TARİH VE ARKEOLOJİ: Altaic Hieroglyphs and Hittite inscriptions

7 Eylül 2014 Pazar

Altaic Hieroglyphs and Hittite inscriptions

It is not to be supposed that a problem which has so long occupied our best Orientalists can be solved at once by one who does not possess their scholarship and knowloedge. The Egyptian and Cuneiform systems were not perfectly understood when first dicovered; and many long years of special study have been devoted to their elucidation since the keys to their right understanding were found.

What I felt justified in claiming, what I hope to have done, is to have found a true key (*) to the reading of the Altaic system, which may be accepted by Orientalists as simple and demonstrable, and to have identified the language of these texts as belonging to the family of Ugro-Altaic dialects, of which the Proto-Medic and the Akkadian are, perhaps, the oldest known examples.

(*) I am not the first to have discovered the sounds, since some were fixed already by Professor Sayce ; but I may be the first to discover approximately the language to which the sounds belong.