308 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



the dialect to be intermediate between Latin and early Etruscan. 

 This substantiates Freeman's prophecy that the speech of the Sicu- 

 lians, who came from four towns encircling Rome on the east, would 

 turn out to be '' Latin, or something which did not differ more widely 

 from Latin than one dialect of Greek differed from another." 



(3) The decipherment of the Lydian inscriptions, found by the 

 Americans at Sardis in the summer of 1910 (American Journal of 

 Archeology, 1911, v. 15, p. 149), proved Lydian to be an Indo- 

 European language of the European branch. 



(4) Success in reading numerous Lycian inscriptions revealed an 

 Indo-European language which, like Lydian, shows close affinity both 

 to Hellenic and to Italic speech. 



(5) The decipherment of numerous Hittite pictographic inscrip- 

 tions proved the language to be Greek of the type known to us as 

 Attic. The writing turned out to be, not ideographic, as hitherto 

 assumed, but iconomatic. The native name of the country is Qteria 

 in the earlier texts, Pteria in the later; for many of the inscriptions 

 were cut before q had changed to the tt, t, k of the Greek hitherto 

 known. 



(6) The fact was thus established that the Hittites, as well as the 

 Minoans (Year Book No. 10, page 232), were Greeks of that same 

 Javonian stock that peopled Attica. We see that the four great 

 civilizations, Minoan, Hittite, Attic, and Ionic, which form the 

 foundation of European civilization, were all inspired by the genius 

 of the same Greek strain. A comparison of the Greek features and 

 posture of the gods carved on the rocky walls of Pteria with the 

 Semitic cast of the sculptures found in the eastern portion of the 

 Hittite empire makes clear the mixture of Greek and foreign blood 

 in the border lands. 



(7) These discoveries led to the recognition of the origins and 

 congeners of various mythological personages. For example, the 

 fact was established that Theseus and the Marathonian bull, as also 

 Theseus and the Cretan minotaur, are resolutions of the old bull-god 

 Tesup into a bull and the hero who slew him. That is, Tesup, Tiswp, 

 Tisepo, Teisbas (= Theispos, from Thesippos), the god of the Hittites 

 and their Doric neighbors, was no other than Thesippos, the full 

 form of Theseus, the national hero of Attica. 



(8) Success in reading the non- Assyrian cuneiform texts found at 

 Tell el Amarna in Egypt showed these to be Doric, and not Hittite, 

 as generally supposed. The longer text is a letter from Tarqon- 

 dorous, king of Arzama (hitherto incorrectly transliterated Arzawa), 

 to Amenophis III (f about 1380 b. c), arranging for the safe conduct 

 of the daughter of the Egyptian king to the court of Arzama. The 

 so-called shorter letter turned out to be no letter at all, but a song of 

 praise in honor of Lappseus, or Lappaios (cuneiform lab-ba-ia, 



