1895-96.1 THE celt in ancient egypt and babylonia. 89' 



THE CELT IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA. 



By John Campbell, LL.D. 



\^Read ist Fehi'uary, iSg6?\ 



In the Transactions of the Celtic Society of Montreal for 1892, the 

 Rev. Dr. MacNish attributes to me the translation of a cuneiform Celtic 

 document after its transliteration by Professor Sayce. Dr. MacNish's 

 own large share in the work of interpretation he fails, with characteristic 

 modesty, to indicate. The document in question is one of the lortunate 

 discoveries made within recent years at Tell el Amarna in Egypt, where 

 an extensive literary correspondence of Canaanitic, Phoenician, Syrian 

 and Babylonian princes, with the later Pharaohs of the dynasty of the 

 Amenhoteps, was brought to light. These clay letters furnish an import- 

 ant historical desideratum in the synchronism of the Pharaohs with the 

 rulers and governors of north-eastern countries. Probably the most 

 important in this respect is that set forth by my learned colleague. Its 

 text is to be found in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archae- 

 ology for 1889, Vol. XI, pp. 336-339, where Dr. Sayce describes it as 

 a " large tablet of grey clay, well preserved and clearly written." Of its 

 thirty-eight lines, the first two are in Assyrian or Semitic; the remaining 

 thirty-six are in an entirely new language, which Dr. Hugo Winckler 

 and Dr. Sayce suspect to be Hittite. As these eminent scholars have 

 not yet shewn themselves to be possessed of any clear idea of what 

 Hittite speech was, their suspicion is of little value. Granting it to be 

 simply Turanian, Dr. Sayce makes an admission that is fatal to any 

 Hittite connection of the tablet, when, discussing its contents, he says 

 "the possessive wz' and //, tu have an Indo-European character." 



It was no pre-conception on the part of Dr. MacNish and myself that 

 led us to find in the main part of the inscription an ancient form of 

 Celtic speech most nearly approaching old Irish. Our labours upon the 

 Umbrian plates of the Eugubine Tables had given us an insight into the 

 archaic pronominal, prepositional and verbal features of the Celtic 

 tongue, so that a glance was sufficient to make it evident we had before 

 us a purely Gaelic document and no other. There is a vast gap between 

 the date of the Eugubine Tables, 180 B.C., and this Tell el Amarna 

 tablet which goes back to the sixteenth century before Christ, so that 

 there is considerable difference in the language of the compared inscrip- 



