1892-93.] THE BUDDHIST INSCUIPTIONS OF INDIA. 265 



Hittite Track in the East. I may add that a copy of an imperfect 

 inscription in the Siberian character, found in Japan, has been lately 

 sent to me. 



The differences between Mr. Prinsep's method and results and those 

 pursued and attained by me are : first, that while he has regarded the 

 inscriptions as the work of an Aryan people, I have identified them with 

 India's aboriginal population. He has, therefore, sought to find in their 

 characters an Aryan alphabet, and has certainly succeeded in showing 

 that the Sanscrit letters were derived from them. While not disputing 

 his conclusion, I deny the inference that the writers of the Lat and 

 those of the Devanagari attached the same phonetic values to the related 

 characters. This inference in Abia Minor, in Etruria, in Celt-Iberic 

 Spain, and elsewhere, has hitherto closed the gateway of knowledge and 

 concealed the existence of ancient Turanian letters and history. 

 Secondly, while the translations of Mr. Prinsep, and his scholarly coadju- 

 tors and successors, are made, often very inconsistently, out of a bastard 

 Pali, otherwise unknown, those I present are made consistently through- 

 out in classical Japanese, such as scholars can read without difficulty. 

 Mr. Prinsep and his followers, thirdly, leave many parts of inscriptions 

 untranslated, while I maintain, and prove in practice, that a whole 

 document only partially translated is not translated at all. Fourthly, 

 inscriptions, as read by Mr. Prinsep's alphabet, present unhistorical 

 bathos. As read by mine, they are found to be royal documents of 

 great historical importance. In fine, I stand towards Mr. Prinsep's 

 system in the same attitude as I stood, and now still more firmly stand, 

 towards those who read the Etruscan characters with their Greek 

 equivalents. The so-called Lat alphabet is, liko- the Etruscan and 

 Siberian systems of writing, a Turanian or Hittite syllabary.-^ 



The fish like character denoting an m syllable, the rounded yoke or 

 bow one giving a power of r, and that shaped like a square Hebrew 

 sJim, which has the phonetic value ^o, alone serve to link the Lat 

 syllabary with the ancient Hittite, on the one hand, and, on the other, 

 with the so called runes of Siberia.. Where and when did the cursive 

 Turanian writing originate? It is natural to think that it followed the 

 Hittite hieroglyphic ; but, so far, we possess no Hittite hieroglyphic 

 documents that approach by many centuries the most ancient inscrip- 

 tions in the cursive syllabary. In the Sinaitic Peninsula, and dating 

 back to the time of the patriarch Abraham, are Hittite documents of 

 enormous value to the historian, and these are all in the cursive char- 

 acter.''' Hittite hieroglyphics must thus have been much earlier, since 

 there can hardly be any doubt that the conventional cursive was the 



