in Egypt pictures which are known to represent Hittite kings and warriors, and statues of the gods with hieroglyphic texts discovered in the Hittite country, it is clear that it is no mere theory with which we have to deal, but with records as real and as important as those whereby the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Medes, the Babylonians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Persians, Greeks, and Phoenicians are already more or less well known to us all.

And first as regards race, it is a well known fact that the ancient sculptors of Asia and of Egypt carefully distinguished the various peculiarities of race in their pictures. In Egypt side by side with the various Egyptian types we find the black negro, the hook-nosed Semitic people, and the yellow peoples of the north represented. The Phoenician with shaven upper lip and long beard, the brown ancestor of the Arabs, are clearly distinguishable from other types; and at Tell Loh, by quite recent discoveries, a dark race, with fine features recalling the Abyssinian, has lately been brought to light, which is no doubt the same "dark people" mentioned in one of the oldest cuneiform records. I understand that the question of obtaining good reproductions of these various types is already under consideration, and no doubt interesting papers on this subject may be shortly expected; but in the meanwhile I may say that the differences of type are already so well known and are so marked that we have sufficient evidence in the pictures of Rosellini, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Brugsch, and others to enable us to draw very definite conclusions.

On the walls of the great temple of Karnak the Hittites of Kadesh are represented warring against Rameses II. Two races have combined their forces and are easily distinguished in these pictures. The one is a dark or brown race, bearded, and resembling the ordinary Semitic type. This no doubt is the population which accounts for the Semitic nomenclature of Palestine before the Hebrew conquest, which is to be recovered in the long list of towns conquered by Thothmes III in Palestine. Kadesh, the great city where the battle against Rameses II was fought had itself a Semitic name, and no fact is better established than the existence in Palestine as early as 1600 B.C. of a people speaking a language akin to Hebrew.

But side by side with this population, the ruling class as represented in the chariots which are rushing towards the Egyptian army, or fleeing before the Pharaoh, there are warriors and drivers of another type. They have a lighter complexion. They have black hair and eyes, but no beards. Their moustaches are long and their heads are more or less shaven, and they have real pigtails like the Chinese. I well remember Dr. Birch five years ago in the British Museum bringing out for me the plates in Rosellini and saying, "Look at the Hittites, are they not just

like Mongols or Chinese ?" It was then a new idea to me, but if we reflect on the relations of race still notable in travelling through Palestine and Northern Syria, it seems to me that we perhaps begin to understand Hebrew history better. The war against the Canaanites may have been only part of the constantly recurring struggle still going on in Syria between the Semitic and the Turanian peoples; the race hatred between Israel and Canaan becomes identified with that antipathy which has always existed between these two peoples, who nevertheless have lived together since the dawn of history and have mutually influenced and civilised one another.

The evidence of physiognomy seemed, I would submit, sufficient ground for an inquiry into the relationship which the Hittites, if a Turanian people, must have borne to other Turanian populations in the west of Asia. Now in studying such a subject it is absolutely necessary to begin by accepting what has been laid down by competent authority. I do not claim to have any opinion as to the true home of the Turanian race, or as to the relationships between north and south Turanian languages. Max Müller enumerates more than 100 such languages spoken in Asia, of which more than half are grouped as South Turanian, including the Indian, Malay, and Himalaic groups. He regards this great number of tongues which (as compared with eight Semitic and some forty Aryan tongues) represent a large majority of Asiatic languages as being all more or less remotely linked to that most archaic form of Asiatic speech-the oldest Chinese. According to the generally received theory the majority of North Turanian tongues are grouped together as Ugro-Altaic, on the supposition that the home of the race was in the Altai Mountains north-west of China, and that the Turanians of Western Asia migrated thence. The Finnic tribes, among whom are reckoned four great families, are those which seem to have penetrated furthest west. Their families are 1st, the Ugric, including Hungarians, Voguls, and Ostiaks; 2nd, the Bulgaric, who advanced from the Asiatic Bulgaria to the country now so called; 3rdly, the Permic; and 4thly, the Chudic, including Lapps, Finns, and Esthonians. Of these Finnic peoples the Hungarians and the Finns are the most civilised; and the Kalevala is a native epic which has been called the Turanian Iliad, and which, to the student of Asiatic mythology, is of the greatest possible value.

Next to these Finnic peoples the Turkic tribes have to be considered. From the Oxus they pushed gradually westwards into Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. The Turks, Turkomans, and Siberians, the races of Anatolia and Roumelia, the inhabitants of the Crimea, are classed by Max Müller as Turkic, and the

modern Turkish language, with its wonderful grammar and its vocabulary full of Arabic, Persian, and other foreign words, represents the results of centuries of foreign influence on the hardy horsemen of Central Asia.

The eastern groups—the Mongols and the Tunguse peoples near China need not arrest our attention. It is with the migrants who went west that we have evidently to do, not so much with those who went east or south towards China and India.

Now among the great discoveries of the cuneiform scholars none is more wonderful than that of a Turanian population existing long before 2000 B.C. in Mesopotamia. The ancient Akkadian language is thought to have become a dead language about 1500 B.C. The language of the common people of Media, known by the inscriptions of the Achæmenidæ after the fall of Babylon, has been closely studied by Lenormant, and he says it is found to approach both in its grammar and in its vocabulary to the Akkadian-this is the so-called Proto-Medic; further south the Susian language, though its grammar differs, yet retains many of the old noun and verb roots of Akkadian quite in a recognisable form; and is said, indeed, to be nearer Akkadian than is the Proto-Medic. There are other dialects called Cassite and Sumerian, distinguished, yet akin to Akkadian, and Akkadian being some 2,000 years older than Proto-Medic, being in fact the oldest known Turanian language of Western Asia, has even been called the Sanskrit of Turanian tongues.

The investigation of Akkadian has led to just the results which might naturally be expected. It is found to differ in structure from any modern Altaic tongue, but to be nearest to the Finnic languages or more probably to the Turkic. The Finns call themselves Suoma-lainen, or "fen dwellers," a word which the great French scholar Lenormant compares with the name Sumerian, which was proper to the inhabitants of the lowlands near the Euphrates and the Tigris, as distinguished from the Akkadians or "highlanders." Whether the Finns came westwards or pushed northwards practically they are the same original people, we may say, as the old Altaic race of Chaldea. Finnic and Turkic languages supply a key to the Akkadian cuneiform like that supplied by Coptic for Egyptian.

Another scholar working without any reference to the Akkadians in the first instance has demonstrated the fact that the ancient Etruscan race in Italy was also Altaic and that the Etruscan language is akin to the Finnic languages. This student was Dr. Isaac Taylor, and on comparing his Etruscan vocabulary with Akkadian I found many words which are the

same, including nearly every word which he had been able to fix by comparison with Finnic languages.

But yet more, although Basque is not grouped as an Altaic language but with Esquimaux as an "incorporating tongue," that is to say, one perhaps more primitive than the Finnic, still Lenormant has shown that the vocabulary and the grammar of the Basque both shew a connection with Akkadian. Even in Egypt, though the language is distinct, a certain number of loan words are said to have been discovered which are identical with Finnic words. These separate studies by distinguished students serve then to connect more or less the Finns, the Basques, the ancient Etruscans (and to a certain degree even the Egyptians) with the old Turanian populations of Mesopotamia.

Tracing back from Etruria or west from Media, we shall find it possible perhaps to fill up the gap also in Asia Minor. The Etruscans are said to have been related to the Carians, Lycians, and Lydians; and Lenormant long ago stated as a fact that all across what is now Anatolia an ancient Turanian population existed akin to the Akkadians. The Carian and Lycian mercenaries found their way to Egypt, and the evidence of palæography seems to show that the same population may have existed in Cyprus. The Etruscans were a sturdy, big-headed people, with eyes oblique like the Chinese, black hair, high cheek bones, squat figures, and without beard or moustache. If we go to Cappadocia and look at the monuments cut on the rocks we find exactly the same type-the sturdy figure, short nose, and hairless mouth. This type of race recalls that of the Mongols in later times as described by travellers, and it is as much contrasted as possible with the Semitic type.

Seeing then that the Hittites were shut in on all sides by Turanian tribes, said to be akin to the Akkadians, and remembering their own Mongolian appearance, we might be justified in supposing that they belonged to the same race. Akkadian and Etruscan and Proto-Medic we have ancient languages, which we may perhaps compare with that spoken by the Hittites.

In

A curious peculiarity of dress also serves to indicate the same general connection. In Cappadocia and in Anatolia the monuments represent figures with a boot or shoe curled up in front. An Assyrian representation of an Armenian merchant shows the same boot. Prof. Sayce has called it a snow-shoe, but I think Sir C. Wilson first compared it with the boot now worn by the peasantry of Asia Minor. Perrot compares it with the cavalry boot worn in Syria, and with what we call a Turkish slipper. I find also that the Etruscans wore a similar shoe called Calceus Repandus by the Romans. On the monuments

at Karnak the Hittites are represented wearing the same shoe, and although it is not of necessity a mark of race, it is still curious that this curly-toed boot was common to the various Turanian peoples of Syria, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Italy.

But as regards the language it may be asked: How do we know monumentally what language the Hittites spoke? We may know from the names of their kings, and from the names of towns in the Hittite country, as recorded by the scribes of Rameses II and of Thothmes III. The topographical lists are about as old as 1600 B.C., and the lists of kings about as old as 1340 B.C. The scholars who have written on this subject, from Chabas downwards, have agreed in saying that the names of the Hittite kings are not Semitic, and not Aryan, and that they must either be Turanian, or belong to that class of languages of the Caucasus, which has been called Alarodian. In a list of twenty-five royal names, we find the words Tar, Sar, Nazi, Lar, and others repeated as personal names. These are not new or unknown words at all. They occur in the languages already noticed. Unless some new reading is pronounced to be correct in cuneiform we have Tar, Sar, Nazi, occurring in personal names in Akkadian and in Proto-Medic; and in Susian also Nazi Lar is a very familar Etruscan word for a chief, and I venture to compare it with lul and rar for chief, enumerated as Akkadian words in Prof. Sayce's "Assyrian Grammar." There are many similar cases in the name list in question, and although such evidence is, of course, not sufficient to show that the Hittites talked Akkadian, it seems to me strongly to favour the view that they gave to their kings titles which can be shown to be common words meaning "king," "chief," or "prince," traceable through very many Altaic languages or dialects.

occurs.

The topographical name lists are not only earlier, but they are more valuable, because they include no less than 200 names. They are, however, very difficult to study for several reasons. Mariette, Maspero, and other scholars have given much attention to these lists, which occur in hieroglyphic writing at Karnak. It appears to be generally recognised and I believe Lenormant held the same view-that the names in question are in some cases Semitic, and in other cases-probably in the majoritynon-Semitic. The first difficulty then is to distinguish between these two classes of names. Kadesh, for instance, the Hittite southern capital, had an evidently Semitic name; but Carchemish, their northern capital, had a name which is not Semitic, according to general opinion. In addition to this difficulty there is the difficulty of correctly deciphering the hieroglyphic signs. There is not a complete agreement apparently on this point. What some scholars have taken as a