The Hittites

The subsequent history of Shalmaneser concerns us but little. The power of the Hittites south of the Taurus had been broken for ever. The Semite had avenged himself for the conquest of his country by the northern mountaineers centuries before. They no longer formed a barrier which cut off the east from the west, and prevented the Semites of Assyria and Babylon from meeting the Semites of Phœnicia and Palestine. The intercourse which had been interrupted in the age of the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt could now be again resumed. Carchemish ceased to command the fords of the Euphrates, and was forced to acknowledge the supremacy of the Assyrian invader. In fact, the Hittites of Syria had become little more than tributaries of the Assyrian monarch. When an insurrection broke out among the Patinians, in consequence of which the rightful king was killed and his throne seized by an usurper, Shalmaneser claimed and exercised the right to interfere. A new sovereign was appointed by him, and he set up an image of himself in the capital city of the Patinian people.

The change that had come over the relations between the Assyrians and the Hittite population is marked by a curious fact. From the time of Shalmaneser onwards, the name of Hittite is no longer used by the Assyrian writers in a correct sense. It is extended so as to embrace all the inhabitants of Northern Syria on the western side of the Euphrates, and subsequently came to include the inhabitants of Palestine as well. Khatta or 'Hittite' became synonymous with Syrian. How this happened is not difficult to explain. The first populations of Syria with whom the Assyrians had come into contact were of Hittite origin. When their power was broken, and the Assyrian armies had forced their way past the barrier they had so long presented to the invader, it was natural that the states next traversed by the Assyrian generals should be supposed also to belong to them. Moreover, many of these states were actually dependent on the Hittite princes, though inhabited by an Aramean people. The Hittites had imposed their yoke upon an alien race of Aramean descent, and accordingly in Northern Syria Hittite and Aramean cities and tribes were intermingled together. 'I took,' says Shalmaneser, 'what the men of the land of the Hittites had called the city of Pethor (Pitru), which is upon the river Sajur (Sagura), on the further side of the Euphrates, and the city of Mudkînu, on the eastern side of the Euphrates, which Tiglath-pileser (I.), the royal forefather who went before me, had united to my country, and Assur-rab-buri king of Assyria and the king of the Arameans had taken (from it) by a treaty.' At a later date Shalmaneser marched from Pethor to Aleppo, and there offered sacrifices to 'the god of the city,' Hadad-Rimmon, whose name betrays the Semitic character of its population. The Hittites, in short, had never been more than a conquering upper class in Syria, like the Normans in Sicily; and as time went on the subject population gained more and more upon them. Like all similar aristocracies, they tended to die out or to be absorbed into the native population of the country.

They still held possession of Carchemish, however, and the decadence of the first Assyrian empire gave them an unexpected respite. But the revolution which placed Tiglath-pileser III. on the throne of Assyria, in B. C. 725, brought with it the final doom of Hittite supremacy. Assyria entered upon a new career of conquest, and under its new rulers established an empire which extended over the whole of Western Asia. In B. C. 717 Carchemish finally fell before the armies of Sargon, and its last king Pisiris became the captive of the Assyrian king. Its trade and wealth passed into Assyrian hands, it was colonised by Assyrians and placed under an Assyrian satrap. The great Hittite stronghold on the Euphrates, which had been for so many centuries the visible sign of their power and southern conquests, became once more the possession of a Semitic people. The long struggle that had been carried on between the Hittites and the Semites was at an end; the Semite had triumphed, and the Hittite was driven back into the mountains from whence he had come.

But he did not yield without a struggle. The year following the capture of Carchemish saw Sargon confronted by a great league of the northern peoples, Meshech, Tubal, Melitene and others, under the leadership of the king of Ararat. The league, however, was shattered in a decisive battle, the king of Ararat committed suicide, and in less than three years Komagênê was annexed to the Assyrian empire. The Semite of Nineveh was supreme in the Eastern world.

Ararat was the name given by the Assyrians to the district in the immediate neighbourhood of Lake Van, as well as to the country to the south of it. It was not until post-Biblical days that the name was extended to the north, so that the modern Mount Ararat obtained a title which originally belonged to the Kurdish range in the south. But Ararat was not the native name of the country. This was Biainas or Bianas, a name which still survives in that of Lake Van. Numerous inscriptions are scattered over the country, written in cuneiform characters borrowed from Nineveh in the time of Assur-natsir-pal or his son Shalmaneser, but in a language which bears no resemblance to that of Assyria. They record the building of temples and palaces, the offerings made to the gods, and the campaigns of the Vannic kings. Among the latter mention is made of campaigns against the Khâte or Hittites.

The first of these campaigns was conducted by a king called Menuas, who reigned in the ninth century before our era. He overran the land of Alzi, and then found himself in the land of the Hittites. Here he plundered the cities of Surisilis and Tarkhi-gamas, belonging to the Hittite prince Sada-halis, and captured a number of soldiers, whom he dedicated to the service of his god Khaldis. On another occasion he marched as far as the city of Malatiyeh, and after passing through the country of the Hittites, caused an inscription commemorating his conquests to be engraved on the cliffs of Palu. Palu is situated on the northern bank of the Euphrates, about midway between Malatiyeh and Van, and as it lies to the east of the ancient district of Alzi, we can form some idea of the exact geographical position to which the Hittites of Menuas must be assigned. His son and successor, Argistis I, again made war upon them, and we gather from one of his inscriptions that the city of Malatiyeh was itself included among their fortresses. The 'land of the Hittites,' according to the statements of the Vannic kings, stretched along the banks of the Euphrates from Palu on the east as far as Malatiyeh on the west.

The Hittites of the Assyrian monuments lived to the south-west of this region, spreading through Komagênê to Carchemish and Aleppo. The Egyptian records bring them yet further south to Kadesh on the Orontes, while the Old Testament carries the name into the extreme south of Palestine. It is evident, therefore, that we must see in the Hittite tribes fragments of a race whose original seat was in the ranges of the Taurus, but who had pushed their way into the warm plains and valleys of Syria and Palestine. They belonged originally to Asia Minor, not to Syria, and it was conquest only which gave them a right to the name of Syrians. 'Hittite' was their true title, and whether the tribes to which it belonged lived in Judah or on the Orontes, at Carchemish or in the neighbourhood of Palu, this was the title under which they were known. We must regard it as a national name, which clung to them in all their conquests and migrations, and marked them out as a peculiar people, distinct from the other races of the Eastern world. It is now time to see what their own monuments have to tell us regarding them, and the influence they exercised upon the history of mankind.

CHAPTER III.

THE HITTITE MONUMENTS.

It was a warm and sunny September morning when I left the little town of Nymphi near Smyrna with a strong escort of Turkish soldiers, and made my way to the Pass of Karabel. The Pass of Karabel is a narrow defile, shut in on either side by lofty cliffs, through which ran the ancient road from Ephesos in the south to Sardes and Smyrna in the north. The Greek historian Herodotos tells us that the Egyptian conqueror Sesostris had left memorials of himself in this place. 'Two images cut by him in the rock' were to be seen beside the roads which led 'from Ephesos to Phokaea and from Sardes to Smyrna. On either side a man is carved, a little over three feet in height, who holds a spear in the right hand and a bow in the left. The rest of his accoutrement is similar, for it is Egyptian and Ethiopian, and from one shoulder to the other, right across the breast, Egyptian hieroglyphics have been cut which declare: "I have won this land with my shoulders."'

These two images were the object of my journey. One of them had been discovered by Renouard in 1839, and shortly afterwards sketched by Texier; the other had been found by Dr. Beddoe in 1856. But visitors to the Pass in which they were engraved were few and far between; the cliffs on either side were the favourite haunt of brigands, and thirty soldiers were not deemed too many to protect my safety. My work of exploration had to be carried on under the shelter of their guns, for more than twenty bandits were lurking under the brushwood above.

The sculpture sketched by Texier had subsequently been photographed by Mr. Svoboda. It represents a warrior whose height is rather more than life-size, and who stands in profile with the right foot planted in front of him, in the attitude of one who is marching. In his right hand he holds a spear, behind his left shoulder is slung a bow, and the head is crowned with a high peaked cap. He is clad in a tunic which reaches to the knees, and his feet are shod with boots with turned-up ends. The whole figure is cut in deep relief in an artificial niche, and between the spear and the face are three lines of hieroglyphic characters. The figure faces south, and is carved on the face of the eastern cliff of Karabel.

It had long been recognised that the hieroglyphics were not those of Egypt, and Professor Perrot had also drawn attention to the striking resemblance between the style of art represented by this sculpture and that represented by certain rock-sculptures in Kappadokia, as well as by the sculptured image of a warrior discovered by himself at a place called Ghiaur-kalessi, 'the castle of the infidel,' in Phrygia, which is practically identical in form and character with the sculptured warrior of Karabel.

What was the origin of this art, or who were the people it commemorated, was a matter of uncertainty. A few weeks, however, before my visit to the Pass of Karabel, I announced[6] that I had come to the conclusion that the art was Hittite, and that the hieroglyphics accompanying the figure at Karabel would turn out, when carefully examined, to be Hittite also. The primary purpose of my visit to the pass was to verify this conclusion.

Let us now see how I had arrived at it. The story is a long one, and in order to understand it, it is necessary to transport ourselves from the Pass of Karabel in Western Asia Minor to Hamah, the site of the ancient Hamath, in the far east. It was here that the first discovery was made which has led by slow degrees to the reconstruction of the Hittite empire, and a recognition of the important part once played by the Hittites in the history of the civilised world.

As far back as the beginning of the present century (in 1812) the great Oriental traveller Burckhardt had noticed a block of black basalt covered with strange-looking hieroglyphics built into the corner of a house in one of the bazaars of Hamah[7]. But the discovery was forgotten, and the European residents in Hamah, like the travellers who visited the city, were convinced that 'no antiquities' were to be found there. Nearly sixty years later, however, when the American Palestine Exploration Society was first beginning its work, the American consul, Mr. Johnson, and an American missionary, Mr. Jessup, accidentally lighted again upon this stone, and further learned that three other stones of similar character, and inscribed with similar hieroglyphics, existed elsewhere in Hamah. One of them, of very great length, was believed to be endowed with healing properties. Rheumatic patients, Mohammedans and Christians alike, were in the habit of stretching themselves upon it, in the firm belief that their pains would be absorbed into the stone. The other inscribed stones were also regarded with veneration, which naturally increased when it was known that they were being sought after by the Franks; and the two Americans found it impossible to see them all, much less to take copies of the inscriptions they bore. They had to be content with the miserable attempts at reproducing them made by a native painter, one of which was afterwards published in America. The publication served to awaken the interest of scholars in the newly discovered inscriptions, and efforts were made by Sir Richard Burton and others to obtain correct impressions of them. All was in vain, however, and it is probable that the fanaticism or greed of the people of Hamah would have successfully resisted all attempts to procure trustworthy copies of the texts, had not a lucky accident brought Dr. William Wright to the spot. It is to his energy and devotion that the preservation of these precious relics of Hittite literature may be said to be due. 'On the 10th of November, 1872,' he tells us, he 'set out from Damascus, intent on securing the Hamah inscriptions. The Sublime Porte, seized by a periodic fit of reforming zeal, had appointed an honest man, Subhi Pasha, to be governor of Syria. Subhi Pasha brought a conscience to his work, and, not content with redressing wrongs that succeeded in forcing their way into his presence, resolved to visit every district of his province, in order that he might check the spoiler and discover the wants of the people. He invited me to accompany him on a tour to Hamah, and I gladly accepted the invitation.' Along with Mr. Green, the English Consul, accordingly, Dr. Wright joined the party of the Pasha; and, fearing that the same fate might befall the Hamath stones as had befallen the Moabite Stone, which had been broken into pieces to save it from the Europeans, persuaded him to buy them, and send them as a present to the Museum at Constantinople. When the news became known in Hamah, there were murmurings long and deep against the Pasha, and it became necessary, not only to appeal to the cupidity and fear of the owners of the stones, but also to place them under the protection of a guard of soldiers the night before the work of removing them was to commence.

The night was an anxious one to Dr. Wright; but when day dawned, the stones were still safe, and the labour of their removal was at once begun. It 'was effected by an army of shouting men, who kept the city in an uproar during the whole day. Two of them had to be taken out of the walls of inhabited houses, and one of them was so large that it took fifty men and four oxen a whole day to drag it a mile. The other stones were split in two, and the inscribed parts were carried on the backs of camels to the' court of the governor's palace. Here they could be cleaned and copied at leisure and in safety.

But the work of cleaning them from the accumulated dirt of ages occupied the greater part of two days. Then came the task of making casts of the inscriptions, with the help of gypsum which some natives had been bribed to bring from the neighbourhood. At length, however, the work was completed, and Dr. Wright had the satisfaction of sending home to England two sets of casts of these ancient and mysterious texts, one for the British Museum, the other for the Palestine Exploration Fund, while the originals themselves were safely deposited in the Museum of Constantinople. It was now time to inquire what the inscriptions meant, and who could have been the authors of them.

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 Phœnician, 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.

It was not long, therefore, before the learned world began to recognise that the newly-discovered script was the peculiar possession of the Hittite race. Dr. Hayes Ward was one of the first to do so, and the Trustees of the British Museum determined to institute excavations among the ruins of Carchemish. Meanwhile notice was drawn to a fact which showed that the Hittite characters, as we shall now call them, were employed, not only at Hamath and Carchemish, but in Asia Minor as well.

More than a century ago a German traveller had observed two figures carved on a wall of rock near Ibreez, or Ivris, in the territory of the ancient Lykaonia. One of them was a god, who carried in his hand a stalk of corn and a bunch of grapes, the other was a man, who stood before the god in an attitude of adoration. Both figures were shod with boots with upturned ends, and the deity wore a tunic that reached to his knees, while on his head was a peaked cap ornamented with horn-like ribbons. A century elapsed before the sculpture was again visited by an European traveller, and it was again a German who found his way to the spot. On this occasion a drawing was made of the figures, which was published by Ritter in his great work on the geography of the world. But the drawing was poor and imperfect, and the first attempt to do adequate justice to the original was made by the Rev. E. J. Davis in 1875. He published his copy, and an account of the monument, in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology the following year. He had noticed that the figures were accompanied by what were known at the time as Hamathite characters. Three lines of these were inserted between the face of the god and his uplifted left arm, four lines more were engraved behind his worshipper, while below, on a level with an aqueduct which fed a mill, were yet other lines of half-obliterated hieroglyphs. It was plain that in Lykaonia also, where the old language of the country still lingered in the days of St. Paul, the Hittite system of writing had once been used.

Another stone inscribed with Hittite characters had come to light at Aleppo. Like those of Hamath, it was of black basalt, and had been built into a modern wall. The characters upon it were worn by frequent attrition, the people of Aleppo believing that whoever rubbed his eyes upon it would be immediately cured of ophthalmia. More than one copy of the inscription was taken, but the difficulty of distinguishing the half-obliterated characters rendered the copies of little service, and a cast of the stone was about to be made when news arrived that the fanatics of Aleppo had destroyed it. Rather than allow its virtue to go out of it—to be stolen, as they fancied, by the Europeans—they preferred to break it in pieces. It is one of the many monuments that have perished at the very moment when their importance first became known.

This, then, was the state of our knowledge in the summer of 1879. We knew that the Hittites, with whom Hebrews and Egyptians and Assyrians had once been in contact, possessed a hieroglyphic system of writing, and that this system of writing was found on monuments in Hamath, Aleppo, Carchemish, and Lykaonia. We knew, too, that in Lykaonia it accompanied figures carved out of the rock in a peculiar style of art, and represented as wearing a peculiar kind of dress.

Suddenly the truth flashed upon me. This peculiar style of art, this peculiar kind of dress, was the same as that which distinguished the sculptures of Karabel, of Ghiaur-kalessi, and of Kappadokia. In all alike we had the same characteristic features, the same head-dresses and shoes, the same tunics, the same clumsy massiveness of design and characteristic attitude. The figures carved upon the rocks of Karabel and Kappadokia must be memorials of Hittite art. The clue to their origin and history was at last discovered; the birthplace of the strange art which had produced them was made manifest. A little further research made the fact doubly sure. The photographs Professor Perrot had taken of the monuments of Boghaz Keui in Kappadokia included one of an inscription in ten or eleven lines. The characters of this inscription were worn and almost illegible, but not only were they in relief, like the characters of all other Hittite inscriptions known at the time, among them two or three hieroglyphs stood out clearly, which were identical with those on the stones of Hamath and Carchemish. All that was needed to complete the verification of my discovery was to visit the Pass of Karabel, and see whether the hieroglyphs Texier and others had found there likewise belonged to the Hittite script.

More than three hours did I spend in the niche wherein the figure is carved which Herodotos believed was a likeness of the Egyptian Sesostris. It was necessary to take 'squeezes' as well as copies, if I would recover the characters of the inscription and ascertain their exact forms. My joy was great at finding that they were Hittite, and that the conclusion I had arrived at in my study at home was confirmed by the monument itself. The Sesostris of Herodotos turned out to be, not the great Pharaoh who contended with the Hittites of Kadesh, but a symbol of the far-reaching power and influence of his mighty opponents. Hittite art and Hittite writing, if not the Hittite name, were proved to have been known from the banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Ægean Sea.

The stone warrior of Karabel stands in his niche in the cliff at a considerable height above the path, and the direction in which he is marching is that which would have led him to Ephesos and the Mæander. His companion lies below, the block of stone out of which the second figure has been carved having been apparently shaken by an earthquake from the rocks above. This second figure is a duplicate of the first. Both stand in the same position, both are shod with the same snow-shoes, and both are armed with spear and bow. But the second figure has suffered much from the ill-usage of man. The upper part has been purposely chipped away, and it is not many years ago since a Yuruk's tent was pitched against the block of stone out of which it is carved, the niche in which the old warrior stands conveniently serving as the fire-place of the family. No trace of inscription remains, if indeed it ever existed. At any rate, it could not have run across the breast, as Herodotos asserts.

The account, indeed, given by Herodotos of these two figures can hardly have been that of an eye-witness. Instead of being little over three feet in height, they are more than life-size, and they hold their spears not in the right but in the left hand. Their accoutrement, moreover, is as unlike that of an 'Egyptian and Ethiopian' as it well could be, while the inscription is not traced across the breast, but between the face and the arm. Nor was the Greek historian correct in saying that the pass which the two warriors seem to guard leads not only from Ephesos to Phokæa, but also from Sardes to Smyrna. It is not until the pass is cleared at its northern end that the road which runs through it—the Karabel-déré, as the Turks now call it—joins the Belkaive, or road from Sardes to Smyrna. It is evident that Herodotos must have received his account of the figures from another authority, though his identification of them with the Egyptian Sesostris is his own.

Not far from Karabel another monument of Hittite art has been discovered. Hard by the town of Magnesia, on the lofty cliffs of Sipylos, a strange figure has been carved out of the rock. It represents a woman with long locks of hair streaming down her shoulders, and a jewel like a lotus-flower upon the head, who sits on a throne in a deep artificial niche. Lydian historians narrate that it was the image of the daughter of Assaon, who had sought death by casting herself down from a precipice; but Greek legend preferred to see in it the figure of 'weeping Niobe' turned to stone. Already Homer told how Niobê, when her twelve children had been slain by the gods, 'now changed to stone, broods over the woes the gods had brought, there among the rocks, in lonely mountains, even in Sipylos, where they say are the couches of the nymphs who dance on the banks of the Akheloios.' But it was only after the settlement of the Greeks in Lydia that the old monument on Mount Sipylos was held to be the image of Niobê. The limestone rock out of which it was carved dripped with moisture after rain, and as the water flowed over the face of the figure, disintegrating and disfiguring the stone as it ran, the pious Greek beheld in it the Niobê of his own mythology. The figure was originally that of the great goddess of Asia Minor, known sometimes as Atergatis or Derketo, sometimes as Kybelê, sometimes by other names. It is difficult for one who has seen the image of Nofert-ari, the favourite wife of Ramses II., seated in the niche of rock on the cliffs of Abu-simbel, not to believe that the artist who carved the image on Mount Sipylos had visited the Nile. At a little distance both have the same appearance, and a nearer examination shows that, although the Egyptian work is finer than the Lydian, it resembles it in a striking manner. We now know, however, that the 'Niobê' of Sipylos owes its origin to Hittite art. On the wall of rock out of which the niche is cut wherein the goddess sits Dr. Dennis discovered a cartouche containing Hittite characters. By tying some ladders together he and I succeeded in ascending to it, and taking paper impressions of the hieroglyphs. Among them is a character which has the meaning of 'king'[8].

How came these characters and these creations of Hittite art in a region so remote from that in which the Hittite kingdoms rose and flourished? How comes it that we find figures of Hittite warriors in the Pass of Karabel and on the rocks of Ghiaur-kalessi, and the image of a Hittite goddess on the cliffs of Sipylos? Whose was the hand that engraved the characters that accompany them,—characters which are the same as those which meet us on the stones of Hamath and Carchemish? We have now to learn what answers can be given to these questions.

CHAPTER IV.

THE HITTITE EMPIRE.

And they were found as soon as it was recognised that the curious monuments of Asia Minor, of which the warriors of Karabel and the sculptures of Ibreez are examples, were actually inspired by Hittite art. As soon as it was known that the art these monuments represented, and the peculiar form of writing which accompanied them, had their earliest home in the Syrian cities of the Hittite tribes, a new light broke over the prehistoric past of Asia Minor. These Hittite monuments can be traced in two continuous lines from Northern Syria and Kappadokia to the western extremity of the peninsula. They follow the two highways which once led out of Asia to Sardes and the shores of the Ægean. In the south they form as it were a series of stations at Ibreez and Bulgar Maden in Lykaonia, at Fassiler and Tyriaion between Ikonion and the Lake of Beyshehr, and finally in the Pass of Karabel. Northwards the line runs through the Taurus by Merash, and carries us first to the defile of Ghurun, and then to the great Kappadokian ruins of Boghaz Keui and Eyuk, from whence we pass by Ghiaur-kalessi and the burial-place of the old Phrygian kings, until we again reach the Lydian capital and the Pass of Karabel.

Westward of the Halys and Kappadokia they are marked by certain peculiarities. They are found either in the vicinity of silver mines, like those of Lykaonia, or else on the line of the ancient roads, which finally converged in Lydia. None have been discovered in the central plateau of Asia Minor, in the mountains of Lykia in the south, or the wide-reaching coast-lands of the north. They mark the sites of small colonies, or else the lines of road that connected them. Moreover, with the exception of the image of the goddess who sits on her throne in Mount Sipylos, the western monuments represent the figures of warriors who are in the act of marching forward. This is the case at Karabel; it is also the case at Ghiaur-kalessi, where the rock on which the two Hittite warriors are carved lies close below the remains of a pre-historic fortress.

Such facts admit of only one explanation. The Hittite monuments of Western Asia Minor must be memorials of military conquest and supremacy. In the warriors whose figures stood on either side of the Pass of Karabel, the sculptor must have seen the visible symbols of Hittite power. They showed that the Hittite had won and kept the pass by force of arms. They are emblems of conquest, not creations of native art.

But it was inevitable that conquest should bring with it a civilising influence. The Hittites could not carry with them the art and culture they had acquired in the East without influencing the barbarous populations over whom they claimed to rule. The vassal chieftains of Lydia and the Troad could not lead their forces into Syria, or assist in the invasion of Egypt, without learning something of that ancient civilisation with which they had come in contact. The Hittites, in fact, must be regarded as the first teachers of the rude populations of the West. They brought to them a culture the first elements of which had been inspired by Babylonia; they brought also a system of writing out of which, in all probability, the natives of Asia Minor afterwards developed a writing of their own.

It is possible, therefore, that some of the Hittite monuments of Asia Minor are the work, not of the Hittites themselves, but of the native populations whom they had civilised and instructed. It may be that this is the case at Ibreez, where the faces of the god and his worshipper have Jewish features very unlike those found on monuments of purely Hittite origin. But apart from such instances, where the monument is due to Hittite influence rather than to Hittite artists, it is certain that most of the Hittite memorials of Asia Minor are the productions of the Hittites themselves. This is proved by the hieroglyphs which are attached to them, as well as by the uniform type of feature and dress which prevails from Carchemish to the Ægean. It is impossible to explain such an uniformity, and still more the extraordinary resemblance between the characters engraved at Karabel, or on Mount Sipylos, and those which meet us in the inscriptions of Hamath and Carchemish, except on the supposition that the monuments were executed by men who belonged to the same race and spoke the same language. Wherever Hittite inscriptions occur, we find in them the same combinations of hieroglyphs as well as the use of the same characters to denote grammatical suffixes.

We may, then, rest satisfied with the conclusion that the existence of a Hittite empire extending into Asia Minor is certified, not only by the records of ancient Egypt, but also by Hittite monuments which still exist. In the days of Ramses II., when the children of Israel were groaning under the tasks allotted to them, the enemies of their oppressors were already exercising a power and a domination which rivalled that of Egypt. The Egyptian monarch soon learned to his cost that the Hittite prince was as 'great' a king as himself, and could summon to his aid the inhabitants of the unknown north. Pharaoh's claim to sovereignty was disputed by adversaries as powerful as the ruler of Egypt, if indeed not more powerful, and there was always a refuge among them for those who were oppressed by the Egyptian king.

When, however, we speak of a Hittite empire we must understand clearly what that means. It was not an empire like that of Rome, where the subject provinces were consolidated together under a central authority, obeying the same laws and the same supreme head. It was not an empire like that of the Persians, or of the Assyrian successors of Tiglath-pileser III., which represented the organised union of numerous states and nations under a single ruler. Such a conception of empire was due to Tiglath-pileser III., and his successor Sargon; it was a new idea in the world, and had never been realised before. The first Assyrian empire, like the foreign empire of Egypt, was of an altogether different character. It depended on the military enterprise and strength of individual monarchs. As long as the Assyrian or Egyptian king could lead his armies into distant territories, and compel their inhabitants to pay him tribute and homage, his empire extended over them. But hardly had he returned home laden with spoil than we find the subject populations throwing off their allegiance and asserting their independence, while the death of the conqueror brought with it almost invariably the general uprising of the tribes and cities his arms had subdued. Before the days of Tiglath-pileser, in fact, empire in Western Asia meant the power of a prince to force a foreign people to submit to his rule. The conquered provinces had to be subdued again and again; but as long as this could be done, as long as the native struggles for freedom could be crushed by a campaign, so long did the empire exist.

It was an empire of this sort that the Hittites established in Asia Minor. How long it lasted we cannot say. But so long as the distant races of the West answered the summons to war of the Hittite princes, it remained a reality. The fact that the tribes of the Troad and Lydia are found fighting under the command of the Hittite kings of Kadesh, proves that they acknowledged the supremacy of their Hittite lords, and followed them to battle like the vassals of some feudal chief. If Hittite armies had not marched to the shores of the Ægean, and Hittite princes been able from time to time to exact homage from the nations of the far west, Egypt would not have had to contend against the populations of Asia Minor in its wars with the Hittites, and the figures of Hittite warriors would not have been sculptured on the rocks of Karabel. There was a time when the Hittite name was feared as far as the western extremity of Asia Minor, and when Hittite satraps had their seat in the future capital of Lydia.

Traditions of this period lingered on into classical days. The older dynasty of Lydian kings traced its descent from Bel and Ninos, the Babylonian or Assyrian gods, whose names had been carried by the Hittites into the remote west. The Lydian hero Kayster, who gave his name to the Kaystrian plain, was fabled to have wandered into Syria, and there, after wooing Semiramis, to have been the father of Derketo, the goddess of Carchemish. A Lydian was even said to have drowned Derketo in the sacred lake of Ashkelon; and Eusebius declares that Sardes, the Lydian capital, was captured for the first time in B. C. 1078, by a horde of invaders from the north-western regions of Asia.

But it is in the famous legend of the Amazons that we must look for the chief evidence preserved to us by classical antiquity of the influence once exercised by the Hittites in Asia Minor. The Amazons were imagined to be a nation of female warriors, whose primitive home lay in Kappadokia, on the banks of the Thermodon, not far from the ruins of Boghaz Keui. From hence they had issued forth to conquer the people of Asia Minor and to found an empire which reached to the Ægean Sea. The building of many of the most famous cities on the Ægean coast was ascribed to them,—Myrina and Kyme, Smyrna and Ephesos, where the worship of the great Asiatic goddess was carried on with barbaric ceremonies into the later age of civilised Greece.

Now these Amazons are nothing more than the priestesses of the Asiatic goddess, whose cult spread from Carchemish along with the advance of the Hittite armies. She was served by a multitude of armed priestesses and eunuch priests; under her name of Ma, for instance, no less than six thousand of them waited on her at Komana in Kappadokia. Certain cities, in fact, like Komana and Ephesos, were dedicated to her service, and a large part of the population accordingly became the armed ministers of the mighty goddess. Generally these were women, as at Ephesos in early days, where they obeyed a high-priestess, who called herself 'the queen-bee.' When Ephesos passed into Greek hands, the goddess worshipped there was identified with the Greek Artemis, and a high-priest took the place of the high-priestess. But the priestess of Artemis still continued to be called 'a bee,' reminding us that Deborah or 'Bee' was the name of one of the greatest of the prophetesses of ancient Israel; and the goddess herself continued to be depicted under the same form as that which had belonged to her in Hittite days. On her head was the so-called mural crown, the Hittite origin of which has now been placed beyond doubt by the sculptures of Boghaz Keui, while her chariot was drawn by lions. It was from the Hittites, too, that Artemis received her sacred animal, the goat.

The 'spear-armed host' of the Amazons, which came from Kappadokia, which conquered Asia Minor, and was so closely connected with the worship of the Ephesian Artemis, can be no other than the priestesses of the Hittite goddess, who danced in her honour armed with the shield and bow. In ancient art the Amazons are represented as clad in the Hittite tunic and brandishing the same double-headed axe that is held in the hands of some of the Hittite deities on the rocks of Boghaz Keui, while the 'spear' lent to them by the Greek poet brings to our recollection the spear held by the warriors of Karabel. We cannot explain the myth of the Amazons except on the supposition that they represented the armed priestesses of the Hittite goddess, and that a tradition of the Hittite empire in Asia Minor has entwined itself around the story of their arrival in the West. The cities they are said to have founded must have been the seats of Hittite rule.

The Hittites were intruders in Syria as well as in Western Asia Minor. Everything points to the conclusion that they had descended from the ranges of the Taurus. Their costume was that of the inhabitants of a cold and mountainous region, not of the warm valleys of the south. In place of the trailing robes of the Syrians, the national costume was a tunic which did not quite reach to the knees. It was only after their settlement in the Syrian cities that they adopted the dress of the country; the sculptured rocks of Asia Minor represent them with the same short tunic as that which distinguished the Dorians of Greece or the ancient inhabitants of Ararat. But the most characteristic portion of the Hittite garb were the shoes with upturned ends. Wherever the figure of a Hittite is portrayed, there we find this peculiar form of boot. It reappears among the hieroglyphs of the inscriptions, and the Egyptian artists who adorned the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes have placed it on the feet of the Hittite defenders of Kadesh. The boot is really a snow-shoe, admirably adapted for walking over snow, but ill-suited for the inhabitants of a level or cultivated country. The fact that it was still used by the Hittites of Kadesh in the warm fertile valley of the Orontes proves better than any other argument that they must have come from the snow-clad mountains of the north. It is like the shoe of similar shape which the Turks have carried with them in their migrations from the north and introduced amongst the natives of Syria and Egypt. It indicates with unerring certainty the northern origin of the Turkish conqueror. He stands in the same relation to the modern population of Syria that the Hittites stood to the Arameans of Kadesh three thousand years ago.

Equally significant is the long fingerless glove which is one of the most frequent of Hittite hieroglyphs. The thumb alone is detached from the rest of the bag in which the fingers were enclosed. Such a glove is an eloquent witness to the wintry cold of the regions from which its wearers came, and a similar glove is still used during the winter months by the peasants of modern Kappadokia.

We may find another evidence of the northern descent of the Hittite tribes in the hieroglyph which is used in the sense of 'country.' It represents two, or sometimes three, pointed mountains, whose forms, as was remarked some years ago, resemble those of the mountains about Kaisariyeh, the Kappadokian capital.

If we leave Kadesh and proceed northwards, the local names bear more and more the peculiar stamp of a Hittite origin. We leave Semitic names like Kadesh, 'the sanctuary,' behind us, and at length find ourselves in a district where the geographical names no longer admit of a Semitic etymology. It is just this district, moreover, in which Hittite inscriptions first become plentiful. The first met with to the south are the stones of Hamath and the lost inscription of Aleppo; but from Carchemish northwards we now know that numbers of them still exist. The territory covered by them is a square, the base of which is formed by a line running from Carchemish through Antioch into Lykaonia, while the remains at Boghaz Keui and Eyuk constitute its northern limit. We must regard this region as having been the primeval home and starting-point of the Hittite race. They will have been a population which clustered round the two flanks of the Taurus range, extending far into Kappadokia on the north, and towards Armenia on the east.

They preserved their independence on the banks of the Halys in Kappadokia for nearly two hundred years after the fall of Carchemish. It was not long before the overthrow of Lydia by Cyrus that Krœsos, the Lydian king, destroyed the cities of Pteria, where the ruins of Boghaz Keui and Eyuk now stand, and enslaved their inhabitants, thus avenging upon them the conquest of his own country by their ancestors so many centuries before. Herodotos calls them 'Syrians,' a name which is qualified as 'White Syrians' by the Greek geographer Strabo. It was in this way that the Greek writer wished to distinguish them from the dark-coloured Syrians of Aramean or Jewish birth, with whom he was otherwise acquainted; and it reminds us that, whereas the Egyptian artists painted the Hittites with yellow skins, they painted the Syrians with red. It is an interesting fact that the memory of their relationship to the population on the Syrian side of the Taurus should have been preserved so long among these Hittites of Kappadokia.