ON THE CANAANITES. 47 
the verb, me for the plural,—as in Akkadian and Medic, mu, 
na, sw for the three pronouns, ka, ta, sa, na for the case 
endings. We find the arrangement of the sentences to be in 
“ packets,”’ as in agglutinative speech; and the vertical 
arrangement of the words is exactly the same as in the oldest 
Akkadian texts. 
The comparison with other hieroglyphic systems gives us 
the probable meaning of many of the emblems, such as the 
star for deity (as in Hgyptian, and Akkadian cuneiform); the 
foot for come and for the passive voice (as in cuneiform) ; the 
legs for “run,” as in Chinese, Egyptian, and cuneiform ; the 
hand grasping for “take,” as in cuneiform, and Hgyptian 
and Chinese ; the hand raised for another verb, as in-eunel- 
form ; the hand to the mouth for supplication, as in Kgyptian. 
While using these comparisons to assist in understanding the 
Hittite, I do not mean to say that Hittite is the same as either 
of the other systems. The differences are very great, and 
the grammatical signs are quite different, excepting that a 
series of strokes represents the plural in Egyptian and cunei- 
form as well as in Hittite. At the same time, I see no impos- 
sibility in Chinese, cuneiform, and perhaps Egyptian, having 
all originated in an old Asiatic picture writing of a very 
primitive character, to which in some respects (such as the 
absence of determinatives, of included emblems and of com- 
pounds) the Hittite seems probably to approximate nearest. 
The translations which (tentative though they are) I have 
proposed for some of the texts, not only depend on this 
detailed examination of every emblem, but are also in accord- 
ance with the grammatical structure of the ancient Turanian 
languages. There is, as far as I know, nothing arbitrary in 
the value which I have assigned to any emblem ; in each case’ 
the proposal rests on comparative evidence. Out of the 120 
emblems, I have, I believe, recovered the sound in 50 cases, 
and the meaning in about 30 more; while, to the 60 words 
already mentioned as recovered from the monuments as 
Hittite words, we may add about 50 more, the sound of 
which is recovered from the hieroglyphic texts, giving us 
more than 100 Hittite words in all. 
As regards the method of reading, it is exactly the same as 
in the early Akkadian texts. The syllables of each word 
stand in a vertical column in the line, or when the word is a 
long one it may occupy two columns. The only difference is 
that in Akkadian all the lines read from right to left, but in 
Hittite, as a rule, as in early Greek texts, the alternate lines 
read from left to right. I have appended to this paper a list 
of Hittite emblems in two plates. In the first the sound is, 
