Sprache or language of the Aymara or peasantry, German and Peruvian key-words together side by side. I will not delay you very long upon the subject of these island languages, except to point out some few curious facts, which I have come upon in my studies, which it will be useful for us to keep clearly in mind as clues to guide our steps as we search carefully through the great labyrinth of halfforgotten traditions; as we elbow our way through the Babelclash (charivari) of unfamiliar dialects; as we follow the faint and dim outline which I shall endeavour to trace; pricking out our way like cautious navigators in the philological chart, tracing these half-forgotten migrations of Asiatic Columbuses across the great waste of waters.

(1) The eastern Polynesian tongues, of which the Maori, the Rarotongan, the Tahitian and the Manjarivan are types, show a certain admixture of the maritime Arab and the Persian, probably from Arab gharabs or trading vessels,* from Bassora, and of the barques of Parsee merchants from Bombay, who working their way southwards in their extensive pearling operations on the coast of Western Australia, blundered upon the great south passage, and forestalled by hundreds of years the discovery of Tasmania or Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand by Abel Tasman and his stalwart Dutchmen from Java. Some of these vessels must have had live stock on board. I give as an example of this:

Take the Tahitian word Mamoe, a sheep.

It is a worn-down form of the Arabic Mamawesh, plural of Mawesh, a flock or herd, which has the generic meaning of quadrupeds, live stock in general. This is the first thread in the fabric.

(2) But be it remarked: The main body of the key-words in these languages I find about three-fifths consists of HinduMalay roots, the result, I feel certain, of a very large body of emigrants from Java, the Southern Philippines and the Moluccas coming by way of the Carolines, the Hawaii, and Tahiti. Presently we shall trace this great migration of which we

* Compare 'Arawa, the Maori name of one of the great canoes of the migration.

have very full and explicit traditions, exceedingly well preserved by the Maori of New Zealand. This migration gave the Carolines and Samoans their aristocracy or ruling class, just as the Norman invasion laid the foundation of England's ancient nobility. This is the second and most substantial thread in the fabric. To borrow a figure from the Inca Quipus or Calculating Cord, as Carlyle calls it, a Quipo thrum. Imagine a parti-coloured cord or cable twisted up of different threads, one of hemp, one of cotton, one of silk, a fourth of coir-fibre, and you will have an idea of the fabric of a South Sea or Peruvian language. Comparative philology untwists them one by one.

(3) Other threads in the fabric of South Sea speech are Aino Eskimo, Innuit, and possibly the Hydah of Vancouver. These are the early and primitive threads. These race-influences have been so covered up by the later migrations, and so overshadowed by the bolder and newer figures in the pattern, if I may call it so, that they need not enter much into our calculations to-night. Anyhow, nothing but barbarism could have come by this route to America.

(4) Then there are some few words in the Caroline and Gilbert Islands, and a fewer still in Rarotongan that have evidently come from the wrecked crews of Japanese, Siamese, and Chinese junks.*

I give a quotation from Preface of Book entitled A Javanese Columbus or the First of the Incas.

"In A.D. 1024 Mahomet of Ghisni made the fifth of his destructive invasions of Hindustan, and plundered the great Temple of the Moon Somnauth in S. Gujerat, obtaining an enormous booty of jewels."

This was the commencement of a succession of determined Arab inroads by land and sea throughout the East, and extending from India, first to Sumatra, then to the neighbouring island of Java, itself a colony from Gujerat, and a mighty centre of Hindu civilisation. The tide of Mohammedan invasion swept through the Malay Archipelago right up to the Philippines in the north and to the Moluccas on the east, where the great gateway of Gilolo opens

The word for wrestling in E. Polynesia, Kukumi or Kumi, which is pure Japanese, Kumi.

These stray emigrants, if they reached the American coast at all, would much more likely have struck the coast much higher up, in British Columbia, California and Central America. So we may eliminate the odd threads in the fabric from our consideration as they do not affect to any great degree the history of the South Sea Islanders, or that of the Incas and their civilisation.

out upon the Pacific main. It was this growing pressure from behind, which forced bands of Malays of varying degrees of civilisation eastward and still further eastward from Java and Celebes, Bourn and the South Philippines, Timor and the Moluccas, to launch out in search of new homes upon the trackless deep. In 1475 the Hindu Empire of Java, after lasting about a thousand years, was finally overthrown at the great battle of Mataram in one of the western provinces of the island.

The scene where the events of the story of the adventurous Hindu-Malay Columbus commences is laid in Middle and Western Java about half way between these two notable historical events, the sacking of Somnauth by Mahomet of Ghizni and the battle of Mataram, the Javanese Senlac or Hastings, whilst the cloud of Mohammedan invasion was beginning to lower darkly and menacingly over Northern Java; where the Arabs, taking advantage of civil war and tribal dissension in the Sunda provinces of the north, had already raised the green banner and the Crescent, and the cry The Koran and Peace, or the Sword of War! About this time King John was wrangling with his barons, and the foundation of our British Parliament was being laid at Runnymede. Spain, rising like a Phoenix out of her ashes from under the heel of her Moorish conquerors, had just broken the Moslem yoke of the Almohades at the great battle of Tolosa, where, on that memorable midsummer day of 1212, the combined forces of Castile, Leon, Navarre, Aragon, and Portugal inflicted one of the most terrible defeats ever suffered by the Crescent at the hands of the Warriors of the Cross;-rich earnest of future bloodstained laurels yet to be won in harmless Holland, in savage Mexico, and in peaceful Peru under her mild Inca rulers, whose dynasty was as yet in the moulding and the modelling, as wax in the hand of the Almighty, whose founder was soon to spread sail and speed across the blue Pacific, a Javanese Columbus, inspired by the voice of a seer, by the counsels of brave adventurous warriors, piloted by God's messengers, the birds in their migration, guided by the hand of Heaven.

The south-west group of Polynesian tongues including Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga, has drawn a large proportion of words from Malagasy-Malay sea-rivers from the south, and of JavanesePhilippine Malay from the north, with a touch of Arab corsair admixture.

A careful examination of the chief language of Samoa, stamps it as partly Javanese-Malay in origin, and therefore of Aryan type and partly Arabic and Persian.

The Fijian aristocracy was Javanese-Malay in origin. Cf. Ratu, a prince, Rani, a queen. Javanese Ratu, a chief; Sanskrit, Rani, a queen.