34 The Rev. Edward Hincks on a Tablet in the British Museum. 



home, I perceived the connexion between shal. shi and shal. ish.ti as the mas- 

 cuhne and feminine forms of the same adjective. I inferred that the four words 

 which I had found on the Tablet were feminine ordinals in the genitive case; 

 I had previously recognised a fifth adjective, t^ *^ V'Ti sha . nu . ti, which 

 occurs in the 77th line of the Nimrud ObeUsk, with the meaning " second ;" 

 and that for " seventh," »^^ V'*^ '-<y-*i ^^i ■ ^" • '''. ^^.s been since observed by 

 me in the colophon to the inscription on Bellino's cylinder. 



In Colonel Rawlinson's " Notes on the Early History of Babylonia," pub- 

 lished at the close of 1854, he gave, what he believed to be, the cardinal num- 

 bers representing " eight," " six," " four," and " two." These were found by 

 him on a tablet connected with these numbers in their ordinary ideographic 

 form . They were, ^y "^y t^, tsu . ma . nu ; ^y ^, fsu . du ; ^yyy "I^^, ru . bu ; 

 and ^ tyiy "5^, shu . un . nu. I have already mentioned that I had published 

 previously a different numeral for " four," namely, arbah. As this occurs in 

 various places in the inscriptions of Sargon and Sennacherib, and is also an 

 element in the name of the city of Arbela, Ir arba Hi, i. e., " the city of the 

 foixr deities," I could not doubt that Colonel Rawlinson was mistaken as to 

 rubu being " four ;" and, if in this instance, he must have been so likewise as 

 to the other numerals. I was confirmed in this by my observing that Colonel 

 Rawlinson had given irom another Tablet, as an equivalent to "ten," tyi[ "ij^ "-TTT, 

 'i.si . rat. This is of a form completely dissimilar to the forms tsumanu, &c., 

 but harmonizing with arba'. The cardinal numbers had in Hebrew two forms, 

 a masculine and a feminine ; and, assuming the same to be the case in Assyriac, 

 we should have arba', arba' at, for " four ;" 'isir, 'isirat, for " ten." 



Being satisfied that this was the true view of the matter, I began to consider 

 what the four words, produced by Colonel Rawlinson, could be. I compared 

 them with ^y C^y ^y, shu . u'sh . shu, which he gave for "sixty," and which is 

 of exactly the same form. This word I had previously explained as " denoting 

 ' sixty' of anything, analogous to our ' dozen' and ' score ;' whence, as applied 

 to years, the awaao^ of Abydenus." — ("Journal Royal Asiatic Society," vol. xvi., 

 p. 218). I inferred that the four words produced by Colonel Rawlinson were 

 similar collective nouns, and that they do not signify " eight," &c., but " an 

 octad," " a hexad," " a tetrad, or quaternion," and " a pair." 



I remarked that all these words had u for the first vowel, and that, except 



