ist
by the name of Silifan, and the Emperor Ming-Ti, of the Hagne dynasty,
sent, a year before Christ's birth, to India for the sacred books
written by the Buddha Sakya-Muni--the founder of the Buddhistic
doctrine, who lived about 1200 before Christ.

The doctrine of the Buddha Gauthama or Gothama, who lived 600 years
before Jesus Christ, was written in the Pali language upon parchment. At
that epoch there existed already in India about 84,000 Buddhistic
manuscripts, the compilation of which required a considerable number of
years.

At the time when the Chinese and the Hindus possessed already a very
rich written literature, the less fortunate or more ignorant peoples who
had no alphabet, transmitted their histories from mouth to mouth, and
from generation to generation. Owing to the unreliability of human
memory, historical facts, embellished by Oriental imagination, soon
degenerated into fabulous legends, which, in the course of time, were
collected, and by the unknown compilers entitled "The Five Books of
Moses." As these legends ascribe to the Hebrew legislator extraordinary
divine powers which enabled him to perform miracles in the presence of
Pharaoh, the claim that he was an Israelite may as well have been
legendary rather than historical.

The Hindu chroniclers, on the contrary, owing to their knowledge of an
alphabet, were enabled to commit carefully to writing, not mere legends,
but the recitals of recently occurred facts within their own knowledge,
or the accounts brought to them by merchants who came from foreign
countries.

It must be remembered, in this connection, that--in antiquity as in our
own days--the whole public life of the Orient was concentrated in the
bazaars. There the news of foreign events was brought by the
merchant-caravans and sought by the dervishes, who found, in their
recitals in the temples and public places, a means of subsistence. When
the merchants returned home from a journey, they generally related fully
during the first days after their arrival, all they had seen or heard
abroad. Such have been the customs of the Orient, from time immemorial,
and are today.

The commerce of India with Egypt and, later, with Europe, was carried on
by way of Jerusalem, where, as far back as the time of King Solomon, the
Hindu caravans brought precious metals and other materials for the
construction of the temple. From Europe, merchandise was brought to
Jerusalem by sea, and there unloaded in