igoo-i.j Spanish Documents Relative to the Canary Islands. 65 



In the writer's article on "The Oldest Written Records of the 

 League of the Iroquois," in Vol. VI. of the Transactions of the Insti- 

 tute, p. 260, he has translated a Sinaitic inscription of the nineteenth 

 century B.C., which reads : " Hadad, lord of the whole earth, son of the 

 metallurgist, the noble Bedad," in which " metallurgist " translates 

 ganibeta. Never dreaming of finding the name or title in the Canaries, 

 he wrote : " This is undoubtedly the Hadad, son of Bedad, of Genesis 

 xxxvi., 35, 36, who succeeded Husham in the range of Hor, and smote 

 Midian in what afterwards became Moab. The name of his city was 

 Avith, that is to say, Abydos in Egypt. His father, Bedad or Beda, 

 he calls the metallurgist, as one who was among the first to work 

 the mines of Arabia Petraea. The modern Japanese name for a 

 metallurgist is kane-ficki, but the ancient Hittite term for smelting 

 was beta. The remarkable thing, however, about the word kanebeta is 

 that it is the original of the English knife and French canif which 

 were derived from the Basque ganibet, a knife, the meaning of which 

 in old Hittite days was simply 'smelted or manufactured metal.'" 

 M. Van Eys suggests a derivation from the Provencal canivet, but the 

 debt is plainly the other way. As the writer has indicated elsewhere, 

 (The Nations of Canaan ; Presbyterian College Journal, November, 

 1900, pp. 10-13), the Hebrew Hadad is an attempt to render the 

 Basque Otadi, which means a field of gorse, broom, or whin. In 

 Egyptian, an equivalent leguminous plant was called usert, the osiritis 

 of Pliny, and, with the addition of sen, a tree or shrub, gave name to 

 the Usertsens of Abydos, famous Pharaohs of the so-called twelfth 

 dynasty (Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs). These Usertsens were 

 Hadads or Otadis. A body of their tribal descendants arrived in 

 Britain at some pre-Christian period, and were known to the classical 

 writers, drawn upon by Richard of Cirencester, as the Ottadini, who 

 dwelt along the borders of England and Scotland. Their ancient 

 traditions formed the subject of the " Gododin " of Aneurin, a famous 

 Welsh bard. A lordly offshoot of this family remained behind in 

 Anjou in France, till, in the twelfth century, their chief, Geoffrey, 

 married Matilda, Queen of England, and brought into that country 

 the royal line of the Otadis, Usertsens, or, in Latin speech Planta- 

 genistas (which are words that perfectly translate the former) to 

 become the Plantagenets, from whom, in the female line of John of 

 Gaunt, His Gracious Majesty King Edward in part descends. In 

 translating two of the already published Hierro inscriptions, Nos. XVI. 

 and XXI. of M. O'Shea, the writer mistook the value of two characters 

 and rendered by Osata what should have been Otadi. The person so 

 called in No. XVI., is termed "the Son of Tane, King of Amahetzio." 



