Nevertheless I am bound to add that it is only as a whole that they do so. With all the general unlikeness there is a curious similarity in a few--a very few--instances which it is difficult to interpret as merely the result of accident. The round circle with lines inside it which denotes “a city” in Egyptian might be explained from the circular villages which still characterize Central Africa; but then how is it that the ideograph for “place” in the pictorial script of Babylonia had precisely the same form? That the word for “country” should be denoted in the Babylonian script by the picture of three mountain peaks may be due to the fact that to the Babylonian “country” and “mountain” were the same; but such an explanation fails us in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyph of “foreign land,” where the three peaks appear again, since the hieroglyph for “mountain” in Egyptian has but two. The picture of a seat, and a seat, too, of peculiar shape, represents “place” in Egyptian; in Babylonian the same picture represents “city,” thus inverting the ideographic signification of the picture which in Egyptian and Babylonian has respectively the meanings of “city” and “place.” Between the primitive Babylonian picture of a “ship” and the boats depicted in the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, again, the resemblance is very exact, and Professor Hommel has pointed out to me a curious likeness between the original form of the Babylonian ideograph for “a personal name” and the _ka_-sign with the Horus-hawk above it within which the names of the earliest Pharaohs are inscribed.[93] Indeed the learned and ingenious Munich Professor has made out a list of even more striking coincidences, where the characters agree not only in sense but also in the phonetic values attached to them.[94]