BABYLONIAN LITERATURE. 83 



on particulars with respect to foreign na- 

 tions which have adopted the Arabic alpha- 

 bet. I allude to the indecisive form of 

 certain letters ; the absence of any diacritic 

 points in proper names, or the inaccurate 

 way in which the points are placed. All 

 Shemitic alphabets are bad channels of 

 transcription, owing to the absence of 

 vowels. How then is this difficulty to be 

 overcome, when to this source of inaccu- 

 racy, we have to add another, even more 

 serious, that of the uncertainty as to the 

 letters themselves ; the same character, for 

 example, being, perchance, either b, n, t, y. 1 



1 The name of JU;j-wU , for instance, which previously was read : 

 Yanbushudh, at the lime when " The Book of Nabatha-im Agri- 

 culture" came to the knowledge of the Jews in the 12th century 

 (v. ante, p. 7), and which would give the key to the problem, if it 

 could be clearly ascertained this Yanbushudh, in fact, should be a 

 personage whom we know under some other name, is susceptible 

 of such a variety of renderings, that we may say that the forms or 

 letters of which it consists are of no value. The first three forms may 

 be taken each for four different letters ; the J which follows them is 

 easily confounded with the J ; the three forms of the ^*> may be 

 like the strokes at the beginning, three different letters, each read- 

 ing in four ways ; the \ is often confounded with the <J and the j 

 with the J 



