The ancient literature of America Author:John Campbell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and are entirely different from those of the Wyriek Stones and other supposed Hebrew relics. This is the Yarmouth inscription : vr( It consists of twelve s... more »ymbols, that preceding the V, which is fourth from the end of the line. being formed of two angles that, properly represented, should be parallel and close together. They are syllabic, like the Mexican hieroglyphics. and are transliterated as follows : Int In tll- kn l.n In ftt tll- Im s/i / ku kn. In old Japanese this reads, 'i dekn Kuittraile liuahi goku, Peacefully Iiam Kuiiu out KutnrniU', warrior eminent, which may be rendered. "Kutunulc, tin- eminent warrior, him died in peace." It may very naturally be asked how it is known that such is the reading, and how a Japanese inscription could be found in Xova Scotia? The answer to the first question is that the identical writing in question has been found in Siberia, Mongolia, and Japan. and the representations of numerous inscriptions in it published in St. Petersburg. Helsingfors. and other ]loints in the Russian empire attbrd ample opportunity for detecting the original of the American Mound Builder syllabary. As 'for the appearance of old Japanese in America, I have shown repeatedly that the Choctaw, the Creek or Maskoki, the Chieasu and all their related tongues are simply Japanese dialects. That linguistic family, probably by means of such literary compositions as The Migration Legend, preserved the purity of aneient speech, so much corrupted in other tribes of the same origin as to exhibit to the casual observer no trace of its family relationship. It is not at all likely that an aneient Choctaw ever found his way to Nova Scotia, nor is it necessary to suppose that the inscriptions in the mounds of the United States were the work of members of the ...« less