Dr. Wright at once suggested that they were the work of the Hittites, and that they were memorials of Hittite writing. But his suggestion was buried in the pages of a periodical better known to theologians than to Orientalists, and the world agreed to call the writing by the name of Hamathite. It specially attracted the notice of Dr. Hayes Ward of New York, who discovered that the inscriptions were written in _boustrophedon_ fashion, that is to say, that the lines turned alternately from right to left and from left to right, like oxen when plowing a field, the first line beginning on the right and the line following on the left. The lines read, in fact, from the direction towards which the characters look. Dr. Hayes Ward also made another discovery. In the ruins of the great palace of Nineveh Sir A. H. Layard had discovered numerous clay impressions of seals once attached to documents of papyrus or parchment. The papyrus and parchment have long since perished, but the seals remain, with the holes through which the strings passed that attached them to the original deeds. Some of the seals are Assyrian, some Phoenician, others again are Egyptian, but there are a few which have upon them strange characters such as had never been met with before. It was these characters which Dr. Hayes Ward perceived to be the same as those found upon the stones of Hamah, and it was accordingly supposed that the seals were of Hamathite origin. In 1876, two years after the publication of Dr. Wright's article, of which I had never heard at the time, I read a Paper on the Hamathite inscriptions before the Society of Biblical Archæology. In this I put forward a number of conjectures, one of them being that the Hamathite hieroglyphs were the source of the curious syllabary used for several centuries in the island of Cyprus, and another that the hieroglyphs were not an invention of the early inhabitants of Hamath, but represented the system of writing employed by the Hittites. We know from the Egyptian records that the Hittites could write, and that a class of scribes existed among them, and, since Hamath lay close to the borders of the Hittite kingdoms, it seemed reasonable to suppose that the unknown form of script discovered on its site was Hittite rather than Hamathite. The conjecture was confirmed almost immediately afterwards by the discovery of the site of Carchemish, the great Hittite capital, and of inscriptions there in the same system of writing as that found on the stones of Hamah.