5<DO MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



script, which has been variously deciphered according to the bias 

 or fancy of epigraphists. This simply means that the " Hittite 

 texts " have not yet been interpreted, and are likely to remain 

 unexplained, until a clue is found in some bilingual document, 

 such as the Rosetta Stone, which surrendered the secret of the 

 Egyptian hieroglyphs. 



Meanwhile the Hittite language and people are proved to be 

 Semites, Pelasgians, " Turanians," or Ural-Altaic or Akkado- 

 Sumerians, of all of which views one may say with Prof. Peter 

 Jensen that they " are without foundation, and their results are 

 destitute of value 1 ." Is the same to be said of the solution 

 proposed, or rather revived by Jensen himself? I am not com- 

 petent to decide, and can but say that his theory, which connects 

 the Hittite language with the Armenian branch of the Aryan 

 family, has been favourably received, and seems plausible. In 

 the Hittite area, which has still to be defined, he admits a Semitic 

 element, which was in remote times Aryanised in speech by Indo- 

 European intruders speaking an archaic form of the Armenian 

 language. 



This view agrees well with some of the known conditions, and 

 is independently supported by the results of Von Luschan's 

 explorations in Senjirli, as well as by his theory on the modi- 

 fications of the Semitic type in western Asia by early inter- 

 minglings of Amorites and Jews with Hittites in this region. 

 In North Syria, land of the Amorites, " nearly all the heads are 

 brachy, with indices near to 90 ; and these same brachy elements 

 we find everywhere in Western Asia ; we find them more or less 

 prominent even with the modern Greeks, Armenians, and Turks 

 of Asia Minor, and especially the Armenians are most remarkable 



1 Various papers in the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental Society, 1893- 

 96, and Hittiter und Armenier, a scholarly work which appeared in 1898 almost 

 simultaneously with C. R. Conder's The Hittites and their Language. This 

 last is singularly inconclusive, and seems to fall between two stools by attempting 

 to compare the Hittite system "on the one hand with what is called the Asian 

 syllabary, including the Cypriote syllables, and the extra letters of the Lycian 

 and Carian alphabets, which are generally admitted to be of the same origin ; 

 on the other by comparing the sounds and forms of the oldest known Sumerian 

 emblems" (p. 215). Peiser's "Turanians" and Reinach's "Pelasgians" seem 

 equally wide of the mark. 



