ΤΟ MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HENRY RAWLINSON, K.C.B., THE INVESTIGATOR OF THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE EAST, AND YIELDING TO NONE IN HIS KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRESENT CONDITION OF CENTRAL ASIA, En Token of Admiration and Gratitude, THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE DEDICATED BY A. VAMBÉRY. PREFAC E. I was born in Hungary in 1832, in the small town of Duna Szerdahely, situated on one of the largest islands in the Danube. Impelled by a particular inclination to linguistic science, I had in early youth occupied myself with several languages of Europe and Asia. The various stores of Oriental and Western literature were in the first instance the object of my eager study. At a later period I began to interest myself in the reciprocal relations of the languages themselves; and here it is not surprising if I, in applying the proverb nosce teipsum," directed my principal attention to the affinities and to the origin of my own mother tongue. แ That the Hungarian language belongs to the stock called Altaic is well known, but whether it is to be referred to the Finnish or the Tartaric branch is a question that still awaits decision. This inquiry, interesting* to us Hungarians both in a scientific and a national point of view, was the principal and the moving cause of my journey to the East. I was desirous of ascertaining, by the practical study of the living languages, the positive degree of affinity which had at once struck * The opinion, consequently, that we Hungarians go to Asia to seek there those of our race who were left behind, is erroneous. Such an object, the carrying out of which, both from ethnographical as well as philological reasons, would be an impossibility, would render a man amenable to the charge of gross ignorance. We are desirous of knowing the etymological construction of our language, and therefore seek exact information from cognate idioms. me as existing between the Hungarian and the Turco-Tartaric dialects when contemplating them by the feeble light which theory supplied. I went first to Constantinople. Several years' residence in Turkish houses, and frequent visits to Islamite schools and libraries, soon transformed me into a Turk -nay, into an effendi. The progress of my linguistic researches impelled me farther toward the remote East; and when I proposed to carry out my views by actually undertaking a journey to Central Asia, I found it advisable to retain this character of effendi, and to visit the East as an Oriental. The foregoing observations will explain the object which I proposed to myself in my wanderings from the Bosphorus to Samarcand. Geological or astronomical researches were out of my province, and had even become an impossibility from my assumption of the character of a dervish. My attention. was for the most part directed to the races inhabiting Central Asia, of whose social and political relations, character, usages, and customs I have striven, however imperfectly, to give a sketch in the following pages. Although, as far as circumstances and my previous avocations permitted, I allowed nothing that concerned geography and statistics to escape me, still I must regard the results of my philological researches as the principal fruits of my journey. These I am desirous, after maturer preparation, to lay before the scientific world. These researches, and not the facts recorded in the present pages, must ever be regarded by me as the real reward of a journey in which I wandered about for months and months with only a few rags as my covering, without necessary food, and in constant peril of perishing by a death of cruelty, if not of torture. I may be reproached with too much limiting my views, |