280 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XVII, 
a singular apes for representing an object of which a part 
alone was figured and this faculty which though scarcely 
favourable to the heclonGni of art was a marvellous instrument 
of mht ge tees Through the symbol it paved the way for the 
script.’ ome to know of a still earlier pleistocene script 
from a paper ‘of Armand Viré ae years later’ which depicts a 
reindeer’s horn containing no less than 22 signs of the linear 
type side by side. This ee has been placed in the Aurignacian 
epoch, and the former two in the Magdalenian epoch, which, 
rahmi characters. These are, form of hm i ae the 
Le Madeleine inscription (Piette, fig. 10) ; oy ’ from 
the Rochebertier inscription (Piette, fig. ae besides ‘ OQ’ from 
the Lourdes inscriptions (Piette, fig. 2); and |_, v, I, A, j, from 
the stag horn baton at the Combe Cullier Grotto (Viré, fig. 9) 
bie I think are strikingly similar to Brahmi ‘| (kha), |\ (ga). 
™ (6a), 3 (da), A (ta), O (ha), L (a), (ea) Bias x (in) ad 
| (ra), respectively. It rgotten here a: India 
also ha analogous pee of aah 
ny reader going through Osborn’ s Men of the Old Stone 
Age (1918) and Sollas’s Ancient Hunters (2nd edition, 1915) 
would find that Capsian and Azilo-Tardenoision cult tures, 
transitional between palaeolithic and neolithic, extended far to 
he east from the shores of France. The Vi ndhyan hills as 
well as the Banda district on the Jumna in India have been 
definitely recognised to be Azilian stations.’ In the signs on 
the coloured pebbles of Mas d’Azil we can recognise at 
ah 
interesting com mparisions with the Brahmi + (ka), © (tha), 
T (na) & (cha), (, (gha) € (ja), | (ra) and O (ba) respectively. 
comparative study of these signs in Europe has led to 
the discovery of interesting missing links of cultural and. 
ethnological history in the old world. It is ee since Evans 
brought forth his momentous discovery of pre-Phoenician 
script in Crete and by instituting comparisons Ebleket the 
affinities of the linear variety of this with the proto- Egyptian 
and Libyan signs. Since then the question of the origin of 
alphabets has attracted much attention in Europe. It is some 
time since Petrie started the theory ‘that the linear system 
might not have been derived from pictographs by degenera- 
ee 
! ri er tomagne oo 1905, p 
Crozo de Gen eh BAnthro ologie, 1908, 
§ Ancient Hunters, p. 5: oe ats 
