ETRURIA CAPTA. 169 



SEPULCHRAL INSCRIPTIOl^S. 



(Tlie, numbers refer to those in Lanzi's Saggio.) 



41. OANA • ZEIANYI • LAYINIAL 



Transliterated — ma ra ka ra • no ne u ra ka ku u " sa ra ku u ka ii ra sa 

 Basque — marakara non orogogoi Saraku uga au eritza 

 Translation — monument where in memory Saraku mother his esteems 

 Freely — the monument in which Saraku honours his mother's memory 



The first word marakara, which has been read Thana and made a 

 proper name, occurs in a great many inscriptions, generally as the 

 first word.*" Sometimes it is replaced by inarakahu or inaragogn, 



denote vowel sounds : see Latham's Varieties of Man, pp. 523 and .560. It is important to keep 

 in mind what Professor Max Mtiller says in his Sanskrit Grammar for Beginners : "To admit 

 the independent invention of a native Indian alphabet is impossible. Alphabets were never 

 invented in the usual sense of that word. They were formed gradually, and purely phonetic 

 alphabets always point, back to earlier, syllabic or ideographic, stages." The flr.st stage of 

 every system of writing was the hieroglyphic, which may have been purely ideographic like the 

 Cliinese. That the latter was the case, however, there is not sufficient evidence to decide. 

 The oldest Egyptian hieroglyphics are syllabic and alphabetic as well as ideographic. So the 

 oldest cuneiform writing was syllabic as well as ideographic. The Hittite hieroglyphics were 

 syllabic, and but rarely ideographic. The hieroglyphics of Mexico were used ideographically, 

 but also with syllabic values, for the Pater Noster, and other prayers and religious formulas 

 were written in them by missionaries for the use of native converts. M. L6on de Rosny in an 

 article on Les Sources de I'Histoire Ante-Colombienne du Nouveau Monde, in the Revue 

 Orientale et Americaine, says : "Malgre son extreme defectuosite, les missionaires catholiques 

 charges d'evangeliser les Azteques, le trouverent suflfisant pour composer des livres religieux a 

 I'usage des Indiens convertis. Les bons missionaires espaguols allaient meme jusqu'a ecrire de 

 la fagon le texte latin des prieres qu'ils voulaient enseigner 4 leurs neophytes." 



The next stage was that of reducing the number of signs within the smallest possible compass 

 and simplifying their forms for the sake of rapid expression. This gave the Semitic alphabets, 

 from which the European were derived. These, as has been shown, were really syllabaries 

 with little or no representation of vowel sounds. In course of time the inconvenience of such a 

 mode of writing became apparent to Cadmus or whoever introduced the Greek alphabet. By 

 setting apart certain signs to denote vowel sounds, such as aleph, lie, yodh and ayin, he turned 

 a syllabary into an alphabet. This the Semitic peoples afterwards effected by added vowel- 

 points or lines, of which, perhaps, the most perfect system is the Ethiopic. The syllabary 

 derived from the Hittite hieroglyphics was perfected in a similar way in India by added lines 

 and curves, a comparison of which with the vowel indicators of Corea at once attests the com- 

 mon origin of the old Indian and Corean systems of writing. The western Kliitan syllabaries 

 of Asia Minor, Etruria, Spain and Britain show little or no trace of having arrived at this third 

 or perfect stage. For the old Indian alphabet, see Prinsep's Indian Antiquities, and for the 

 Corean, the atlas accompanying. Klaproth's San Kokf Tsou Ran To Sets. There are curious 

 analogies between these systems and that of the Ethiopic syllabary. 



40 I am also indebted to Mr. VanderSmissen for the suggestion that OANA needs explanation 

 in connection with the THANA which appears in corresponding positions on other Etruscan 

 monuments. Etruscologists have unnecessarily supposed that the latter word is in Roman 

 letters. Read as Etruscan it is poAra rafcar a. The first word I have shown farther on to be 

 egoki, importer, appartenir, concerner, convenir. It is the Japanese kaka-ru with the same 

 meaning. The word rakara does not now exist ia Basque, but as I have elsewhere indicated is 

 a compound of ra, rako, towards. It is thus a synonym of NEY ganego, another Etruscan 



