490 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



letter groups, looked for a Semitic language with an alphabet in which 

 only the consonants were written (as was the case in the Phoenician 

 alphabet); in this case most words would have three letters, for the 

 three consonants of the root, or four, for the root plus some affix. In 

 May 1930 Professor Bauer communicated his first suggestions for 

 decipherment; during the same time Professor Dhorme in Jerusalem 

 was arriving at somewhat similar results. Both agreed on some of the 

 letters, and each corrected from the other's suggestions. 



There were no bilingual texts, and the process of deciphering in- 

 volved considerable ingenuity. But as soon as the majority of signs 

 had been correctly worked out, familiar words such as al'p ^ ("ox") 

 and gdl ("large") began to appear in the very first texts, and soon they 

 were readable. Some characters remained in doubt even then. One 

 which had been read/ turned out, when more texts were published, 

 to be sometimes simply the two signs j) and ayin (a Semitic laryngal), 

 and sometuncs a new sign with the value z. Another sign, long taken 

 as a variant for the s-sign, is seen to be a different sibilant character, 

 apparently representing some Ilurrian sound. One or two are stUl 

 uncertain. 



THE SCRIPT 



The alphabet consists of simple cuneiform characters having no 

 relation to the syllabic and ideographic (logographic) signs of Sumer- 

 ian-Akkadian cuneiform writing, but similar in that they too are made 

 of combinations of impressions of a wedge-shaped stylus on clay 

 tablets. The writing runs from left to right, like Babylonian cunei- 

 form, but unlike the Phoenician alphabet, which originated in a carved 

 script and ran from right to left. 



There are some 30 signs, all representing consonants; as in the 

 Phoenician alphabet there are no signs for vowels. However, for the 

 consonant aleph (the glottal stop) there are three signs, one each for 

 alepli with a, i, and u vowels respectively. Each sign is of set form, 

 but in the smaller tablets there appear certain signs the value of which 

 has not yet been detennined, which may be merely variant forms of 

 some of the standard signs. There is one character (5^) which occurs 

 only in the smaller tablets, and which may be a second s-sign (entirely 

 djilerent in form) by the side of the usual s (which appears both in 

 the poems and in these same small texts). 



The spelling is fixed throughout; no word is written differently at 

 one time than at another. This is hardly surprising, since each letter 

 represented a different sound, so that properly there could be but one 

 spelling for each word, but the absence of all slips indicates that the 

 script was well-established at this time. 



> The three Ugarltic alephs will be here transcribed a, i, and u, so that a represents o spoken ['aj or [-a'l, 

 j represents ['i) or [-i'J, and u. ['u] or [-u'J. 



