A curious anomaly occurs in the declension of pronouns.’  When accompanied by the preposition kita, “with,” there is a tmesis of the preposition, and the pronouns are placed between its first and second syllable; e.g. vi, him’’-ki-ni-ta, “with him.”  This takes place in every number and person, as the following scheme will show:—­

1st person. 2d person. 3d person.

Sing.      ki-mu-ta     ki-zu-ta      ki-ni-ta
(with me)     (with thee)     (with him)

Plur.      ki mi-ta    ki zu-nini-ta  ki-nini-ta
(with us)      (with you)     (with them)

N. B.—­The formation of the second person plural deserves attention.  The word zu-nini is, clearly, composed of the two elements, zu, “thee,” and nini, “them”—­so that instead of having a word for “you,” the Chaldaeans employed for it the periphrasis “thee-them”!  There is, I believe, no known language which presents a parallel anomaly.

Such are the chief known features of this interesting but difficult form of speech.  A specimen may now be given of the mode in which it was written.  Among the earliests of the monuments hitherto discovered are a set of bricks bearing the following cuneiform inscription [PLATE VI., Fig. 3]: 

This inscription is explained to mean:—­“Beltis, his lady, has caused Urukh (?), the pious chief, King of Hur, and King of the land (?) of the Akkad, to build a temple to her.”  In the same locality where it occurs, bricks are also found bearing evidently the same inscription, but written in a different manner.  Instead of the wedge and arrow-head being the elements of the writing, the whole is formed by straight lines of almost uniform thickness, and the impression seems to have been made by a single stamp. [PLATE VII., Fig. 1.]

[Illustration:  PLATE 7]

This mode of writing, which has been called without much reason “the hieratic,” and of which we have but a small number of instances, has confirmed a conjecture, originally suggested by the early cuneiform writing itself, that the characters were at first the pictures of objects.  In some cases the pictorial representation is very plain and palpable.

     [Etext Editor’s Note:  the next two pages contain many examples
     of heiratic symbols [—­] which can be seen only in the html file
     or the jpg image page0044.jpg]

[Illustration:  PAGE 44]

For instance, the “determinative” of a god—­the sign that is, which marks that the name of a god is about to follow, in this early rectilinear writing is [—­] an eight-rayed star.  The archaic cuneiform keeps closely to this type, merely changing the lines into wedges, thus [—­], while the later cuneiform first unites the oblique wedges in one [—­] , and then omits them as unnecessary, retaining only the perpendicular and the horizontal ones [—­] .  Again, the character representing the word “hand”