;j48 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academtf. 



which table "ives us a further confirmation of the conclusions already arrived 

 at, regarding the declensional prefixes, as well as the rule for their concoid. 



There remains one important point. At the bottom of certain characters 

 there is a sloping line running to the left. This is always at the end of a 

 word-group : the two apparent exceptions shown in some drawings of the 

 disc, on face IT in word-gioups 6 and 23, being seemingly cracks in the 

 surface of the disc. The letters marked are underlined in the transcript 

 given above. In detemdning which letters should be marked, I have had the 

 advantage of consulting a cast, which I owe to the kindness of my friend and 

 colleague, the Eev. Henry Browne, s.J. 



These marks have been supposed to be signs of punctuation. If so, all 

 the foregoing discussion is lost labour, for the supposed punctuation divides 

 the text in a way utterly at variance with the sense that it seems to 

 convey. It is, however, open to doubt that there is any precedent for a 

 punctuation so elaborate in a purely hieroglyphic text. It may of course be 

 objected that the elaborate word-division is equally unprecedented ; but yet 

 to the latter Egyptian offers some analogy. The pains which the Egyptian 

 scribes took to build up their words into symmetrical squares, even at the 

 expense of sometimes disturbing the proper order of the letters, may faii-ly 

 be compared with the arrangement of the words on the disc, though the 

 squares are imaginary in the one case, and expressed by lines on the other.' 



I have another suggestion to ofier with regard to these marks ; namely, 

 that they are meant to express a modification of the phonetic value of the 

 character, too slight to require a different letter to express it, but too marked 

 to allow it to be neglected altogether. And obviously the most likely 

 modification of the kind would be the elision of the vowel of a final open 

 syllable. The mark would thus be exactly like the virama of the Devanagari 

 alphabet, or, to come nearer home, something analogous to our own apostrophe. 



■\Vhen we examine the text, we find that it is only in certain definite words 

 that this mark occurs. It is found in /3h, however declined, except when the 

 postfixes w, I, are present. It is found in the word nvhf, however declined. 

 It appears in the two similar words /ihtac^ and il^tair. "it is found in the 

 personal name kq (in the formula p_a M|kq). There" are only one or two 

 of the eighteen examples of its use outside these groups ;. and probably if we 

 had some more examples of the script, or a longer text, these would be found 

 to fit likewise into series. In some cases the " apostrophe " may be grammarical; 

 m others euphonic, to avoid hiatus. In any case I take it that most of these 

 syllabic signs denote a consonant with a vowel, and that this stroke is a 



' I see that Dr. deUa Seta has anticipated this observation. = This is a little doubtful. 



