Abstract
IV. THOSE who have attempted to decipher the Hittite inscriptions have not always regarded a fact which may be discerned with tolerable facility. The inscriptions from Hamath, and those from Jerablûs or Carchemish, though no doubt deriving their origin from a common source, yet present, as we know them, two distinct types. Symbols usual and frequently repeated on the Jerablûs monuments are wholly absent from those of Hamath. Other symbols, not difficult to identify as essentially the same, yet assume a form more or less changed. The difference is altogether so considerable that in ancient times the ability to read and fully understand the one type may quite possibly not have involved a facility of perfectly comprehending the other. The difference might be spoken of as one of dialect, if that word could be, in this case, appropriately employed. Then, so far as the more considerable monuments in the Museum from Jerablûs or Carchemish are concerned, there is clearly between them a difference in age, and the difference may possibly be very great. As evidence in support of this assertion, I may adduce a symbol which was intended apparently to denote an agricultural implement. When this symbol was given as in Fig, M (1), though probably drawn out of perspective and perhaps already somewhat conventionalized, yet its relation to the actual object would seem to have been not very distant. But when the symbol has become changed in the manner that appears in (2), there is no difficulty in recognizing that a considerable interval must have elapsed. In (3), on an incised bowl, at present deposited in the British Museum, the same symbol has assumed something of a hieratic form. Though the bowl was found at the site of Babylon, the inscription cut into it obviously belongs to the Carchemish type. Possibly the bowl had been brought from Carchemish as a trophy.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
The Hittites, with Special Reference to Very Recent Discoveries 2 . Nature 37, 590–593 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037590a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037590a0