By Edkins’s time, the shared history of the Indo-European languages had been demonstrated and accepted. The great impetus for this study had been the growth of European scholarship on Sanskrit, and the major figure in the first half of the nineteenth century in this field had been Franz Bopp (1791–1867). Bopp had shown the relationship between Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages (and later Old Slavonian, Lithuanian, and Zend — the language of the Zoroastrian Avesta scriptures) through his comparative study of grammatical forms; thus his first work was on verbal inflexions. He is best known for his Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and Sclavonic Languages which appeared in German from 1833 and in English translation beginning in 1845.^[30]

Edkins’s comments on the Indo-European project open his book:

“Yet,” he continues:

Edkins was by no means the first to see links between Chinese and languages of peoples far to the west — such discussions go back at least to John Webb’s An Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language, published in 1669.^[31] Most of these works refer to Biblical chronology, a detailed discussion of which will occur below, as the crucial evidence put forward for the truth of Edkins’s proposition comes from the beginning of the eleventh chapter of Genesis: “And the whole of earth was of one language, and of one speech.” First, however, we should note that Scripture was only the spur to Edkins’s work, and did not relieve the scholar from further research, informed by the most advanced studies of his time. Indeed, Edkins placed his work in a thoroughly modern linguistic context and in this book was launching a serious critique of accepted linguistic wisdom. Thus, relying on Max Müller’s hypothesis of “dialectal regeneration” — first published in Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language in 1864 — to bolster his argument, Edkins contended that the Indo-European inflected languages and agglutinative languages (such as those of Tartary, South India and Japan) were fundamentally related. This flew in the face of contemporary ideas about language taxonomy and was one reason, Edkins claimed, for the exclusion of Asian languages from comparative philology.

Another was the so-called isolating nature of some of these languages, Chinese being the classic case. In Chinese most morphemes are free-floating and rely on syntax to acquire grammatical function: words neither inflect, as in most European languages, nor glue together — the etymological root of “agglutinative” — as in Japanese. In the case of Chinese, it was obviously impossible to compare its verb endings with those in, say, Sanskrit, because it didn’t have any. Thus, Edkins proposed that the word roots of Chinese and similar languages should be compared to bring them into the comparative fold. This did not find favour with some reviewers but it did represent an attempt to introduce into the discussion an original methodology designed to address a question that had previously simply been ignored.

Implicit in Edkins’s arguments is his defence not only of Scripture in general but, more specifically, for the position that the languages of humankind had a single origin. For Edkins, with his scientific cast of mind, finding the language of Adam himself was never going to be a viable scholarly project, though he did allow himself some speculations of the nature of “the primeval language”. Rather, in arguing the monogenetic case on purely philological grounds, Edkins, arguably, sought to lay a scientific foundation for faith. In these debates it is worth stressing once more that for Edkins, Scripture was not the proof; rather, it was philological — and other modern scientific — argument that worked towards a vindication of Scripture. He applies the same attitude to another lively field in nineteenth-century scholarship: “After a careful sifting of recent discoveries by the geologists on the antiquity of man, it will be the duty of the Christian theologian to examine afresh the question of early Biblical chronology. All new light brought upon this subject from unexpected quarters must be cheerfully accepted…”^[32]

And, similarly, Edkins adopted a model of linguistic evolution pioneered by Max Müller on the Darwinian model. The Origin of Species had been published in 1859, and provided linguistics with the tools capable of turning the study into a science, as it was perceived, with linguistic laws being the equivalent of the laws of the natural sciences. Müller adopted a model of natural selection in language with alacrity arguing, in the Lectures on the Science of Language, that languages formed, changed and died out through a series of processes corresponding to the biological model, except that:

Thus, the imperatives of religion and science were both met: the fundamentals of the faith were safe from being overthrown by the discoveries of comparative philology and comparative philology would be able to take its place beside astronomy and geology in the scientific pantheon.

This position, was, of course, more than acceptable to Edkins, providing him with a mechanism of linguistic change to apply to his grand model of the development of the world’s languages. It should be noted, however, that for Edkins language evolution is not teleological. We are, perhaps, too accustomed to seeing the process of biological evolution leading inexorably to us; that is, from lesser to greater complexity up a developmental ladder. In fact, however, natural selection need not lead to greater complexity, simply to greater suitability to the environment in which the organism finds him or herself. Thus, for Bible-believing linguists, language evolution could simply mean language change as the people who spoke each language found themselves in new environments. This is important from two points of view: firstly, the original language was given by God to Adam and it would be inconceivable to believe that this first language could be improved over time — if anything the reverse should be the case, as in the model of degeneration; secondly, Edkins and his colleagues were linguistically very capable and would have appreciated that languages do not necessarily increase in complexity as time passes. Ancient languages like Latin, Greek and Hebrew were, after all, no less complex than modern English or modern Chinese.

To return to the book itself: China’s Place in Philology reads as a linguistic and cultural history, from prehistory up to the development of European languages in comparatively recent historical times. There is not the space here to give a complete summary of Edkins’s work, and indeed much of it is complex and needs to be read closely to follow his arguments, so here I will concentrate on the underpinnings of his research and give a broad outline of his views.

Edkins’s argument does not, in fact, begin with language but with a comparison between the civilizations of the ancient Chinese and the ancient inhabitants of the Middle East: “The resemblance existing between the old [that is, ancient] Chinese civilization and that of the Hamite race [that is, the descendants of Ham, the second son of Noah] long ago developed on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates is very remarkable."^[34]

There follows a catalogue of similarities in customs, agricultural methods, and architecture, amongst other topics, and the basic proposition is raised:

Importantly, for Edkins, there were also (as he saw them) close affinities between the worship, sacrifices and religious buildings in the ancient Holy Land and those in China. For him this pointed to an original monotheism in the Chinese, a monotheism that derived from their shared ancestry with the Semitic peoples. This stance echoes throughout the history of the Western encounter with China, most particularly, of course, in missionary circles where the possibility of conversion was seen to be enhanced if, at the very root of Chinese religion, lay a belief in a single all-powerful deity — especially if that deity was actually, originally, Jehovah. It also had direct consequences for perhaps the longest-running and most bitterly fought controversy amongst the missionary fraternity in nineteenth-century China — the so-called term question. The essence of the “term question” can be easily stated: what is the best translation of the word “God” in Chinese? Which, if any, of the words found in Chinese texts meant what Christians mean by God? Huge storehouses of human effort were expended on these questions, and acrimony was often not far from the surface, as, for Protestants at least, translation of Scripture was at the core of their vocation and it was obviously imperative to get the word for “God” right. So, if the ancient Chinese were truly the descendants of people who had received the original revelation, the mystery and nature of ancient Chinese religion could be understood and the right words could be identified.

Now, as obvious for Edkins that the Chinese were originally monotheistic was the fact, observable about him in Beijing as well as in the most ancient of texts, that Chinese religious practice also included features not found in ancient semitic religion. One of these clearly non-monotheistic practices was the role played by heavenly bodies in astrology as well as in star cults. Edkins uses the term “Sabeanism” to describe this style of worship, explaining: “That the early Chinese should, in addition to their monotheism, have become infected with the Sabeanism that Job condemned, and with some other heathen usages found to prevail long after in the countries from which they came and through which they passed, need not be wondered at…”^[36]

Thus, the people we know as Chinese originated in the Mesopotamian region and migrated slowly eastward, arriving in China at “nearly 3,000 years B.C.”. They entered that land, “by the usual highway from Mohammedan Tartary, into Kansu and Shensi, founding colonies along the banks of the western tributaries of the Yellow River, where we find the ancestors of the family,”^[37] then subsequently spread out into those areas of early Chinese settlement we know from the ancient texts.

These Chinese were not, however, the first to enter the territory of China. In Edkins’s scheme, the “migrations of races have been in the direction of radii from a common centre where the first human pair were created”.^[38] One route was into India through the Punjab and was followed first by the Dravidians “and after them the Hindoos”. Another group — “the Eastern and Western Himalaic races” — crossed Tibet and followed the Brahmaputra, heading south and east into Indo-China and north and east into south-western China. The Chinese, meantime, went north and west along what became known, much later, as the Silk Route. The Himalaic branch that entered China from the south constituted, according to Edkins, the “Miau, Lo lo, Nung, [and] Yau” ethnic groups known under the current dispensation as “national minorities”. This southerly branch met with the northerly branch in various regions across China.

Following this explanation of how the Chinese entered their destined territory, Edkins moves back to postulate on the origins of language itself. He proposes that some elements and characteristics of “the primeval language” are retrievable by philological comparison. Thus, “that it was monosyllabic is deducible from the fact, that in all the families, from the Indo-European upwards, the roots are monosyllables”^[39] and “the structure of sentences in the primeval language, it may be reasonably concluded, was according to the order of nature. The nominative preceded the transitive verb, and the transitive verb preceded its object. The Chinese, the Hebrew, and the English here agree.”^[40] The other way of determining the nature of the first language, of course, is by recourse to Scripture. The classic statement of language origin in the Bible is from the second chapter of Genesis: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field; and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”^[41] This, in Edkins’s reading, meant that while “divine assistance” was required to make language, it was not fully developed at that stage. This was so because the initial language act was simply the naming of animals — full language competence was a gradual process aided by divine assistance but not granted complete. Edkins quotes a Dr Magee approvingly in this context: “It is sufficient if we suppose the use of language taught him [Adam] with respect to such things as were necessary, and that he was left to the exercise of his own faculties for further improvement upon this foundation.”^[42]

Having established the essential characteristics of the primeval language, Edkins addresses the important issue of combining Biblical chronology with his scheme of language development. The downfall of the primeval language was, of course, the Confusion of Tongues at the Tower of Babel, an event Edkins dates to 400 years after Noah’s Flood, which itself took place 2,200 years after Creation.^[43] However, his position on Babel is, perhaps, surprising:

What this enables, for him, is the possibility that in some specific cases the primeval language may have survived God’s intervention, if the speakers of the primeval language, or their descendents, no longer lived in the world as known by the Babylonians. He cites two cases of this: first, in Genesis 4 it says that when Cain was expelled from the presence of the Lord, he “dwelt in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden”.^[45] With his wife, he subsequently produced the line of succession that ran from Enoch to Lamech and beyond. Of this, Edkins says:

The second case is that of the Cushites, the descendants of Cush, the son of Ham, grandson of Noah and father of Nimrod, the mighty hunter. The Cushites were, then, Nimrod’s people who built the Tower at Babel. Edkins proposes, on the basis of the shared culture of the Babylonians and the Chinese that he observed earlier, that the wave of emigration that produced the ancient Chinese left the Cushite region after the Flood — thereby acquiring Babylonian civilization — but before the Confusion of Tongues — to preserve the primeval language. Thus, when these Chinese arrived in China from the north they displaced the people they met there, the Eastern and Western Himalaics who had arrived earlier from the south, and who were the result of migrations from before the Flood, and therefore less civilized. This accounts for why both groups in China spoke monosyllabic languages like the primeval tongue as they were not subjected to God’s punishment after the Tower of Babel.

I have spent a good deal of space on Edkins’s explanations of the origins of the Chinese people and their language. In the rest of the book, he proceeds to explain in similar terms the Semitic, Himalaic, Turanian, Malayo-Polynesian and Indo-European language families, though I will not cover that ground here. Let me add that, while cataloguing those parts of his work I have neglected in this paper, each step of his developmental edifice is illustrated with copious linguistic examples displaying his remarkable breadth of knowledge. The point of the whole enterprise, however, remains a proof of the fundamental unity of the world’s languages and of the world’s peoples, and especially the original revelation that all peoples received in the beginning. In his conclusion he writes, inter alia quoting the seventeenth chapter of Acts and a famous passage from Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Religion:

Edkins’s radical monogenism is, thus, buttressed on the one hand by his firm belief in the literal truth of Scripture, and on the other by an ethic of the common brotherhood of all peoples; the savage, the barbaric and the civilized. In a kind of reply essay in The China Review to some harsh reviews of China’s Place in Philology, Edkins describes the two schools of thought relating to ancient China. The first, he claims, “looks upon its old civilization as self-grown, desiderates no connection with the old Asiatic empires of the Old Testament, and detracts in many ways from the credit hitherto allowed to the ancient Chinese”. “The other party”, of which Edkins was a member, he suggests, “desires to harmonize the safe conclusions of modern geologists and ethnologists with regard to the antiquity of man, both with the historical traditions of Judea and Babylon, and with those of the Chinese.” The choice between them, he says, is between the proposition that “religion, language and history are one in origin” and the alternative that, “there was more than one Adam”.^[48] In his view, any polygenetic model was, by definition, against science, against Scripture, and against common brotherhood.