246 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. VI. 
to the story of Israel’s desert wanderings, assigns arbitrary phonetic 
values to the characters represented, and wastes much unappreciated 
learning upon them. The characters, however, are not Semitic but 
Turanian, and the originals of those that appear in the East on Parthian 
coins, and on the Lats of India, on the monoliths of Siberia and Mon- 
golia, and on Mound-Builder stones in America; while their Western 
descendants appear in the inscriptions of Lycia and Phrygia, of Lem- 
nos and non-Aryan Italy, of Celt-Iberia, and Pictland. The Turanian 
revelled in inscriptions, and, while it is true that the Teuton, whether 
German or Scandinavian, borrowed his characters, with change of pho- 
netic value in the runic staff, most of the supposed Teutonic runic inscrip- 
tions are really records of an Iberic predecessor, alike of kin to the 
Basque of the Pyrenees and the Ugrians of the Baltic and the Urals. 
The so-called Etruscan document, found on a mummy now in the 
museum at Agram in Croatia, probably never saw Etruria, but was 
written in the land of Egypt, where once dwelt many thousands, it may 
be millions, of the users of old Turanian script. In point of language, 
the peculiar polysynthesis that characterizes the Basque appears first in 
Asia Minor, and thenceforth accompanies all the Western inscriptions to 
the very shores of Greenland. But in the East it is unknown. From 
Arabia Petreea to America eastward, in Susiana and Parthia, India, 
Siberia, and Japan, the language is Japanese, archaic and severely brief 
often, but classical and universal. He who can read an inscription of 
the nineteenth century B.C. in Arabia Petrzea, can also read one of the 
same character in America in the seventeenth century A.D. 
The characters of the Sinaitic inscriptions are singularly free from the 
hieroglyphic form to which the Turanian Hittites of far later centuries 
went back, and to which on this continent the Aztecs confined them- 
selves. Yet, it is evident that the conventional characters of Sinai had 
a hieroglyphic origin. So far, these original Turanian hieroglyphics 
have not come to light. Time is required to modify a hieroglyphic 
system of writing into one of conventional symbols, yet the conventional 
Turanian can be proved as old as the nineteenth century B.C. How 
old, therefore, must have been the primitive hieroglyphic system, bor- 
rowed, no doubt, from Egypt, with change of phonetic value, which the 
Turanian simplified into the Sinaitic hieratic or demotic script! Still 
more wonderful is the fact that the scribes of Arabia Petreea, instead of 
carefully keeping their syllabic characters distinct and punctuating them 
with colons, as did their descendants both east and west, ran them 
together into compound characters, often very confusing and hard to 
decipher, as if for them and their readers their work was a mere child’s 
a a a ee 
