nds of different matters
in the countries which he visited, in order to be able to tell about them
to the Great Kaan.[NOTE 3]

NOTE 1.--The word Emperor stands here for _Seigneur_.

What the four characters acquired by Marco were is open to discussion.

The Chronicle of the Mongol Emperors rendered by Gaubil mentions, as
characters used in their Empire, the Uighur, the Persian and Arabic, that
of the Lamas (Tibetan), that of the Niuche, introduced by the Kin Dynasty,
the Khitan, and the _Bashpah_ character, a syllabic alphabet arranged, on
the basis of the Tibetan and Sanskrit letters chiefly, by a learned chief
Lama so-called, under the orders of Kublai, and established by edict in
1269 as the official character. Coins bearing this character, and dating
from 1308 to 1354, are extant. The forms of the Niuche and Khitan were
devised in imitation of Chinese writing, but are supposed to be syllabic.
Of the Khitan but one inscription was known, and no key. "The Khitan had
two national scripts, the 'small characters' (_hsiao tzu_) and the 'large
characters' (ta tzu)." S. W. Bushell, _Insc. in the Juchen and Allied
Scripts_, Cong. des Orientalistes, Paris, 1897.--_Die Sprache und Schrift
der Juchen_ von Dr. W. Grube, Leipzig, 1896, from a polyglot MS.
dictionary, discovered by Dr. F. Hirth and now kept in the Royal Library,
Berlin.--H. Y. and H. C.

Chinghiz and his first successors used the Uighur, and sometimes the
Chinese character. Of the Uighur character we give a specimen in Bk. IV.
It is of Syriac origin, undoubtedly introduced into Eastern Turkestan by
the early Nestorian missions, probably in the 8th or 9th century. The
oldest known example of this character so applied, the _Kudatku Bilik_, a
didactic poem in Uighur (a branch of Oriental Turkish), dating from A.D.
1069, was published by Prof. Vambery in 1870. A new edition of the
_Kudatku Bilik_ was published at St. Petersburg, in 1891, by Dr. W.
Radloff. Vambery had a pleasing illustration of the origin of the Uighur
character, when he received a visit at Pesth from certain Nestorians of
Urumia on a begging tour. On being shown the original MS. of the _Kudatku
Bilik_, they read the character easily, whilst much to their astonishment
they could not understand a word of what was written. This Uighur is the
basis of the modern Mongol and Manchu characters. (Cf. E. Bretschneider,
_Mediaeval Researches_, I. pp. 236, 263.)--H. Y. and H. C.

[Illustration: Hexaglot I