Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

772 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
tions equally well, and since, moreover, his further results
rest upon a series of similar postulates, it is clear how exceedingly
vague these " results " must be. Besides, he is
directly wrong in his arrangement in connection with one
of the inscriptions as in various of his other suppositions,
a circumstance which makes it still more evident that all his
conclusions with respect to the phonetic deciphering of the
inscriptions are equally false. However, his efforts too have
not been quite without result ; his recognition of one symbol
as a punctuation mark is approximately correct. Anything
he may have done for the correct or approximately
correct determination of the sound values he owes to
chance ; to the interpretation of the inscriptions he has not
contributed an iota. So much for the labors of my predecessors
and their results.
They have all failed sufficiently to remember that the
decipherer has two tasks before him, — one being the determination
of the contents, and the other the reading of the
words — and that these two sections of the work, while often
running parallel and frequently overlapping, still
cannot be
too strictly kept separate. We may be able to read an inscription
without understanding it, and to tell the contents
of another without being able to read it. Throughout my
decipherings, which I now proceed to describe, I have endeavored
as far as possible to keep the two problems apart.
At the first sight one perceives that the inscriptions are
written in the so-called boustrophedon manner, which
Hayes Ward was the first to see as early as 1873. In the
inscriptions there are no empty spaces separating the different
word-groups from one another. Hence the first
step was by comparing the inscriptions to delineate (i. e. y
to
separate from each other) the various word-groups. In
course of this process it
became evident that different signs,
an upright knife — Peiser's " Sintrenner " — and a similar
sign served to keep the word-groups apart. These again