Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/270

230 which the general appearance of the surface affords no justification. But is it not possible that the disputed signs are not letters but numerical symbols? On Phœnician inscriptions numbers are frequently expressed by symbols in lieu of words, but even when the words are written in full the equivalent symbols often follow. Similarly, on the Assyro-Aramaic lion-weights, the denominations are expressed first in words and then in symbols, some of them denoting fractions, which were doubtless intelligible to many persons who could not read. Of symbols for fractions among the Phœnicians and Hebrews we have hitherto known nothing; but that they existed is probable, since both the Egyptians on the one side and the Assyrians on the other had a fractional notation. If, then, we find the word "quarter" followed by a group of signs that cannot be read as letters without adding supplementary lines of a very hypothetical kind, it seems reasonable to suspend our judgment for the present and keep our eyes open for fresh evidence as to Hebrew and Phœnician arithmetical signs.

7. As regards the later inscription, it is difficult to believe that it can be anything but a modern forgery. It is not, of course, inconceivable that a new inscription was cut in ancient times after the old one was partly worn down; but the probabilities are all the other way. For my own part, I have little doubt that Professor Euting is right in reading the second word as and explaining it to be the Arabic word for "half." But how did the forger, after copying the of the other side, which means "quarter" both in Arabic and in Hebrew, come to follow it up with the word "half"? On this point I can, at least, make a suggestion, which I give for what it is worth. The lines immediately following on the side are (l) the detached oblique stroke which serves as the right limb of Professor Sayce's W; (2) the chevron-shaped stroke which he takes for the two middle lines of the W. Now the first of these is the usual symbol for  in modern Syria, and the second is the modern symbol for, turned through a right angle, so as to point upwards instead of to the left (see Caussin de Perceval, "Gram. Ar.-Vulg.," Paris, 1824, p. 73).

8. It is not denied that it is graphically possible to read the second inscription "quarter of a "; and if it could be shown that is a genuine Hebrew word giving a suitable sense, or even that a suitable new word of this form could be derived from a known root on ordinary etymological principles, this reading would deserve consideration, and we might after all be justified in concluding that the second inscription is ancient, though not so old as the first.

Professor Sayce, in Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, 1893, p. 32, reads the word netseg—i.e., or  (ts being his transcription of the peculiar Semitic s which modern scholars commonly represent by s), and he thinks it possible that the word means "a standard weight," and is derived from the root. But every Hebraist knows that, if the word is netseg, it cannot possibly come from or