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102 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January Is it, on the face of it, likely ? We have to consider not merely the facts, but also the probabilities. The fact that no continuous hieroglyphic inscriptions occur at Boghaz Keui or Euyuk does not prove that the Hittites did not possess a continuous hieroglyphic script at the time they were built, in the face of the probability that they invented their national system of hieroglyphs long before they became acquainted with the foreign cuneiform. For all we know, they may have written hieroglyphs on skins before they took to the more convenient Babylonian method of incising cuneiform signs on clay tablets. It may turn out, therefore, that the hieroglyphs, the old national writing of the Hittites, were used to express their non- Aryan tongue. But this does not seem on the face of it probable. We may yet have to con- fess, pace Dr. Cowley, that Dr. Hrozny is right, and that the Hittites spoke and wrote both in hieroglyphic and cuneiform a west- Aryan language, or at any rate a tongue, whatever its origin, with a strong west- Aryan admix- ture. Dr. Cowley makes a most interesting contribution to the study of the hieroglyphic system in his attempted decipherment of several of the inscriptions (pp. 48 ff.). For this he starts anew with a fresh reading of the famous bilingual ' Boss of Tarkondemos ', which leads him to make rather far-reaching interpretations of other inscriptions. Space fails us in which to discuss his readings at length. One welcomes every new attempt at interpretation with interest, confident that in* time the key will be found, and that the inscriptions of Khatti will eventually be read with certitude. ' Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.' Meanwhile we congratulate Dr. Cowley on his ingenuity and labour in this matter, by which he adds one to the number of workers in this field, Sayce, Jensen, and Campbell Thompson being the most notable. Though he does not believe that their language, as he reads it in the hieroglyphs, was Aryan, Dr. Cowley does not commit himself as to the precise ethnic affinities of the Hittites. On p. 30 he notes (what I am myself unable to see) Mongolian traits in the Egyptian representa- tions of Hittites : ' the curiously Mongolian type . . . the pigtail (?), the lack of hair on the face.' The Hittite pigtail certainly was a pigtail, and not a liripipe ; but pigtails and glabrous countenances are not necessarily Mongolian attributes. The Hittites no doubt shaved the face, as both the Minoans and the Egyptians did ; and, as I remarked in a note on p. 334 of my Ancient History of the Near East, ' if we are to seek for ethnic connexions for the Hittites on the score of their pigtails, one can find them in their own time and neighbourhood in the Minoan Greeks, who wore their hair to their waists and evidently often in pigtails.' The twisted or plaited pigtail is an obvious method of disposing of long hair that has been in vogue among males at various times and places from the Hittite and Minoan of the fourteenth to the Grreek athlete of the sixth century B.C., and from the German dandy knight of the thirteenth to the ordinary young European man ' in his own hair ' of the eighteenth century a.d., as well as the Chinaman of yesterday ; and the Chinese only adopted the fashion at the beginning of the seventeenth century a.d. But Dr. Cowley does not really think that the Hittites were Mongolians :