in the Targum of Onkelos on Genesis, or the whole Pentateuch, should be taken. This enumeration has been made as regards the Hebrew (see Bagster's Family Bible, at the end of Deuteronomy). The readiest mode of effecting such enumeration would be to employ twenty-two persons knowing the Chaldee letters, and to assign a letter to each, calling out to them each letter as it occurred in Onkelos, whilst each person kept count of his own letter on a tally, and summing up the total gave in the result to the reader at the end of each chapter. This would be necessary with a view to ascertain what quantity of unknown inscription was required to evolve the rule, as the proposed method is clearly inapplicable when the quantity of matter to be decyphered is inconsiderable.

Having gone over sufficient ground to satisfy himself of the certainty of the rule, the decypherer would next count the numbers of each distinct character in all the cuneiform inscriptions accessible to him, making allowance for final letters, also for vowel points which may be attached to the character, as in Ethiopic. Assuming the rule in Chaldee to be the same as in Hebrew (it is in fact very different), he would find the character oftenest occurring in the Nineveh inscriptions to be ו, the next מ, the rest in the following order as to frequency of occurrence, ט , ס , ע , צ , [?] ד , פ , ז , ק , [?] ח , [?] ב , ש , [?] ד , [?] ב , ל , נ , א , ה , כ , ת , י , the first letter, ו, vau, occurring nearly seven times as often as ט, teth. The order of the letters would, in fact, vary much from this in Chaldee; the servile letters being different would alone much disturb the assumed order, actually ascertained nevertheless, as respects the Hebrew letters, in the five books of Moses. One word as to the order in which the several languages should be experimented on. The Chaldee would be the first, and next in succession, (2) the Syriac, (3) the Ethiopic, (4) the Arabic, (5) the Hebrew (die jungste Schwester),[3] and (6) the Pehlvi. The Indo-European languages would, in case of failure in the above, claim next attention: of these first the Zend, next (2) the Sanscrit, then (3) the Armenian, &c. &c.

[3] Adelung in Mithridates.

The resemblance of many of the characters on the Babylonian bricks, as well as on the stones of Nineveh, is very great to the characters known in our Bibles as Hebrew, but which are in fact not Hebrew but Chaldee, and were introduced by the Jews subsequent to their Babylonish captivity: the original Hebrew character was that still existing on coins, and nearly approximates in many respects to the Samaritan character. In some MSS. collated by Kennicott, he found the tetragrammaton "Jehovah" written in this ancient character, whilst the rest was Chaldee. The characteristic of the unknown letters is their resemblance to nails, to arrow-heads, and to wedges, from which, indeed, they are commonly designated. In the Chaldee (the Hebrew of our Bibles) this is also strikingly visible, notwithstanding the effect of time in wearing down the arridges: thus, in the oftenest recurring letter, ו, in the left leg of the ת, in ע, in צ, in ט, in נ, in מ, and especially in ש, the cuneiform type is most clearly traceable. One of the unknown characters,

seems almost identical with ש, allowance being made for the cursive form which written characters assume after centuries of use.

The horn is very conspicuous on the heads of men in the Nineveh (Asshur) sculptures, still, as a fashion, retained in Ethiopia (Cush, Abyssinia[4]), the origin of the Chaldeans, through Nimrod the Cushite (Gen. x. 8.), who probably derived their chief sustenance from the river Tigris (Hiddekel). Subsistence from (1) fishing, (2) hunting (e.g. Nimrod), (3) grazing, and (4) agriculture, seems to have succeeded in the order named. The repeated appearance of fish on the same sculptures, is in allusion, doubtless, to the name Nineveh (= fish + habitation); and their worship of the half-man, half-fish (the fabulous mermaid or merman), to which many of the Cetaceæ bear a close resemblance (the sea-horse for example), common with them and the Phœnicians (in the latter tongue named Dagon), is probably allusive, in their symbolic style, to the abstract notion of fecundity, so general an element of veneration in all the known mythological religions of ancient and modern times. See Nahum passim.

[4] Alexander the Great adopted the horns as Jupiter Ammon. See Vincent's Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, and frontispiece. The women of Lebanon have, it appears, retained the fashion. See Pict. Bible on Zech. i. 18.

From an attentive examination of these monuments in the British Museum, it appears highly probable that the writing is from left to right, as in the Ethiopic and Coptic, and in the Indo-European family generally, and is the reverse of all the other Shemitic tongues. This inference is derived from the fact that each line (with few exceptions) ranges with those above and below, as in a printed book, perpendicularly on the left, and breaks off on the right hand, as at the termination of a sentence, whilst some of the characters seem to stretch beyond the usual line of limit to the right, as if the sculptor had made the common error of not having quite space enough for a word not divisible.

The daguerreotype might be advantageously used in copying all the inscriptions yet discovered, of each of which three or four copies should be taken, to obviate mistakes and accidents. These being brought to England and carefully examined by the microscope,