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

776 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
only one in order. What else should the figure mean ?
Other considerations must lead us to suppose that a word
following this figure, or else its phonetic transliteration,
must stand for " am." After this we must expect to find
names and titles of the king. Since even in the greater inscriptions
such titles, etc., are also found in the middle and
even at the end, always appearing in the same form, /.
e., in
the same case, we cannot help concluding that at least the
bulk of the inscriptions beginning with " I am " contain
only titles, attributes, and so on ; including above all, of
course, the title "king of."
This circumstance assists us very materially in understanding
the inscriptions correctly, for it appreciably reduces the
number of possible meanings. By comparing the inscriptions
with one another we can now establish the ideographic
or phonetic equivalents, or perhaps both, for "king" and
various synonyms of the same ;
for " son " or " child " with
one synonym ; for " country " and the names of countries ;
for adjectives like " great " and " mighty " or their likes ;
the pronoun " this "
; for the names of gods, which being regarded
as sacred are very frequently isolated
for
by placing before
and after (that is, above and below) them the symbol
which denotes the beginning of a new word ; for words
expressing the relations between men, mostly the king and
the gods, as perhaps " servant," etc. ;
for names of kings ;
for a king's title occurring only in certain inscriptions found
within a narrow radius. Thus, without being able to read
a single symbol, I was in a position to explain a not inconsiderable
portion of the inscriptions. Furthermore, I
could make out various points which went far to determine
the character of the Hittite speech. Thus the substantives
have flectional endings, those for the nominative and genitive
singular containing only vowels, that for the genitive
plural a consonant. As for the syntax, it was plain that the
genitive could follow or precede the word that governs it.