The recent recovery of the Revelation of St. Peter has again attracted attention to this branch of apocalyptic literature. Speculation has been rife as to the sources of that Revelation.

I intend publishing now, for the first time in English garb, the oldest extant Revelations which must have served as source to that of Peter, then to that of Paul, Ezra, Abraham, Isaiah, Virgin Mary, St. Macarius, and the host of others down to Dante and St. Patrick.

For the last twenty years the question of the decipherment of the hieroglyphic texts found in Syria and Asia Minor, representing a distinct written character, has excited the interest of Orientalists; and for the last five the question has been much discussed in England and abroad. Fresh monuments have been copied by Puchstein and Hogarth, and a second bilingual has been recovered from Cilicia; but the number of texts which are of any length, or at all complete, is only two dozen, and we are still at the very beginning of the study. We may expect, however, that the successors of those who recovered the Egyptian and Cuneiform systems will, in the end, not fail to conquer a third system, the study of which must be conducted on the same principles, and must result from the same gradual advance, which led to the former final results.

The study of Akkadian is based on upwards of thirty bilingual inscriptions of considerable length, the texts having been translated into Assyrian in the seventh century B.C. The affinity of the language to the Mongolic dialects of Central Asia, and especially to the Uigur and Turkish, is very generally recognized by scholars, the syntax and grammar, not less than the vocabulary, pointing to such comparison. The following notes refer to points which are not generally mentioned in former treatises on the subject, but which seem clearly deducible from a study of the texts, and from comparison with living languages.