weight passed into Mr. Greg's hands were invisible through dirt. They establish that the inscription upon the seal must be read E-si-re or Re-si-e, the name, probably, of the original owner. The word, moreover, on the patera found in the necropolis of Thymbra, which I had doubtfully made Levon or Revon, is now read ῥέζω by Dr. Deecke, no doubt rightly.
The alphabet of Kappadokia I am no longer inclined to include among those that preserved some of the characters of the old Asianic syllabary. Mr. Ramsay has copied an inscription at Eyuk, which goes far to show that the one given by Hamilton is badly copied, and that the characters in it which resemble those of the Cypriote syllabary had probably no existence in the original text. In fact, Mr. Ramsay's inscription makes it clear that the Kappadokian alphabet was the same as the Phrygian, both being derived, as he has pointed out, from an early Ionic alphabet of the 8th century B.C., used by the traders of Sinopê.[1] As I now feel doubtful also about the alphabet of Kilikia, the alphabets of Asia Minor, which indubitably contain characters of the Asianic syllabary, will be reduced to those of Pamphylia, Lykia, Karia, Lydia, and Mysia. These, it will be noticed, form a continuous chain round the western and south-western shores of Asia Minor, the chain being further continued into Cyprus. The Karian alphabet, though still in the main undeciphered, has been determined with greater exactness during the last two or three years in consequence of the discovery of new inscriptions, and I have recently made a discovery in regard to it which may lead to interesting results. A peculiar class of scarabs is met with in Northern Egypt, on which certain curious figures are scratched in the rudest possible way, reminding us of nothing so much as the figures on some of the Hissarlik "whorls." The art, if art it can be called, is quite different from that of the "Hittite" cylinders of Cyprus or of the
- ↑ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, XV. 1 (1883).
