arrangement of the characters, due more to the necessity of filling up the vacant space on the boss than to the requirements of their natural order, allowed more than one interpretation of them. But there were two facts which furnished the key to their true reading. On the one hand, the inscription is divided into two halves by two characters whose form and position in other Hittite texts show them to signify 'king' and 'country'; on the other hand, the first two characters are made, as it were, to issue from the mouth of the king, and thus to express his name. We thus obtain the reading: 'Tarku-dimme king of the country of Er-me,' the syllables tarku and me being denoted by the head of a goat and the numeral 'four,' while the ideographs of 'king' and 'country' are represented by the royal tiara worn by gods and monarchs in the Hittite sculptures, and by the picture of a mountainous land. In the ideograph of 'country' Mordtmann had already seen a likeness of the shafts of rock which rise out of the Kappadokian plateau.
The bilingual boss accordingly furnishes us with two important ideographs, and the phonetic values of four other characters. Armed with these, we can attack the other texts, and learn something about them. It becomes clear that the inscriptions from Carchemish now in the British Museum are the monuments of a king whose name ends in -me-Tarku, and who records the names of his father and grandfather. To the grandfather belonged an inscription copied by Mr. Boscawen among the ruins of Carchemish, but unfortunately never brought to England, and probably long since destroyed.
On the lion of Merash, moreover, a king similarly
