146 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



Aryans adopted the Semitic alphabet, which had been borrowed from 

 the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, we haye no evidence that 

 Turanian peoples ever did so. Granting that Semites and Turanians 

 equally borrowed from the hieroglyphics of Egypt their phonographs, 

 it does not follow that they assigned the same values to the hiero- 

 glyphics and their later attenuations or letters. The fact that the 

 Hebrews took the hieroglyphics representing an ox, a house, a camel, 

 and a door, to set forth the sounds A, B, G, and D, because these 

 are the initials of aleph, beth, gimel, and daleth, the Hebrew words 

 for ox, house, camel, and door, rather tends to make it probable 

 that a Turanian people woiild assign to these characters the sounds 

 of the initial letters or syllables of the words denoting the same 

 things in their own language. I say letters or syllables, because, of 

 the ancient systems of writing known to us, many, such as the 

 Assyrian, Chaldean, Median, were syllabic, not alphabetic, and such, 

 originally was the Persian.^ The late origin of the vowel points in 

 the Semitic languages seems to indicate that their alphabets were at 



on the joint testimony of Herodotus I. 94, Strabo V. 220, Tacitus Ann. I. iv. 55. See, however^ 

 on tlie otlier side Rawlinson's Herodotus, Book I., Essay 1. Tlie labours of Professor Sayce- 

 and otliers have establislied beyond a doubt tlie early occupation of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, 

 and other countries of Asia Minor by a Turanian Hittite people : The Monuments of the 

 Hittites, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Vol. VII., p. 248. Professor 

 Sayce says, (p. 249), " The chief monuments of the class to -which I -refer (Hittite) are found 

 carved upon the rocks at Boghaz Keui, supposed to represent the classical Pteria, and at 

 Eyuk, both of which are situated on the eastern bank of the Halys, and in the line of the high 

 road from Sardis to Armenia. Besides these, others are met with at Ghiaour-Kalessi, in. 

 Phrygia^ near Frahtin, and on the summit of one of the mountains of the Bulghar Dagh, in. 

 Lykaonia; and above all at Karabel, on the road between Ephesus and Sardis." Such are 

 the two pseudo-Sesostris sculptures in Lydia. Further on (p. 272), Professor Sayce remarks : 

 " The remains fonnd by Dr. Schliemann, at Hissarlik, show no traces of Assyrian, Egyptian, or 

 Phoenician influence, but they point unmistakably to Babylonian and Hittite influence." And 

 on the same page: "It is also possible that the Lydian tradition recounted by Herodotus,, 

 which derived the Heraklid dynasty from Ninus, the son of Belus, was an echo of the fact that 

 Sardis had once been in Hittite hands." The Lycian and Phrygian alphabets, which have been 

 read in much the same way as the Etruscan, I include in my scheme of Turanian syllabaries. 



5 The cuneiform characters of Babylon, Nineveh, and Media, are accessible to the general 

 reader in Lenormant and Chevalier's Ancient History of the East, vol. I., p. 436, seq. About 

 90 such characters are there represented, having such values as ba, bi, bu, ga, gi, gu, da, di, 

 du, akh, ikh, ukh, 11, lu, al, il, ul, &c. For the Persian, see vol. IL, p. 122, where Lenormant 

 says: " Originally, it was probably syllabic." The present Japanese syllabaries called Hira- 

 gana and Katakana, which superseded the old Corean about the end of the 9th century, repre- 

 sent each 47 syllables — the latter by the same number of modified Chinese characters, the 

 former by about three hundred such characters. See Aston's Grammar of the Japanese- 

 Written Language, p. 8, seq. The following are among the syllables represented : ka, ki, ku,, 

 ke, ko, ta, chi, tsu, te, to, ma, mi, mu, me, mo. The Tamul alphabet is really a syllabary, but 

 of a kind similar to the Semitic alphabets taken together with the vowel points, although in 

 the case of the Tamul the vowel indicators are incorporated with the consonantal character^ 



