Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 2.djvu/49

 The Writing of the Hittites. other thirty hieroglyphics, which to some may not always appear well founded.^ In all fairness, however, it should be stated that certain renderings are only tentative ; his method of going to work is always eminently suggestive, whilst the Cypriote syllabary most opportunely gave him the means to check and prove his theorem. The curious complicated outline observable in some of the letters which occur on the older Cypriote inscriptions, coins, and contract-tablets had long puzzled scholars, but without being able to offer a solution for them. The late George Smith, by analogy of other bilingual scripts, was the first to surmise, and finajly to establish, that such characters were remnants of an older syllabary, or rather the survival of an extremely ancient mode of picture-writing, which was connected with the ^olian group of dialects, and that in conservative Cyprus they had been preserved down to the first Ptolemies, along with the ordinary Greek writing. The older alphabet consisted of about sixty signs, of which five were vowels (a, e, l, o, v), and twelve consonants (ac, t, x» i"-* ^> K p, F,J, cr, f, Q, most of these being capable of assuming a different form before each different vowel, for instance, /ca, ko, ke, kl, kv. In all probability/, f, and ^, had fewer signs. There were seem- ingly no aspirates, at least they were not noted in writing. The fact of the ruder Cypriote alphabet having been retained side by side with the simpler Phoenician was due — as already stated — to the conservative spirit which obtained in a country separated by the ocean from the rest of the world. The primitive syllabary was looked upon with reverence as an ancestral relic ; it became the hieratic writing made use of in all public deeds. Like Egypt, Cyprus was proud to own a system of hieroglyphics.^ The Cypriote system of writing was at first supposed to have been derived from the Assyrian characters introduced into the island in the age of Sargon ; but the hypothesis was overthrown by comparison of the various inscriptions where this peculiar mode of epigraphy occurs. Thus legends in Cypriote letters were found in the lowest strata, seemingly of great antiquity, by Dr. Schlie- mann, in his excavations at Hissarlik;'' and the alphabets of Caria, 348. VOL. II. D
 * Wright, T/te Empire^ ch. xi.
 * On Cypriote writing, consult Hist, of Ar/, torn. iii. pp. 493, 494, 496, Figs. 347,
 * J/ios. J. Murray, London, 1884. In Appendix III., Professor Sayce draws the