Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/131

Rh M. François Lenormant, one of the most learned and brilliant Oriental scholars of the present century. He had seen the original at Constantinople some twenty years previously, and had there made a cast of it, which he forwarded to me. The cast and the electrotype agreed exactly together.

There could accordingly be no doubt that we had before us, if not the original itself, a perfect facsimile of it. The importance of this fact soon became manifest, for the original boss disappeared after M. Jovanoff's death, and in spite of all enquiries no trace of it can be discovered. It may be recovered hereafter in the bazaars of Constantinople or in some private house at St. Petersburg; at present there is no clue whatever to its actual possessor.

The reading of the cuneiform legend offers but little difficulty. It gives us the name and title of the king whose figure is engraved within it—'Tarqu-dimme king of the country of Erme.'

The name Tarqu-dimme is evidently the same as that of the Cilician prince Tarkondêmos or Tarkondimotos, who lived in the time of our Lord. The name is also met with in other parts of Asia Minor under the forms of Tarkondas and Tarkondimatos; and we may consider it to be of a distinctively Hittite type. Where the district was over which Tarqu-dimme ruled we can only guess. It may have been the range of mountains called Arima by the classical writers, which lay close under the Hittite monuments of the Bulgar Dagh. In this case Tarkondêmos would have been a Cilician king.

The twice-repeated Hittite version of the cuneiform legend has been the subject of much discussion. The