ON THE CANAANITES. 71 
one race embodied in the Hittite people. If you look at the monu- 
ments you find traces of that, and if you require existing traces of the 
Hittite people, you need not go to Bactria or the regions of Central 
Asia. If you travel into the regions of Marash, and between the 
western mountains of Armenia and the Taurus range, you will find 
men there working as muleteers, and if you take them and stand 
them, as I have done, alongside a Hittite sculpture, you will see 
that they might have stood as models for the Hittite race! With 
regard to their connexion with Babylonia, I do not see that that 
can be borne out as yet. There was certainly a Turanian popula- 
tion in Babylonia. Our knowledge of the Akkadian language is 
gradually increasing, but I notice that out of the list of words 
which Major Conder has given, there are many which I do not see my 
way to accept at present; in my own mind, their connexion with 
Babylonia is not proven. Then there is a point to which I would refer 
as carrying the subject considerably further,—I mean as connecting 
them with the alphabet of Asia Minor,—with the Cypriote; and here I 
would say just as the monuments may be divided into three periods, 
so the inscriptions may be divided again into two periods and two 
distinct classes of writings. The author, no doubt, noticed that 
on comparing the inscriptions from Karchemish, with those of 
Hamath, that the Hamath inscriptions are much simpler and contain 
much less of a pictorial character than those of Karchemish. 
Other inscriptions that have come from Hamath and from Aleppo 
(which I believe are now utterly destroyed), also belong to the same 
class, and other inscriptions situated in the region bordering on 
the Orontes Valley, and on the shores of the Lake of Antioch, 
Passing round the Lake, or Gulf of Antioch, and following one of 
the great roads which lead from Phcenicia into Asia Minor, we 
come to another inscription of Ibreez. This is more pictorial, but not 
so much as the inscriptions from Marash ; and if you wish to com- 
pare the so-called Asia Minor alphabet with the Hittite form, you 
will find that you must do so in the inscriptions of this region, 
and no doubt it is in this district, in the line of the great 
commercial road, that the simplification of the characters takes 
place, and that, therefore, the inscriptions from Hamath, and 
in that region, are certainly of a later period than those from 
Karchemish. Now, if we follow this commercial road, and pass 
-from Karchemish through Marash, and so on to the shores of the 
Aigean, we find a larger and more pictorial form of writing; so it 
seems to me that Professor Sayce was right when he suggested that 
