Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/61

Rh and one of them was so large that it took fifty men and four oxen a whole day to drag it a mile. The other stones were split in two, and the inscribed parts were carried on the backs of camels to the' court of the governor's palace. Here they could be cleaned and copied at leisure and in safety.

But the work of cleaning them from the accumulated dirt of ages occupied the greater part of two days. Then came the task of making casts of the inscriptions, with the help of gypsum which some natives had been bribed to bring from the neighbourhood. At length, however, the work was completed, and Dr. Wright had the satisfaction of sending home to England two sets of casts of these ancient and mysterious texts, one for the British Museum, the other for the Palestine Exploration Fund, while the originals themselves were safely deposited in the Museum of Constantinople. It was now time to inquire what the inscriptions meant, and who could have been the authors of them.

Dr. Wright at once suggested that they were the work of the Hittites, and that they were memorials of Hittite writing. But his suggestion was buried in the pages of a periodical better known to theologians than to Orientalists, and the world agreed to call the writing by the name of Hamathite. It specially attracted the notice of Dr. Hayes Ward of New York, who discovered that the inscriptions were written in boustrophedon fashion, that is to say, that the lines turned alternately from right to left and from left to right, like oxen when plowing a field, the first line beginning on the right and the line following on the left. The lines read, in fact, from the direction towards which the characters look.

Dr. Hayes Ward also made another discovery. In