ON THE CANAANITES. oe 
Semiti¢é, and apparently not Aryan. No one, as far as I 
know, has made any serious effort to translate them. Pro- 
fessor Sayce believed that Georgian might furnish the key, 
but though he has studied Georgian, as have Mr. Hyde 
Clarke, Mr. Bertin, and others, the Georgian vocabularies 
have not been found to throw any light on the subject. I 
have also inspected these vocabularies with the same result. 
Georgian is a modern language which, according to Brosset, 
who has written the best grammar, is a mixed language. 
Many of its common words are Mongolic, and its grammar is 
Turanian, but a great many Iranian words are mixed up in 
its vocabulary, just as in Turkish words from Persian and 
Arabic are mixed with the real old Turkic words,—as in fact 
is found generally in such languages as Armenian, Assyrian, 
and even to a small extent in Hebrew.* 
The Hittites, as represented on the monuments at Karnak, 
have, however, long been recognised by Dr. Birch, Mr. H. G. 
Tomkins, and myself, as being of Mongolian type. They wear 
pig-tails in some cases, and the facial lines are almost exactly 
those of the Kirghiz of Central Asia. This impression of 
their racial affinity is very generally accepted, and it follows 
that the Turanian languages are those in which we must look 
for the key to the Hittite nomenclature. 
We have two ancient Turanian languages in Western Asia, 
the Akkadian,—with its dialect called Sumerian,—traceable 
back to between 2000 and 3000 B.C., and the Medic, trace- 
able to about 500 B.C. These languages, though not the 
same, have the same grammar, and to a great extent the 
same vocabulary. Dr. Oppert has compared the Medic 
mainly with Turkic languages, though Ugric and Finnic 
languages also present, as he allows, many identities; and 
even in Chinese some Medic words remain almost unchanged. 
The Akkadian (although many words are only doubtfully 
deciphered) is comparable with the same living languages. 
About 200 words known in modern Turkish are known almost 
* Very little is as yet known about the languages of the Caucasus 
even by the Russians, who are most advanced in the study. Max Miller 
and Dr. Isaac Taylor have classed them as Turanian. The only one with a 
literature is the Georgian. Notes in the Academy (July 21st and August 
18th) show how little is known, but the Royal Geographical Society of 
Scotland (vol. iv. No. 6) has published an excellent summary of informa- 
tion. There are three groups of Caucasian languages :—(1) The Abaz- 
Circassian of the West Caucasus, including twenty dialects; (2) the 
Lesghian, including fifteen tribes of Daghestan ; and (3) the Cartvelian, 
including Georgian and three other tongues. The best authority on Georgian 
(Brosset) points out the existence of Iranian words in the language, 
