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

DURING 19 CENTURY: HITTITES 781
haps the earliest of the series, calls himself king, not of Cilicia,
but of something that perhaps has the same attribute as
occurs in connection with the city of Karkemish in the
Jerabis inscriptions.
Unless, therefore, the kings of Cilicia,
like those of Assyria, for instance, bore some general title like
" king of the whole earth " or the like, we must suppose
that Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, is meant. According to
the Assyrian and Aramaic writing of the name at the time
to which the inscription belongs, about 600 b. c, the word
must have been pronounced Tarz, or if the Biblical "Tiras "
in Gen. 10 be identical with it, must have had the consonants
Trds. This, accordingly, will be the form of the
name in the inscription.
There is one title which amongst all the Hittite sovereigns
is peculiar to those of Cilicia. In the word-group which
stands for it, the first symbol and the fourth are alike. From
the frequency with which it
occurs this symbol must have a
simple phonetic value. As it is not one of the vowel signs,
it must denote a simple consonant. At least three Cilician
kings are called Syennesis in Greek. Only one, the father
of one Syennesis, has a different name, Oromedon. From
this observation it
has been surmised for a considerable time
that Syennesis is properly a title. The fact that in Herodotus
the father of one king is called by a different name
need cause no difficulty, for Syennesis may well have been
the designation only of the reigning sovereign, who after
death recovered his proper name, while his former title
passed to his successor. This title Syennesis (borne by the
kings of Cilicia) with its four stem consonants : s, the spiritus
lenis
between y and e, which we and the Greek do not write,
n and s, has the peculiarity that its first consonant is the
same as the fourth. But as noted above, exactly the same
is the case with the Cilician royal title in the so-called
Hittite inscriptions, and we may venture therefore to read
this latter as Sy(u)ennes.