The Philistines: Chapter IV. The Culture of the Philistines: I. Their Language

each character by a letter, which is to be regarded as a mere algebraic symbol and not a phonetic sign, we may write the inscription on the disk in this form:

Fig. 4B. The Phaestos Disk (Face II).

There is just one type of ancient document which shows such a 'sediment', so to speak, of proper names at the end. This is a contract tablet, which ends with a list of witnesses, and in the paper above

referred to I have put forward the conjecture that the disk is of this nature. In Face I, although not one word of the inscription can be deciphered, it will be found that, applying the clue of the proper names, everything fits exactly in its place, assuming the ordinary formula of a contract such as we find it in cuneiform documents.

The first two words would give us the name and title of the presiding magistrate: then comes the name of one of the contracting parties, uζc χηs: then come six words or word-groups, quite unintelligible, but not improbably stating what this person undertakes to do: then follows what would be the name of the other contracting party.

Next come some words which ought to give some such essential detail as the date of the contract. And we find among these words just what we want, a proper name πsa, denoting the officer who was eponymous of the year.

The last thirteen words we might expect to be a detailed inventory of the transaction, whatever its nature may have been. It is therefore satisfactory to notice that they arrange themselves neatly, just as they stand, in three parallel columns, having obvious mutual relations: thus—

which table not only confirms the conclusions arrived at, but illustrates a rule that may also be inferred from the list of witnesses on Face II. Words are declined by prefixes ξ, s, n, h, χ and suffixes w, ξ; and words in apposition have the same prefix. See the third column of the above table, and the titles of witnesses 1, 2. We have a word βh in several forms: s-βh-w, n-βh, h-βh, s-βh-ξ. Further, ξ, prefixed to the 'name of the magistrate' and all the names of witnesses, probably means 'before, in the presence of'. The name which follows that of the two witnesses 5 and 6 is probably that of their father, and this assumed it follows that the prefix s probably has a genitive sense.

There remains one important point. At the bottom of certain characters there is a sloping line running to the left. This is always at the end of a word-group: the two apparent exceptions shown in some drawings of the disk (in word-groups 6 and 23 on Face II) being seemingly cracks in the surface of the disk. The letters marked are underlined in the transcript given above. I suggest with regard to

these marks that they are meant to express a modification of the phonetic value of the character, too slight to require a different letter to express it, but too marked to allow it to be neglected altogether. And obviously the most likely modification of the kind would be the elision of the vowel of a final open syllable. The mark would thus be exactly like the virāma of the Devanāgarī alphabet. 1 When we examine the text, we find that it is only in certain words that this mark occurs. It is found in βh, however declined, except when the suffixes w, ξ are present. It is found in the word nvhf, however declined, and appears in the two similar words µhtaσ and Mξtaσ. It is found in the personal name kq (in the formula pa Mξkq). There are only one or two of the eighteen examples of its use outside these groups, and probably if we had some more examples of the script, or a longer text, these would be found to fit likewise into series. This stroke would therefore be a device to express a final closed syllable. Thus, if it was desired to write the name of the god Dagon, it would be written on this theory, let us say, DA-GO-NA, with a stroke underneath the last symbol to elide its vowel. The consequences that may follow if this assumption should at any time be proved, and the culture which the objects represented by the various signs indicate, are subjects for discussion in later sections of this chapter. For further details of the analysis of the disk I must refer to my Royal Irish Academy paper above quoted: I have dwelt on it here, because if, as is most probable, the plumed head-dress shows that in this disk we have to deal with 'proto-Philistines', we must look to this document and others of the same kind, with which excavators of the future may be rewarded, to tell us something of the language of the people with whom we have to deal.

Footnotes

79:1 The 'Lords of the Philistines' are, however, in the Greek Version called σατράπαι; but in Judges (except iii. 3), Codex Vaticanus and allied MSS. have ἄρχοντες, a rendering also found sometimes in Josephus.

80:1 De Filistijnen, p. 81.

80:2 Cf. Latin cappa, &c. (?).

81:1 Max Müller in his account of the school-tablet (ante, p. 10) compares the Assyrian form Ikausu and the Greek Ἀγχοῦς, and infers that the true pronunciation of the name was something like Ekôsh.

81:2 But in the last edition of KAT. p. 437, it is noticed that this name can possibly be read Ikasamsu or Ikasamsu.

82:1 See the description by Chassinat, Bulletin de l’inst. franç. d’arch. au Caire, i. (1901), p. 98.

82:2 See Conway in the Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. viii, p. 125, for an exhaustive analysis of these inscriptions.

82:3 Zeitschr. f. ägypt. Sprache (1871), p. 61.

83:1 Zeitschr. der D. M. G. xxxi, pp. 451, 452.

83:2 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxx, section C, p. 342.

87:1 I find that this comparison has been anticipated in an article in Harper's Magazine (European Edition, vol. lxi, p. 187), which I have read since writing the above. The rest of the article, I regret to say, does not convince me.