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

DURING VJTH CENTURY: H1TTITES 777
This fact alone excludes the possibility of a connection
with the so-called Turanian languages on the one side and
the Semitic tongues on the other.
It is now to be noted that the word for " I
" contains a
consonant of the same class as one word for " this," and the
ending of the genitive plural
as the word for "am."
a consonant of the same class
Besides, a word for "great," or the
like, has the latter as its first consonant and the former as
its second. The last named, again, is the first consonant in
two different words for " son " or "child;" while, as appears
from the writing of it, a word for " king " could be
regarded as a compound beginning with the word for " man."
It cannot escape the Indogermanic scholar that exactly
the same is or must have been the case in Armenian. Thus,
before I could read a word, I might have concluded from
the mere way the words were written that the speech was
Armenian. For in Armenian the word for " I
" is es, but
of eso (out of edzo, or the like), while a word for " this " is
ais ; em, formerly emi> means " I am," while om was once
the ending of the genitive plural ; mets out of medzi(s) or
the like means "great;" ustr means " son " and zav-ak
" descendant ; " ark 1 ay is " king," and ayr, formerly ar(o)> is
" man." This could have indicated a way of arriving at the
reading of the inscriptions. I found another which led to
the same astonishing result.
If the inscriptions from Syria and the districts to the
north belong, as we have shown at
length, to the period between
say iooo and 600 b. c, then those from Hama in
Syria have come down from kings of Hama; those from
Jerabis on the Euphrates, in the territory of the ancient
Karkemish, from kings of Karkemish ; those from Mar'ash
north of Syria from kings of Gurgum, whose capital was Markash,
the modern Mar'ash.
In other words, these different inscriptions
go back to princes of various petty states, not
the lord of a single great empire called
to
Khate embracing all