1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 101 European and first cousin to Italic, then causa finita est : the Hittites were first cousins to the Italians. And in that case, what sort of language did the Etruscans really speak ? Was it Aryan after all ? Look at Larthi Atharnies, the noble lucumo who stands in relief on a slab from his tomb in the Florence Museum : is he not a Hittite, high boots, pigtail, and all ? or at any rate first cousin of the warrior who guards in relief the gate of Boghaz Keui ? And»then the lituus and the skull-cap of the Hittite flamen of Yasili Kaya ! If Dr. Hrozny is right, there are de- velopments in store. We know that the neighbouring Mitanni was ruled at this time by an Aryan-speaking aristocracy, and that Aryan princes ruled in Palestine at this time side by side with Hittites. Indo-Europeans were ' in the air ' at the time, as Dr. Cowley says (p. 45). But this difference appears to me to exist between the Indo-European (?) Hittites and the contemporary undoubted Aryan rulers of Mitanni and possibly the Kassites ; that whereas, if Dr. Hrozny is right, the Hittites spoke a western Aryan language akin to Latin, the Mitannians and possibly the Kassites spoke eastern Aryan languages akin to Sanskrit and old Persian. The Mitannians venerated Indra, Varuna, and the Asvins ; their names have the Iranian elements Arta- and -data : Suryadata, ' gift of the Surr ', is the name of a Palestinian chief in the Amarna letters, Yazdata is another, and the Kassites appear to have called the sun suryash and ' god ' bugash (baga, ■ as in Bagabukhsha = Megabyzus ; Sk. bhdga, t as in Bhagwan : Slav 6ofb). According to Hesychius the Phrygians called Zeus ' Bagaios '. If Dr. Hrozny is right, therefore, we would seem to have in the Hittites one Indo-European population coming from the west through the Balkan peninsula, in the Mitannians and Kassites another coming from the east, more probably from Turkestan than through the Caucasus. However, Dr. Cowley does not think that Professor Hrozny has yet proved his point or that Hittite is really Indo-European, and the matter is, of course, still subjudice. Dr. Hrozny reads the Hittite cuneiform as Indo-European ; it is at least reasonable to suppose that the language of the hieroglyphs is the same as that of the tablets. But we do not yet know this to be so : it may yet appear that while the cuneiform language is Aryan that of the hieroglyphs is not, and that the hieroglyphic language is the real non- Aryan Hittite speech, the other an Aryan lingua franca of western origin. Against such a supposition might be advanced the view, proposed by Dr. Cowley, that the hieroglyphic inscriptions, which are commonest in the Syrian dominion of the Hittites and are most evident at Carchemish, whereas they hardly appear at Boghaz Keui, are in reality later in date than the cuneiform, which they ' eventually ousted ' (p. 38). We know now from the Cappadocian Semitic cuneiform tablets (which are not to be con- fused with the Hittite cuneiform tablets) that a Semitic dialect written in cuneiform was in use in the Halys-land at least as early as 2500 B.C. It was from the users of these tablets, obviously, that the Hittites learnt to write their tongue in cuneiform. But it is not in the least probable that the Hittites, after having used cuneiform, should have invented and adopted a clumsy ideographic picture-writing. This is going against all probability, and against all that we know of the development of writing elsewhere.
