We know that Gengis-khan conquered a
part of Asia at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but it is not
through either him or the Tartars that we know it. Their history,
written by the Chinese and translated by Father Gaubil, states that
these Tartars had not at that time the art of writing.
This art cannot have been less unknown to the Scythian Oguskan, named
Madies by the Persians and the Greeks, who conquered a part of Europe
and Asia so long before the reign of Cyrus. It is almost certain that at
that time of a hundred nations there were hardly two or three who used
characters. It is possible that in an ancient world destroyed, men knew
writing and the other arts; but in ours they are all very recent.
There remain records of another kind, which serve to establish merely
the remote antiquity of certain peoples, and which precede all the known
epochs, and all the books; these are the prodigies of architecture, like
the pyramids and the palaces of Egypt, which have resisted time.
Herodotus, who lived two thousand two hundred years ago, and who had
seen them, was not able to learn from the Egyptian priests at what time
they had been erected.
It is difficult to give to the most ancient of the pyramids less than
four thousand years of antiquity; but one must consider that these
efforts of the ostentation of the kings could only have been commenced
long after the establishment of the towns.
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