Brinton.] 



94 



[April 19, 



to Iranian, were in fact descendants of the Proto-Medes, driven 

 from their southern homes, is deserving of respectful consider- 

 ation.* 



Whether the Guti and the Lulubi who possessed the valley 

 of the Tigris on the east of the stream (from Lat. 34° to Lat. 

 37°) belonged with the Susie group, the material is too scanty to 

 decide. Their writing was in Babylonian, and their royal names 

 largely Semitic, but neither of these facts is conclusive, j" While 

 Prof, Hilprecht has classed them with the Semites, Oppert has 

 suggested, not without some show of reason, that the name 

 " Guti" has an Aryan sound, like Gothi, the Goths, and there- 

 fore that the tribe itself may have been of this blood. | 



The vocabularies of these languages might be supposed to 

 give definite information concerning their relationship. The 

 material in the Kashite, Susie and Medic is, however, too scanty 

 to admit of satisfactory comparison. Of the Sumerian, at least 

 one-third the words are acknowledged by believers in the tongue 

 to be of Semitic origin. Others, as balag, axe (Greek, rrc/ls/ti?), 

 gushkin^ gold (Armenian, os;(fi), are admitted to be Ar^'an. To 

 these, it seems to me, should be added the well-known woi'd tur, 

 son, which is also Susie, and belongs in the oldest gdthds of the 

 Avesta.§ 



The numerals, except in Sumerian, have been very imperfectly 

 ascertained. The following lists will serve for comparison : 



* Mems. de la Societc d' Anthropologic de Lyons, 1891. 



t Winkler believes that the Guti had a tongue of their own, but wrote in Semitic. Ge- 

 schichie Babyloniens, p. 82. Hilprecht gives reasons for holding that Semitic was the 

 native language of both Guti and Lulubi. Old Babylonian Inscriptions, pp. 12-14 (Phila- 

 delphia, 1894). 



X Revue Archxologique, 1893, p. 363. 



gin the Avesta, the TCira people are Iranians (not Turanians). See W. Geiger, ubi 

 supra, p. 32. In Persian legend Tur and Era were brothers, sons of Fredfm, the founder 

 and father of the Iranian tribes. The Armenian os-t-r, son, preserves the radical. The 

 first syllable corresponds to the Greek us. The second j)robably defined the oldest son, 

 and hence came to have the sense of chief, prince. Tliis analogy has been suggested to 

 mc in part by Prof. Llilprecht. 



