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 ] [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.