neither on Gebel Mûsa, nor on the present Horeb, nor on St. Catherine, nor in the valley of the convent; while on Serbal they are seen on its very summit."

Lord Lindsay, in his first letter from Edom and the Holy Land, introduces the same district in the following words:

"We now entered Wady Mokatteb, a spacious valley, bounded on the east by a most picturesque range of black mountains, but chiefly famous for the inscriptions on the rocks that line it, and from which it derives its name. There are thousands of them, inscriptions too, and here is the mystery, in a character which no one has yet deciphered."

Now, let the ancient and modern maps be compared, and it will be discovered that the same place which is called, in Num. xi. 26., כְּתוּבִים, probably on account of its inscriptions, is also called by the Arabians وادى المكتّب Wady el Mokatteb.

Should the identity between Wady Mokatteb and Kibroth Hattavah be considered conclusive, then the antiquity of the Sinaitic inscriptions is far more remote than the date fixed by certain archæologists and palæographists; the records may prove to be, in truth and in deed, the handy-work of the Israelites during their encampment there.

The readers of the "NOTES AND QUERIES" need scarcely be told that the inscriptions were first noticed in the sixth century by Cosmas, a Græco-Indian merchant, who was hence surnamed Indicopleustes. But it is necessary to impress the fact that Cosmas, though a man of intelligence and of letters, considered that the alphabet in which the inscriptions were made, was unknown; but having visited the Wady in company with certain well-informed Jews, his Hebrew companions read and deciphered several of the records, and decided that the Israelites of the Egyptian Exodus were the performers of the inscriptions. All this Cosmas stated in his Christian Topography (a work published for the first time in 1707 by the learned Montfauçon), and concurs in the opinion that the ancient Hebrews were the scribes. This circumstance borne in mind, will be proof against the theory conceived by Professor Beer, brought forth by Dr. Lepsius, adopted and fostered by Dr. Wilson, viz. that an Utopian Nabathæan Christian tribe executed those inscriptions during their pilgrimages to the sacred localities on Mount Sinai. Is it not strange that Cosmas should not have heard that there was such a tribe of scribes in the valley? Is it not unaccountable that the knowledge of the alphabet should so soon have been forgotten? Cosmas flourished comparatively but a short time after the supposed Nabathæans.

But the advocates of the Nabathæan theory argue that the Sinaitic inscriptions must be of a comparatively modern date, since there are found amongst them some Greek and Latin ones; and, moreover, the cross does sometimes occur in various shapes. I venture to submit that the inscriptions bear self-evidence that they have been executed at various dates. It is true that by far the greatest number of them display indubitable marks of remote antiquity; but there are some which must be pronounced juvenile when compared with the great majority. The latter bear marks of an execution resembling the inscriptions on the ancient Egyptian obelisks, whilst the former are rude and superficially cut, and already almost effaced. I take, therefore, the Greek and Latin, and indeed some of the yet unknown inscriptions, to have been cut at a comparatively modern date. Who knows whether Cosmas and his companions did not try their hands at a few?

Why should it be thought improbable that the different monks on Mount Sinai, who occupied the convent there at various ages, should have done their quota to puzzle the modern palæographist and traveller? Is it absolutely impossible that the prefect of the Franciscan missionaries of Egypt, who visited the Wady in 1722, and his companions, who were well instructed in the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Armenian, Turkish, English, Illyrian, German, and Bohemian languages, should have chiselled a few in the characters they were most expert? In the same manner might the occurrence of the cross be accounted for, if it were necessary, without precipitating oneself to the conclusion that "the occurrence, in connection with the inscriptions of the cross in various forms, indicates that their origin should be attributed to the early Christians." But is it possible that such antiquaries as Drs. Beer, Lepsius, and Wilson, should be ignorant, or affect to be ignorant, that the cross was an ancient hieroglyphic, of a date long before the Christian era, well known by the name of Crux Ansata, and of the Divina Taw, and signified among the Egyptians "Life to come"? That the form of the cross was used among the Hebrews is conclusive from the fact that it was the ancient Hebrew mint letter for the ת. What, then, is the value of the arguments in behalf of the Nabathæan theory? All the specimens that have been given hitherto of the inscriptions, are no more in comparison with the vast numbers which literally cover the highest mountains, than a drop out of a bucket, including even those given in the Philosophical Transactions of 1766, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of 1832, and by the Rev. Charles Forster of this year [1], and even adding the 1200 taken by M. Lottin de Laval. (See "NOTES AND QUERIES", Vol. iv., p. 332.)

[1] The One Primeval Language, &c., by the Rev. Charles Forster. The above is a compendium of two letters which the writer addressed on the subject to his Grace the Archbishop of Dublin, and the late Bishop of Norwich,—to the former from Paris, to the latter from Alexandria. See A Pilgrimage to the Land of my Fathers, vol. i. pp. 6-15. Mr. Forster's work did not appear until about a year after the publication of part of the writer's travels.

MOSES MARGOLIOUTH.

ON A PASSAGE IN GOLDSMITH.

Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village, has the lines:

In this passage the fourth line, which I have given in italics, is traced by D'Israeli, in Curiosities of Literature, under the head of "Imitations and Similarities," to the French poet, De Caux, who, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says—

The turn given to the thought in the French has suggested to D'Israeli an emendation of the passage in Goldsmith. He proposes that the word "unmakes" should be substituted for "can make." The line would then read—

This emendation seems to me to be