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THE ALPHABET
The Nestorians eagerly seized this opportunity. Marco Polo tells us that in his times the trade routes from Baghdad to Peking were lined with Nestorian chapels. In 1265, there were twenty-five Asiatic provinces, with seventy bishoprics."
The extremely active Nestorian missionaries carried their teachings, their language and their script into the Kurdistan highlands, into southern India (where in some parts Syriac is still employed as the liturgical language of a few Christian groups), into Turkestan (where they influenced the Sogdians (see the next Chapter); amongst the Turki and Mongol tribes of central Asia, and into China, where a Nestorian mission arrived in 635, as attested by the Nestorian-Chinese inscription of 781, preserved in the great historic city of Hsi-an-fu, former capital of the Middle Kingdom.
This important monument is ten feet high by three and a third feet in width and a little under a foot thick, and weighs two tons. The inscription consists of nearly 1,900 Chinese characters and about 70 Syriac words, besides many Syriac names in rows on the narrow sides of the monument with the corresponding Chinese characters. The inscription was excavated in A.D. 1623, in the district of Chou-Chih. See particularly P. V. Saeki, The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China, Tokyo (The Academy of Oriental Culture. Tokyo Institute), 1937. According to the author of that book, the immigration of great Nestorian families into the Chinese territory took place as early as A.D. 578. See also A. C. Moule, Christians in China before the year 1550, London, 1930.
One can gather some idea of the extent of Nestorian influence in China from the Imperial Edict promulgated in 845.
Gradually all the activities of the Nestorian Missions ceased and nothing remained to tell the tale except the numerous sepulchral and other inscriptions and written documents in various parts of Central Asia and in south-western India.
"Mongolian invasions and Mohammedan tyranny have, of course, long since swept away all traces of many" of the Nestorian monuments and written documents.
"It was in 1885 that some Russian explorers first came into contact with two Nestorian cemeteries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Russian province of Semiryechensk in South Siberia, or Russian Turkestan, near the towns of Pishpek and Tokmak. So far as I can ascertain, more than six hundred and thirty gravestones bearing Syriac inscriptions have since that year been either photographed or brought into the important Museums of Europe, chiefly into Russia." (A. Mingana, The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East, etc., "BULL. OF THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY," 1925).
"Assyrians"
The "Assyrians," who were in the news some years ago because of their persecution by the Moslems, and who live in Kurdistan and in the district of Mosul under a religious head, known as the "catholicos," are the only exponents of this once flourishing faith. In the course of centuries, groups of "Assyrians" gravitated from northern Mesopotamia to the highlands of Kurdistan, where they developed a semi-autonomy, owing allegiance only to their maliks. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the Assyrians of the district of Mosul, separated
