Note 406 — Chapter XII

As the merchants resident in the interior of China had no intercourse with, nor, in fact, any knowledge of, Europe till a comparatively recent period, it may be inferred that such guilds are of the most remote antiquity, if not of pre-historic times; and although no mention is made of them in the early records of the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Phœnicians, or Egyptians, it is quite probable that similar customs prevailed among the earliest of those nations, and were interchanged by them in their commercial intercourse with the Chinese on the one hand, and with the Europeans on the other.

My learned friend Sir P. Colquhoun is of opinion that we got our guilds (not corporate bodies, as they became afterwards, but associations of men similarly employed like the present trades’ unions), which existed in England as early as the ninth century, from the East, through the Teutonic tribes who came from the north of Europe. He adds, that the word “Zunft,” German for “corporation,” is also possibly derived from the Arabic plural word “Esnáf,” a view which Mr. Redhouse supports: other Oriental scholars, however, whom I have consulted, see no reason for its derivation from the Arabic.