LITERATURE. From the most ancient times there have been races and nations in the south and east of•Asia who have been famed for their literary attainments. The Akkadians were pre eminently a literary people ; their conception of chaos was that of a time when as yet no books were written, and in their legend of creation the art of writing was seemingly to be traced back to the very beginning of mankind. They were the inventors of the cuneiform system of writing. They left behind them a considerable amount of literature, which was highly prized by their Semitic successors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Accordingly, a large portion of the tablets which have been found at Nineveh consist of interlinear or parallel translations from Akkadian into Assyrian, as well as of reading books, dictionaries, and grammars, in which the Akkadian original is placed by the side of its Assyrian equivalent. In the Akkadian mythology, there was a tree of life, of Irmin, the personified Euphrates, and of Hea, the snake-god of the tree of life.
The Hittite, another powerful race, carried their arms, their arts, and their religion to the shores of the Egean. one time their empire stretched from the Euphrates to the Dardanelles, and they held mastery in Syria in the era of the Judges and earlier kings of To the Phce nicians and the Hittites the \Greeks owed their alphabet and their early civilisation, and the alphabet as used in Europe came through the Greeks and Romans. The HittiteS were defeated by the Egyptian king Rameses u., about B.C. 1340; their last king, Pirsiris, was defeated and slain by the Assyrians B.C. 717, and their writing character was displaced by the Assyrian cunei form.
From another race of that south Asian region there has been handed down a sacred book, the Zendavesta. It is a compilation, for liturgical purposes, from various older books which have been lost. . It is composed of eight pieces or books, entitled Yaena, Visporatu or Visparad, Vendidad, Yashts, Nyayish, Afrigans, Gahs, Sirozah. It is written in the old form of Aryan speech called the Zend, a language closely cognate to the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and to Achmmenian Persian, or the Persian of the cuneiform inscriptions. The original texts of the
Zendavesta are supposed to have been written in Media by the priests of Ragha and Atropatene, and to exhibit the ideas of the sacerdotal class under the Achmmenian dynasty.
The taste for literary pursuits continues to be evinced by the Iranian, Turanian, and Semitic races of Central Asia and Arabia. In Central Asia most of the celebrities in the field of religious knowledge and belles-lettres have been Tajaks. At the present 'day the most conspicuous of the Mawla and Ishan are Tajaks, and the chief men of the Bokhara and Khiva courts are Tajak, or, as the Turks style the race, Sart. In Central Asia, the warrior, the shepherd, the priest, and the laymen, youth and old age, equally affect poetry and reciting of tales. The literature of the Muhammadans or settled nations brought from the S. is filled with exotic mataphor and illustration. In the three khanates, the Mawlas and Ishans have written much on religious sub jects, but its mystical allusions are beyond the reach of the people. The Uzbek, the Turkoman, and Kirghiz esteem music as their highest pleasure, and often break out in song, singing soft minor airs. The Uzbak poetry on religious subjects is exotic, derived from Persian or Arabic sources. The Tartar compositions are tales, and relate to heroic deeds, similar to the romances of Europe. The Arab writings up to the time of Mahomed consisted of poetry and romances, and their learned men were accustomed to compete with one another, and invite criticism by suspending their poems in the temple of Mecca. These were known as the Muallaka or suspended, and Maho med with some chapters of the Koran followed this popular course.
The Muhammadans of Arab, Turk, and Iranian descent have followed this predilection, and to the present day throughout British India every educated Muhammadan occupies his leisure in writing poetry, works on grammar or history.