368 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— H. 



circular work. The circle has a slight ditch round it on the outside, but inside there 

 is nothing to be seen save that there is a slight rise towards the centre. No excavation 

 has actually been done among these works. They are in a remarkable state of 

 preservation. The whole complex looks very like some Idnd of sacred spot. A few 

 hundred yards to the west of the circle are a number of hut circles which have never 

 been excavated. A certain amount of gravel flint occurs naturally at this spot. One 

 hundred yards to the east of the semi-circular work are faint traces of a rough enclosure 

 containing many hut circles. A number of these was excavated in the middle 

 nineteenth century, and it seems from the finds that they were occupied by Neolithic 

 folk, or at the latest by men of the early Bronze Age. StOl farther to the east along 

 the ridge are numerous traces of ancient cultivation. The ground is covered with a 

 dense copse, but the path going through the copse has continually to mount over the 

 remains of old dry stone walling. Finally, immediately to the south of the avenue, 

 is a very regular three-sided work set on the edge of the descent into the Gordano 

 Valley. It seems unfinished, for the fourth side is entirely absent. Further, it seems 

 to bear no relation to the circle and avenue, and has a ditch on its outside which 

 would make it quite defensible had it got a fourth side. Arrangements were made 

 in the summer of 1929 to get the whole site photographed, but the aeroplane company 

 instructed to do the work has not carried it out to date. 



Sir Arthur Keith, F.R.S. — Memorial Lecture : What Dr. John Beddoe 

 did for Modern Anthropology. (Chairman : Sir Evan D. Jones.) 



Saturday, September 6. 



Excursion to Stanton Drew, Cheddar, Meare, Glastonbury, Wellow. 



Monday, September 8. 



Mr. L. S. B. Leakey. — The Kikuyu System of Land Tenure. 



Mr. A. L. Armstrong. — The Antiquity of Man in South Africa as demon- 

 strated at the Victoria Falls, Rhodesia. 



Miss M. A. Murray. — Excavations in Minorca. 



Sir Richard A. S. Paget, 'Qt.— Influence of Mouth Gesture on the 

 Development of the Alphabet. 



Since Emanuel de Rouge's discovery of the relationship between the classical 

 alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphs, many theories have been advanced. Most of 

 these, e.g. that of Dr. Alan H. Gardiner (191G) accept hieroglyphic influence. 



Assuming a pictographic origin, the method of formation is generally agreed to be 

 ' acrophonic,' i.e. each alphabetic sign is a picture which stands for the first letter of 

 its name. 



But the number of actual pictures for names beginning in any given letter was 

 large — whether in Egyptian or Sumerian — what then was the principle of selection ? 



The present hypothesis suggests that, just as in the origin of speech the vocal 

 organs tended unconsciously to imitate the pantomimic gestures of the body and 

 especially of the hands, so in the origin of alphabetic writing the hand of the scribe 

 tended unconsciously to imitate the form and movements of the organs of articulation. 



Hence in Sumerian, according to Langdon, the same symbols were used for P, B. 

 and perhaps also W. W was represented by the same symbols as M, and V and F 

 (if they existed at all) were recorded as B and P respectively — i.e. various sounds 

 made by essentially the same lip gesture were represented by the same symbols. 



In a great many Sumerian words there appears to be a tendency for the script to 

 conform to the mouth movements of the word v/hich it represents. It is as though 

 Sumerian writing was in process of evolving, unconsciously, into a natural alphabetical 

 or syllabic script in which vertical tongue movements were represented by vertical 

 lines — lip projections by parallel horizontals, etc. 



