Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/187

Rh, which were then called the Hamite inscriptions, with the suggestion that this might probably be the language of the Hittites, which is now proved to be the fact. The inscriptions found by Mr. Henderson in the exploration of Carchemish are not only in the same character, but the same language, which Mr. Layard found impressed upon seals discovered by him in the ruins of the record-chamber of Sennacherib's palace, which greatly excited his curiosity, as the writing was unlike any ever noticed before. Another inscription was afterward discovered at Aleppo by Mr. Davis, a missionary; and it also turns out that the famous figures sculptured above the roads from Ephesus to Phocea, and from Smyrna to Sardis, which are mentioned by Herodotus, and were supposed by him to represent the Egyptian King Rameses II, the Sesostris of the Greeks, have inscriptions upon them in the same character as that recently found in Carchemish, showing that these figures also are Hittite monuments. It is supposed that this language was the source of what is known as the Cypriote syllabary, found in Cyprus, a system of characters of which each does not, like the letters of the alphabet, represent a single sound, but a syllable, and which was probably the language in use among commercial people throughout Asia Minor, until it was superseded by the simpler and more practical Phœnician alphabet. This discovery is exceedingly interesting, as the Hittites belong to the same race of people who perfected, by the alphabet, that greatest of human inventions, a written language. We have now in this discovery of Mr. Smith the memorials of a lost people, in neighboring proximity to the Phœnicians; a people who had an important part in the early progress of ancient civilization, with respect to which an eminent Egyptian scholar expresses his conviction that future discoveries in the course of this exploration will afford convincing proofs that this civilization, which was of the highest antiquity, was of an importance which we can only guess at.

What may be anticipated when scholars are able to read these inscriptions, as in all probability they will be, for the cuneiform or arrow-headed characters of Assyria have been read, is foreshadowed by what has been brought to light by the discoveries of Layard and Smith in the mound which now represents what was once Nineveh. Beneath a mass of rubbish were found the remains of what had been a great Assyrian library, the materials of which being of baked clay had proved indestructible, and, though lying in broken fragments, Mr. G. Smith was able to piece the fragments together, and recover over three thousand inscriptions, forming pages of the volumes of which the library was composed, and in some cases recovering entire books. The tablets or leaves of these volumes or bricks, as they are called, are formed of thin plates of clay, upon either side of which the text was inscribed when the clay was soft, the tablet being afterward baked or dried, when the tablets or bricks, like our modern books, were arranged in chapters and volumes. Nearly two thirds of this library are now in the