JOURNAL 



ASIATIC SOCIETY 



Points in the History of the Greeks and Indo- Scythian Kings 

 in Bactria, Cabul, and India, as illustrated by decyphering 

 the ancient legends on their coins. By Christian Lassen, 

 Bonn, 1838.1 



Character of the Alphabet. 



The rule for reading the Alphabet is the Semitic_, and this 

 fact is the more remarkable, as the Indian characters of the 

 immediate neighbourhood, as well as those occurring upon 

 Greek coins, coeval with the most ancient coins on which the 

 Cabulian characters occur, have never assumed this direction 

 in all the varieties which the Indian alphabet has gone through 

 within India and out of its confines. 



The arrow-headed inscriptions too have the same direction 

 with the Indian, and though at least one variety of them 

 does not express the a, following consonants, yet it has not, 

 as the characters of the coins have, signs of the shortened 

 vowels i and u. 



On the other hand, there is evidently in the legends a certain 

 approximation to the Indian system of vowel-writing, not 

 especially by the fact, that i and perhaps also u, even when 

 short, are not denoted by marks on the consonants, nor by 

 the other similarity, that they are not represented, even when 

 long (with u however this is mere conjecture) by the correspond- 

 ing quiescent semivowels j and v ; for the first may occur in 

 * Continued from p. 488. vol. ix. 

 No. 103. New Series, No. 19. 4 l 



