WEBB, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language Of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language. First edition, complete with the folding map, which is often lacking. Webb believed that Noah landed his Ark in China and bequeathed to the region humanity's lingua humana, the tongue spoken by Adam. In his view, this language survived in the Chinese of the 17th-century Qing court. The thesis spurred English sinology in the late 17th century.An architectural pupil of Inigo Jones, Webb reasoned that Noah could be identified with the legendary Chinese king Yao, whose reign witnessed a great flood. His view of Chinese script was strongly influenced by not only the Portuguese missionary Álvaro de Semedo but also the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Webb was also inspired by John Wilkins's recent publication on artificial language (An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language - 1668), arguing that Wilkins, whether knowingly or not, had based his ideas on Chinese.The map of China derives from that included by Purchas in his Hakluytus Posthumus (1625), itself an extract of one obtained by a Captain Saris at Bantam. Here, the map is changed in several respects, including the addition of insets of a king of China and figures of a Chinese man and woman. Added at the bottom left are the crest and name of Edmund Squib, perhaps the half-brother of the Fifth Monarchist Arthur Squibb.

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