342 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. V ct A P ci X e
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X downward strokes have a nearer approach to the vertical ; 1 but whilst the characters which appear in the monuments of Midas (city ?) are wholly borrowed from the Greeks, those of Lycia, in the mode of writing, betray traces of an older stage, of a period when her people employed the system of signs which the primitive inhabitants of the pe- ninsula had derived from Hittite hieroglyphs. Thus, out of the twenty- eight letters of which the Lycian alphabet is composed, four are com- mon to the Cypriote syllabary, 2 whilst two or three cannot be traced either to Phoenicia or Cyprus, and may likewise have originated from the older source. There is, then, reason to believe that when the Lycians adopted the Greek alphabet, not find- ing in it all the signs that were re- quired to express certain sounds in their language, they retained a few of those they had hitherto employed, which they transferred to one or other of those Asianic alphabets, whose complicated arrangement caused them to be discarded everywhere, except in the island of Cyprus. We feel the same impression when we try to collate the scanty data that historians have handed down to us relating to the institutions of Lycia. "This people," says Herodotus, "have a peculiar custom not met with among FIG. 246. Lycian alphabet. 1 F. LENORMANT, " Alphabet," p. 209, in Diet, des antiquites de Saglio. 2 SAYCE, " Inscriptions found at Hissarlik," p. 910, in SCHLIEMANN, Ilios, City and Country of the Trojans. London : Bell and Co.
