Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/78

64 remarked, those found in Cappadocia and Cilicia-Syria of the Hittites. It is amongst these Hittites, or properly Khatti or "Catti" the clan-title of the Ancient Briton kings, whom I have shown elsewhere to be a leading northern branch of the Sumero-Phœnicians, that the tendency to spell Sumerian bi-consonantal signs by two or more separate single consonantal signs first appears and becomes habitual. This is evidenced by the great mass of tens of thousands of Hittite cuneiform tablets of official and business records unearthed from the archives of the old imperial Hittite capital at the modern Boghaz Koi, the Pteria of the Greeks, in the heart of Cappadocia, and at numerous other ancient Hittite "dead" cities and Hittite and Amorite mining settlements throughout Eastern Asia Minor and North Syria, dating from about 2400 to 1300 B.C. The writing though classed as "cuneiform" consists of linear impressions usually without any trace of a wedge-head at all. To Professor Pinches is due the credit of first bringing to notice the peculiar features of this Hittite or Cappadocian style of writing, and effecting the first decipherments through the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform.

As seen in the great numbers of these tablets which have been published, and especially in their transliteration into "Roman" letters, the Hittites (who, as shown by Professor Hrozny, a chief decipherer and finder of the tablets, spoke an Aryan language) were in the habit of splitting up nearly all the Sumerian bi-consonantal word-signs so as to spell them by single consonantal signs, and the signs which they chiefly employed for this purpose were those now disclosed to be the Sumerian parents of our alphabetic