A GAELIC CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTION.
The above is the title of a paper read by the Rev
Dr. MacNish, of Cornwall, Can., before the Celtic
Society of Montreal a short time since ; and the fol¬
lowing are excerpts therefrom. —
"In the proceedings of the Society of Biblical Arch¬
aeology for 1889, there appears an article from Prof
Sayce, bearing the designation : 'The Cuneiform
Tablets of Tel-el-Amarna, now in the Bonlaq Mu¬
seum.' With regard to the Cuneiform Tablet which
bears the number VII., Prof. Sayce remarks that
in a work which is cited, Dr. Hugo Winkler has
published the important letter of the King of Arza¬
pa to Amenophis III. (No. VII.), and I find that,
like myself, he has come to the conclusion that the
language of it is probably Hittite We have also ex¬
plained many of the words occurring in it in the
same way' He further remarks, 'that the two in¬
troductory lines of this interesting letter are in Ass¬
yran ... but the rest of the Tablet is in an
unknown language, which I suspect to be a Hittite
dialect ... Indeed, the possessive mi and ti,
tu have an Indo-European character.' According to
Lenormant, Amenhotep or Amenophis III was a¬
mong the last kings of the eighteenth dynasty, and
flourished in the sixteenth century B.C. Amenophis
IV., the son and successor of Amenophis III,
sought to substitute another form of worship in
place of the religion which formerly prevailed in
Eypt. Wishing to make an end of all the tradi¬
tions of his ancesors, he abandoned the Thebes, and
built another capital in Upper Egypt, in a place
now called Tel-el-Amarna." * It was there that
the Tablets were found which form the subject of
Sayce's article in the Proceedings of the Society of
Biblical Archaeology for 1889. In examining the
Inscriptions which were found on those Tablets,
Prof. Camphell, of Montreal, discovered that Gael¬
ic is the language of Tablet No. VII.; and that, ac¬
cordingly, we have in it by far the oldest specimen
of Gaelic of which the world has hitherto had any
knowledge. By the publication of his “Eastern O¬
rigin of the Celtic Nations” in 1831, Prichard estab¬
lished the antiquity and extensive migration of the
Celts. In his able and elaborate work on the Hitt¬
ites, Prof. Campbell remarks that 'there are good
reasons for regarding the Sumerians as the ances¬
tors of the later Zimri, Gimiri, Cimerians, and Cy¬
mry, and thus as Celts, in contact with Turanian
people, to whom they lent, and they also borrow¬
ed, much in speech and oral traditions. The Sum-
erians were the Zimri of the Assyrian Inscriptions,
the Gimiri of the Persians, the Cimmerians of the
Greeks, and the Cymri of Wales. The name Kal¬
dili is a form of Gilead, which denoted region bey¬
ond the Jordan long before the grandson of Manes¬
seh bore it. Gilead, a purely Celtic word, is also
the original of Galatea in Asia Minor, of Calydon
in Grecian AEtolia, and of the classical appellations
Galatae and Celtae" † Those citations claimed for
the Celts a very ancient and important history.” —
[Here the learned Doctor inserts the interpretaion
given by prof. Campbell to the Cuneiform Inscrip¬
tion on Tablet No. VII. and thereafter gives the pre¬
positional pronouns which occur in the Inscription
and compares them with the Gaelic]. —
* Manual of the Ancient History of the East.
Vol. I., pp. 237, 238.
† The Hittites, Vol. I., pp. 161, 240, 273.
Irish
Gaelic
kakti
chugad
h-ugad
kakta
chuca
h-uca
anzi
ionnise
a h-ionnsuidh
anta
ionnas
annad
atta
asad
asad
asta
asta
asda
istu
aiste
aiste
ubhiista
ibh aista
asaibh
asaibh
sade
asad
asad
Pictet virtually maintains that the points of diff¬
erence between the Celtic languages and the other
members of the Indo European family of languages
are confined to the permutation of initial consonants
and to the composition of personal pronouns with
prepositions. In his Grammatica Celtica (p 324),
Zuess writes : “Pronominnm in ntradue lingua, tam
Hibernica quam Britannica ea proprietas est ut
non semper ut in iliis linguis Ind europaeis, per se
posita plenam formam servent, sed etiam .. ;
si sunt personalia post proepositiones suffigantur.
Scholars of the acumen of Pictet and Zuess regard
the composition of personal pronouns with preposi¬
tions, such as those which have just been cited, as
a peculiar feature in the Celtic languages.
Such adjecttives as galgal, mas (maih) and agaas
(aghaiseach, athaiseach) reveal their Gaelic lineage
at a glance, and form another argument in favour of
the Gaelic character of Tablet No. VII.
Anyone who has even a slight knowledge of Irish
or Scottish Gaelic can perceive that these verbs are
purely Gaelic ;—
khalu
geillim
geill
kuru-in
chuirinn
cuir
amna-num
aomadh
aom
upida upi
obadh
ob
arad
iarruidh
iarr
kar
caram
caruich
putik
fuaduighim
fuadaich
papara
fiafruighim
Several parts of the substantive verb Bi occur in
the Inscription.
The Gaelic complexion of the nouns that occur
in the Inscription can be easily recognized, e. g ;—
dam
damh
daimh
nitak
nitheach
pir
fir
fear
karrum
gearran
khuumaan
chomain
chaomhna
comain
caomhna
Tsi
ti
kurmesti
cursuir (from cuir & fear
tsiliya
teallach
nic
nighean
nic in Gaelic, surnames
names of females
kidda
cead
naat
naas (Irish)
