_— 
ETRURIA CAPTA. 169 
SEPULCHRAL INSCRIPTIONS. 
(The numbers refer to those in Lanzi’s Saggio.) 
41. OANA : ZEIANYI : LAYINIAL 
Transliterated—ma ra ka ra * no ne ura ka ku u* sara kuu kaw ra sa 
Basque—marakara non orogogoi Saraku uga au eritza 
Translation—monument where in memory Saraku mother his esteems 
Freely—the monument in which Saraku honours his mother’s memory 
The first word marakara, which has been read Thana and made a 
proper name, occurs in a great many inscriptions, generally as the 
first word.” Sometimes it is replaced by marakaku or maragogo, 
denote vowel sounds: see Latham’s Varieties of Man, pp. 523 and 566. It is important to keep 
in mind what Professor Max Miiller says in his Sanskrit Grammar for Beginners: ‘‘To admit 
the independent invention of a native Indian alphabet is impossible. Alphabets were never 
invented in the usual sense of that word. They were formed gradually, and purely phonetic 
alphabets always point back to earlier, syllabic or ideographic, stages.” The first stage or 
every system of writing was the hieroglyphic, which may have been purely ideographic like the 
Chinese. That the latter was the case, however, there is not sufficient evidence to decide. 
The oldest Egyptian hieroglyphics are syllabic and alphabetic as well as ideographic. So the 
oldest cuneiform writing was syllabic as well as ideograpmic. The Hittite hieroglyphics were 
syllabic, and but rarely ideographic. The hieroglyphics of Mexico were used ideographically, 
bub also with syllabic values, for the Pater Noster, and other prayers and religious formulas 
were written in them by rnissionaries for the use of native converts. M. Léon de Rosny in an 
article on Les Sources de l’Histoire Anté-Colombienne du Nouveau Monde, in the Revue 
Orientale et Américaine, says: “‘ Malgré son extréme défectuosité, les missionaires catholiques 
chargés d’évangéliser les Azteques, le trouvérent suffisant pour composer des livres religieux a 
Yusage des Indiens convertis. Les bons missionaires espagnols allaient méme jusqu’a écrire de 
la fagon le texte latin des priéres qu’ils voulaient enseigner 4 leurs néophytes.” 
The next stage was that of reducing the number of signs within the smallest possible compass 
and simplifying their forms for the sake of rapid expression. This gave the Semitic alphabets, 
from which the European were derived. These, as has been shown, were really syllabaries 
with little or no representation of vowel sounds. In course of time the inconvenience of such a 
mode of writing became apparent to Cadmus or whoever introduced the Greek alphabet. By 
setting apart certain signs to denote vowel sounds, such as aleph, he, yodh and ayin, he turned 
a syllabary into an alphabet. This the Semitic peoples afterwards effected by added vowel- 
points or lines, of which, perhaps, the most perfect system is the Ethiopic. The syllabary 
derived from the Hittite hieroglyphics was perfected in a similar way in India by added lines 
and curves, a comparison of which with the vowel indicators of Corea at once attests the com- 
mon origin of the old Indian and Corean systems of writing. The western Khitan syllabaries 
of Asia Minor, Etruria, Spain and Britain show little or no trace of having arrived at this third 
or perfect stage. For theold Indian alphabet, see Prinsep’s Indian Antiquities, and for the 
Corean, the atlas accompanying Klaproth’s San Kokf Tsou Ran To Sets. There are curious 
analogies between these systems and that of the Ethiopic syllabary. 
40 I am also indebted to Mr. VanderSmissen for the suggestion that OANA needs explanation 
in connection with the THANA which appears in corresponding positions on other Etruscan 
monuments. Etruscologists have unnecessarily supposed that the latter word is in Roman 
letters. Read as Etruscan it is goka rakara. The first word I have shown farther on to be 
egoki, importer, appartenir, concerner, convenir. It is the Japanese kaka-rw with the same 
meaning. The word rakara does not now exist in Basque, but as I have elsewhere indicated is 
a compound of ra, rako, towards. It is thus a synonym of NEY ganego, another Etruscan 
