If it has been a surprise to learn that Palestine was once within the circle of Babylonian culture, it has been equally a surprise to learn that Asia Minor was so too. It is true that Herodotus traced the Herakleid dynasty of Lydian kings to the gods of Nineveh and Babylon, that Strabo knew of a “mound of Semiramis” in Cappadocia, and that in the Book of Genesis Lud is called the son of Shem. But historians had long agreed that all such beliefs were creations of a later day, and rested on no substratum of fact. The northern limits of Babylonian or Assyrian influence, it was held, were fixed by the Taurus and the mountains of Kurdistan.

The discovery of cuneiform inscriptions on the stones and rocks of Armenia made the first breach in this conclusion. Their existence was known even before Botta and Layard had opened up Nineveh. In 1826 Schulz had been sent by the French Government at the instance of M. Mohl to copy the mysterious characters which had already excited the attention of Oriental writers. Schulz was unexpectedly successful in his quest. The number of inscriptions he discovered was far larger than had been imagined, and his copies of them, as we now know, were remarkably accurate. But the explorer himself never lived to return to Europe. He was murdered by a Kurdish chief, Nurallah Bey, in 1829, while engaged in the work of exploration; his papers, however, were eventually recovered, and the inscriptions he had copied were published in 1840 in the Journal of the Société Asiatique. One of them was a trilingual inscription of Xerxes, the Persian transcript of which was just beginning to be deciphered; the rest were still a closed book.

Then came the discovery of Nineveh and the first essays at the interpretation of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. Layard himself made an expedition to Armenia, and besides recopying Schulz’s texts and correcting certain inaccuracies in them, added considerably to the collection. Dr. Hincks, with his usual genius for decipherment, perceived that the syllabary in which they were written was the same as that used at Nineveh, and utilized them for determining the values of some of the Assyrian characters. He succeeded in reading most of the proper names, in assigning the inscriptions to a group of kings whose order he was able to fix, and in pointing out that many of them contain an account of military campaigns and of the amount of booty which had been carried off. But it was also clear that the inscriptions were not in a Semitic language, and as the nominative and accusative of the noun seemed to terminate in -s and -n, while the patronymic was expressed by the suffix -khinis, the decipherer assumed that the language was Indo-European. The most important texts had been found in or near Van, which had apparently been the capital of the kings by whose orders they had been engraved, and the name of Vannic, accordingly, was given to both texts and language.

It was soon recognized that Dr. Hincks had been in error in suggesting that the Vannic language was Indo-European. It was, it is true, inflectional, but with this any resemblance to the languages of the Indo-European family ceased. Nor was there any other language or group of languages to which it appeared to be related, and all attempts failed to advance the decipherment much beyond the point at which it had been left by Hincks. Thanks to the “determinatives,” which indicate proper names and the like, and the ideographs, which are fairly plentiful, the general sense of many of the inscriptions could be made out; but beyond that it seemed impossible to go. Lenormant, indeed, following Hincks, showed that the suffix -bi denoted the first person singular of the verb, and indicated Georgian as possibly a related language; but in the hands of other would-be decipherers, like Robert and Mordtmann, there was retrogression instead of advance.

So matters remained until 1882, when Stanislas Guyard pointed out the parallelism between a formula which occurs at the end of many Vannic inscriptions and the imprecatory formula of the Assyrian texts. I had already been struck by the same fact, and was at the time preparing a Memoir on the decipherment and translation of the inscriptions, which shortly afterwards appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In this I had made use of Layard’s copies, which had never been published; other copies also, including photographs, squeezes and casts, had been placed at my disposal, and in 1882 I was able to lay before cuneiform scholars a grammar and vocabulary of the Vannic language, together with translations and analyses of all the known texts.[133] These have been subsequently corrected and extended by other Assyriologists—Guyard, D. H. Müller, Nikolsky, Scheil, Belck and Lehmann, as well as by myself. An ordinary Vannic text can now be translated with nearly as much completeness and certainty as an Assyrian text, and the number of them known to us has been greatly enlarged by the archæological explorations of Belck and Lehmann.

In the decipherment of the Vannic inscriptions the ideographs and determinatives which are scattered through them took the place for me of a bilingual text. The determinatives told me what was the nature of the words which followed or preceded them, and so explained the general sense of the passages in which they occurred, while from time to time a phonetically-written word would be replaced in a parallel passage by an ideograph the signification of which was known. I soon found, moreover, that the cuneiform syllabary must have been brought from Nineveh to Van in the age of Assur-natsir-pal II. (B.C. 884–859), and that the actual phrases met with in the inscriptions of that monarch are sometimes reproduced in a Vannic dress. The Vannic language, however, still remains isolated, though the majority of those who have studied it incline to Lenormant’s view that its nearest living representative is Georgian. Not being a Georgian scholar myself, this is a point upon which I can express no opinion.

Instead of “Vannic,” it has been proposed to call the language “Khaldian.” The chief god of the people who spoke the language was Khaldis, and in the inscriptions we find the people themselves described as “the children of Khaldis.” Derivatives from the name are found employed in a geographical sense northward of the region to which the inscriptions belong. Thus the Khaldi “in the neighbourhood of Colchis” are said to have been also called Khaldæi;[134] “Khaldees” are frequently referred to by Armenian writers as living between Trapezont and Batûm, and a Turkish inscription at Sumela shows that as late as the beginning of the fifteenth century Lazistân was still known as Khaldia. That the name was ever applied, however, to the kingdom which had its chief seat at Van is not proved, and it is therefore best to adhere to the term “Vannic,” which commits those who use it to no theory.[135]

The decipherment of the Vannic texts has not only led to the discovery of a new language, it has also thrown a flood of light on the early history, geography and religion of the Armenian plateau. The military campaigns of the Assyrian kings had brought it into contact with Assyrian civilization, and in the ninth century before our era a dynasty arose which adopted the literary culture and art of Assyria, and founded a powerful kingdom which extended its sway from Urumia on the east to Malatia on the west, and from the slopes of Ararat and the shores of Lake Erivan to the northern frontiers of Assyria.

The main fact which has thus been disclosed is that the Armenians of history—the Aryan tribes, that is to say, who spoke an Indo-European language—did not enter the country and establish themselves in the place of its older rulers before the end of the seventh century before our era. The fall of the Vannic monarchy seems to have coincided with the fall of the Assyrian Empire, with which it had once contended on almost equal terms, and in each case the invasion of the so-called Scythian hordes from the plains of Eastern Europe had much to do with the result. The founders of Armenian civilization and of the cities of the Armenian plateau had no connection with the Indo-European family. Their type of language corresponded with that which distinguishes most of the actual languages of the Caucasus, though no genetic relationship is traceable between them. The break with the past, however, occasioned by the irruption of the Indo-European invaders, was so great that not only did the older language become extinct and forgotten, but even the tradition of the older civilization was also lost. Like the recovery of the Sumerian language and the culture it represented, the recovery of the Vannic language and culture is the revelation of a new world.

At the head of the pantheon was a trinity consisting of Khaldis, the supreme god of the race; Teisbas, the god of the air; and the Sun-god Ardinis. Temples were erected in their honour, and shields and spears dedicated to their service. The vine, which grows wild in Armenia, was the sacred tree of the people, and there are inscriptions which commemorate its planting and consecration, and describe the endowments that were set apart for its maintenance. Wine was naturally offered to the gods along with the domestic animals and prisoners of war. Dr. Belck has discovered burial-places which go back to the neolithic age, but the majority of the monuments scattered over the Vannic area belong to the bronze age, and testify to a native adaptation of Assyrian art and culture. Iron also makes its appearance, but scantily. The pottery of the age of the inscriptions is related on the one side to the Assyrian pottery of the same period, and on the other to the pottery of Asia Minor. The polished red ware more especially points to the west.[136]

The existence of a language of the Caucasian type in Armenia, and its association with a powerful kingdom and an advanced culture, is not the only revelation of the kind that we owe to cuneiform decipherment. We have learned that at a much earlier epoch Northern Mesopotamia was occupied by a people who spoke a language of similar type but of far more complicated form; and that here, too, the language in question was accompanied by a high civilization, a powerful monarchy, and the use of the cuneiform syllabary. The monarchy was that of Mitanni, and its culture and script had been borrowed from Babylonia in the age of Khammu-rabi, instead of from Assyria in the age of Assur-natsir-pal. But it is interesting to observe that in borrowing the script the people of Mitanni had adapted and simplified it in precisely the same way as did the people of Van in after days. Superfluous characters were discarded, a single phonetic value only assigned to each character, and large use made of those which expressed vowels. In fact, in both Mitannian and Vannic the system of writing begins to approach the alphabetic. Whether this similarity in adaptation was due to a similarity of phonetic structure in the two languages or to conscious imitation on the part of the Vannic scribes it is difficult to say; it is a point, however, which cannot be passed over.

The name of Mitanni meets us on the Egyptian monuments of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties. The kingdom played a considerable part at that period of time in the politics of Western Asia, and the daughters of its kings were married to the Egyptian Pharaohs. The boundaries of the Egyptian Empire were coterminous with those of Mitanni, and we gather from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence that the Mitannian forces had more than once made their way into Palestine, perhaps as far south as Jerusalem, and that Mitannian intrigue was active in that portion of the Pharaoh’s dominions. Among the Canaanitish governors are some who bear Mitannian names, and testify to the continuance of a Mitannian element in that common meeting-place of nationalities.

Several letters from the Mitannian king have been found among the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Most of them are written in the Babylonian language, but one—and fortunately an exceptionally long one—though in cuneiform characters, is in the native language of the country. A comparison of it with its companion letters, assisted by the determinatives and ideographs which are employed in it from time to time, has enabled Jensen, Leopold Messerschmidt and myself to decipher a very considerable part of the letter, and so to compile a grammar and vocabulary of the Mitannian language. That it is distantly related to Vannic seems to admit of little doubt, but it comes before us in a much more developed form; indeed, its system of suffixes is so elaborate and ponderous as to remind us of the polysynthetic languages of America.

A legal document found in Babylonia and dated in the epoch of Khammu-rabi contains a number of proper names which are of Mitannian or allied origin, and show that persons of that race were already settled in Babylonia.[137] As the Mitannian form of cuneiform script must have been borrowed about the same time, we may infer that the advanced guard of the northern race had already made its way as far south as Mesopotamia, and there established its power in the midst of a Semitic population. From that time forward a constant struggle went on between the two races, the Semitic race striving to push back the northern intruders and planting its own colonies in the very heart of the northern area, while the northerners pressed ever more and more to the southward, and at one time even seemed likely to possess themselves of the heritage of the Babylonian Empire in Western Asia. Like Armenia, Northern Mesopotamia was occupied by a people of Caucasian and Asianic affinities, whose armies had crossed the Euphrates and won territory in Syria and Palestine.

On the west, however, the Mitannians found themselves confronted by another northern population, the Hittites, whose first home was in Cappadocia. The Hittites also had passed under the spell of Babylonian culture, and the cuneiform script had been carried to them at an early date. Thanks to recent discoveries, we can now trace in some measure the earlier fortunes of a race who made a profound impression, not only on the future history of Asia Minor and its relations with Greece, but also on the history of Palestine.

As far back as about B.C. 2000, Babylonian or Assyrian troops had already made their way along the northern banks of the Tigris and Euphrates to the borders of Cappadocia and the neighbourhood of the Halys. I say Babylonian or Assyrian, for Assyria was at the time a province of Babylonia, though as the colonies which settled in the track of the invaders were distinctively Assyrian in their municipal customs and the names of their inhabitants, the troops were probably drafted from Assyria.[138] The mineral wealth of Cappadocia was doubtless the attraction which led them to such distant and semibarbarous lands; Dr. Gladstone’s analysis of the gold of the Sixth Egyptian dynasty, with its admixture of silver, has shown that it was imported from the north of Asia Minor,[139] and the silver itself was probably already worked. Further south, in the Taurus, were mines of copper.

However this may be, the remains of one of these early Assyro-Babylonian colonies has been partially excavated a few miles (twenty-three kilometres) to the north-east of Kaisariyeh.[140] The site is now known as Kara Eyuk, “the Black Mound,” and numerous cuneiform tablets have come from it. It has obtained its present name from the marks of fire which are everywhere visible upon it, and bear eloquent testimony to its final fate. Established as an outpost of the Assyrian Empire in the distant west, a time came when, deserted by the Government at home, its strong walls were battered down by the besieging foe and the Assyrian settlers massacred among the ruins of their burning town. According to M. Chantre, its excavator (who, however, believes that it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption), the whole mound is a mass of charred and burnt remains.

The construction of the walls, as well as the pottery found within them, marks it off with great distinctness from the ruins of the Hittite or native Cappadocian cities in its neighbourhood. While in their case the city wall is made of unmortared blocks of stone, the walls of Kara Eyuk are built of brick, and where stones are used they are of small size and cemented with mortar. The pottery differs considerably from that of the Hittite capital at Boghaz Keui. Some of it is of black ware, especially characterized by the vases with long spouts, which are also found in Phrygia and the Troad. Some of it, again, is of the dark-red lustrous ware which has been met with at Toprak Kaleh, near Van, and Boz Eyuk in Phrygia, while the yellow ware with geometrical patterns in black and maroon-red which has been discovered in Phrygia occurs in large quantities. This latter ware is of the class known as “Mykenæan.”[141]

The cuneiform tablets which have come from the site are known as “Cappadocian,” and were first noticed by Dr. Pinches. The forms of the characters resemble those of the early Babylonian script, which was still used in Assyria in the age of Khammu-rabi. Many of the proper names, moreover, seem to be distinctive of that period. On the other hand, a large proportion of them contain the name of Asur—often in its primitive form of Asir—or are otherwise characteristic of Assyria. The tablets are further dated by the archons who gave their names to the years, a system of chronology which was peculiar to Assyria and unknown in Babylonia, while the month was divided into “weeks” of five days each. The language of the tablets also, which is full of dialectic mispronunciations and strange words, points to Assyria rather than to the southern kingdom, and we may therefore conclude that the colonists were Assyrians, even though the colony may have been founded when Assyria was still a Babylonian province.

There are indications in the Assyrian inscriptions themselves that the road to Cappadocia was known to the Assyrian princes at an early epoch. The earliest Assyrian kings whose annals have come down to us are Hadad-nirari I. and his son Shalmaneser I. (B.C. 1300). Hadad-nirari tells us that his greatgrandfather, Assur-yuballidh, whose letters form part of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, had subdued “the wide-spread” province of Subari, which lay near the sources of the Euphrates, and in which Kara Eyuk was perhaps included, while he himself restored the cities of the same province which had fallen into ruin. Later, Shalmaneser I. conducted campaign after campaign towards the same region. In his second year he overthrew the king of Malatia, and the combined forces of the other “Hittite” states, who had come to his assistance: “all were conquered,” from the borders of Cappadocia to the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish. A military colony was settled at the head waters of the Tigris which secured the high-road to Asia Minor.

Two centuries later we learn from Tiglath-pileser I. that Moschians and Hittites had overrun part of this Assyrian territory, and occupied some of the Assyrian settlements. Once more, therefore, the Assyrian troops marched to the north-west; the provinces which lay in the valley of the Murad-chai were recovered, and the old province of Subari cleared of intruders. Soon afterwards Tiglath-pileser forced his way into Southern Cappadocia and the valley of the Sarus, making Comana tributary, razing to the ground the fortresses that had resisted him, and erecting on their site chambers of brick, with bronze tablets on which his conquests were recorded. Eastern Cilicia was known at the time to the Assyrians as Muzri, or “the Marchland,” a clear proof that it had long formed a borderland and debatable territory between the Assyrian Empire and the nations of Asia Minor.

It is thus evident that even before the rise of the Assyrian monarchy, the road that led to the mining districts of Cappadocia, along the valleys of the Upper Tigris, Euphrates and Tokhma Su, was not only known to the Assyro-Babylonians, but had actually constituted Assyrian territory, which was colonized by Assyrian garrisons and paid tribute to Nineveh whenever Assyria was strong enough to enforce its authority. At the eastern extremity of the road stood the city of unknown name, now represented by “the Burnt Mound” of Kara Eyuk, whose existence as an Assyro-Babylonian city probably dates back to the age of Khammu-rabi.

It was the outpost of Babylonian culture in Asia Minor. Babylonian art, and, above all, the Babylonian system of writing, were brought by it into the heart of the Hittite region, and the archæological objects found there consequently become important for chronological dating. Not far off, on the other side of the Halys, rose the Hittite capital, now known as Boghaz Keui, the centre from which, as Professor Ramsay has shown,[142] the early roads of Asia Minor radiated in all directions.

Boghaz Keui is being excavated at the present moment. Hundreds of clay tablets have already been found there, inscribed with cuneiform characters, the majority of which are in the native Hittite language, though many are in Semitic Babylonian, including a copy of the famous treaty between Ramses II. and the Hittite king. So far as the tablets have been examined, they show that the Hittite empire extended from the west of Asia Minor to the Egyptian frontier, and that the cuneiform characters were used in ordinary life.

By one of those coincidences which sometimes happen in archæological research, the discovery fits with another fact which had long been in the possession of the Assyriologist, though the full meaning of it was unknown to him. Among the Tel el-Amarna letters are two in a language unlike any with which we are acquainted. One of them is from a Hittite leader of condottieri,[143] who has left us two other letters which are in the Assyrian language, and who came from a town in the neighbourhood of Cilicia. The second letter was written to the king of Arzawa by one of the foreign secretaries of the Egyptian Government. But the situation of Arzawa was wholly uncertain; as the king bore the Hittite name of Tarkhundaraba, I suggested that it lay in the Hittite territory, and that consequently in the language of the letter we had a fragment of the Hittite language. For many years, however, this remained a mere conjecture, without any definite proofs.

When the fragmentary tablets from Boghaz Keui came to be copied, it was at once perceived that they were in a language which resembled that of the Arzawa letters, but it was not until the new tablet from Constantinople had been cleaned and copied by Dr. Pinches and myself that the actual facts became clear. The Arzawa and Boghaz Keui texts agree in the forms given to the characters, in grammar and in vocabulary. Arzawa, therefore, must have been the Hittite kingdom which had its centre at Boghaz Keui, and already in the age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty it was employing a form of the cuneiform script which implied a long preceding period of use and adaptation. A new realm has thus to be added to the domain of the cuneiform system of writing; in Syria the Hittite king of Kadesh wrote to the Pharaoh in Babylonian, but in his old home in the north, though the Babylonian syllabary had been adopted, the language it served to express was that of the Hittites themselves.

A certain amount of this Hittite language of Arzawa can be deciphered, thanks to those same determinatives and ideographs which have assisted so materially towards the decipherment of the Vannic texts, and more especially to the recurrence in the two Tel el-Amarna letters of phrases that are common to the whole correspondence. The new tablet, however, is more than usually helpful, since it contains Assyrian words and grammatical forms which in parallel passages of the same text are replaced by native equivalents. In this way a sketch of Arzawan grammar can now be made, as well as a list of Arzawan words. The language which is thus disclosed is of an Asianic type, with features that remind us of Lycian on the one side, and of Mitannian and Vannic on the other. But in what may be termed the fundamentals of grammar it agrees with Mitannian and Vannic.

At the same time, certain of these same fundamentals have a curious but superficial resemblance to what we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as characteristics of Indo-European grammar. The nominative and accusative of the noun, for example, are distinguished by the suffixes -s and -n, the plural nominative and accusative often terminate in -s, and the possessive pronouns of Arzawan are mi-s, “mine”; ti-s, “thine”; and sa(s), “his”; while si is “(to) her.” The third person of the present tense ends in -t; es-tu, is “may it be”; es-mi, “may I be.” Yet with all these remarkable coincidences, I can assure the comparative philologist that Arzawan is certainly not an Indo-European language, and I must leave him to explain them as best he may.

We have, however, learnt a good deal more about the Hittite populations of Asia Minor from the Tel el-Amarna tablets than the nature of the language which they spoke. In the closing days of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty we find them on the southern side of the Taurus, sending forth bands of adventurers, who hired their services to the king of Egypt and to the rival governors and princes of Palestine, and from time to time carved out principalities of their own with the sword. We are even able to follow the fortunes of some of the leaders of the condottieri, who had no scruple in transferring their allegiance from one vassal prince to another when tempted by the prospect of better pay, or in murdering their employer when the opportunity arose, and plundering or occupying his city. They had, it is true, a wholesome awe of Egyptian power and of the Egyptian army, and some of the letters they wrote to the Egyptian court are amusing examples of the excuses they offered for their misdeeds. But they never hesitated about seizing the Pharaoh’s property when they thought they could do so with impunity, while they were all the time professing to be his devoted slaves. A considerable number of the vassal princes of Canaan kept these mercenaries in their pay, and in many cases the Egyptian Foreign Office thought it wisest to confirm one of their leaders in the government of a district, however doubtful might have been the means by which it had come into his hands. So long as the tribute was paid, and the imperial authority acknowledged, no further questions were asked. The mercenaries were useful at times to the imperial forces, and the mutual jealousies and quarrels of the local governors were perhaps not altogether displeasing to the home Government.[144]

In this way bands of Hittite mercenaries came to be settled in various parts of Palestine, even in the extreme south. The sons of Arzawaya, “the Arzawan,” established themselves in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, whose king, by the way, seems to bear a Mitannian name. The statement in the Book of Genesis that Heth was the son of Canaan receives a new signification from the Tel el-Amarna tablets.

But Hittite influence in Southern Palestine goes back to an earlier epoch than the age of the tablets. The painted pottery found in the “Amorite” strata of Lachish and Gezer shows remarkable affinities to the pottery discovered by Chantre at Boghaz Keui, and Mr. J. L. Myres has succeeded in tracing it in a fairly continuous line to the region north of the Halys.[145] Here was found the red ochre—or sandarakê, as it was called—which was used in the decoration of the pottery, and after the introduction of two other colours still remained the principal feature in the system of ornamentation. This Hittite or Cappadocian pottery was carried westward along the road which led from Boghaz Keui towards the Troad, and south-eastwards across the Taurus into Syria. It was probably the ultimate origin of the painted Minoan or “Kamâres” pottery of Krete.

The introduction of Hittite pottery into Canaan where it tended to supersede the native ware, was doubtless the result of trade. But in ancient Asia the trader and the soldier were very apt to march side by side. The soldier opened the way for the trader and kept it for him, quite as much as the trader opened it for the soldier. Hence it is not surprising that the Assyrian monuments should furnish incidental evidence of the Hittite occupation of Palestine at an early date. In the inscriptions of Babylonia, as we have seen, Palestine and Syria are “the land of the Amorites”; the name went back to an immemorial antiquity, and indicates that at the time it was first given the Amorites were the ruling population in the West. But in the Assyrian inscriptions the place of the Amorites is taken by the Hittites. For the Assyrians, Syria is “the land of the Hittites,” and in the later historical texts even the Israelites and Philistines are classed as “Hittite.”[146]

Canaan, however, was already well known to the Assyrians in the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, when the ambassadors of the Assyrian king carried letters and presents through it to the Pharaoh. It must, therefore, have been at a still earlier period that they first became acquainted with it, and at this period Hittite influence must have been so predominant as to cause them to discard the name of Amorite, consecrated though it was by the long-continued usage of Babylonian literature, and to employ instead of it the name of Hittite.

But it was in the direction of the Greek seas that Hittite influence was most powerful. Through Asia Minor Babylonian culture penetrated to the West. A native imitation of the Babylonian seal-cylinder was found by Dr. Schliemann in the ruins of Hissarlik,[147] and the so-called “heraldic” position of the lions at Mykenæ can be traced back through Asia Minor to the designs of the Babylonian gem-cutters. The winged horse, Pegasus, is found on Hittite seals, and, like the double-headed eagle of Eyuk and other composite figures, is derived from Babylonian prototypes.[148] They represented the first attempts of the creative power, as conceived of by Babylonian cosmology, and an old Babylonian legend of the creation accordingly describes the monsters suckled by Tiamât as “warriors with the bodies of birds, men with the faces of ravens.”[149] The fantastic monsters of “Minoan” art, which have been brought to light by the excavations in Krete, claim an intimate connection with the similar composite beings which are a characteristic of Hittite art.[150]

The early Hittite art of Asia Minor, as I pointed out many years ago, is dependent on that of Babylonia, and has little in common with the art of Assyria.[151] It is not until we come to the later Hittite monuments of Cilicia and Syria that the influence of Assyrian art makes itself visible. Hence was derived the partiality of the Hittite artist for the composite animals that adorn the seal-cylinders of Babylonia, and which consequently became known wherever the seal-cylinder and the literary culture it accompanied had made their way. As I have already stated, though Subari was an Assyrian province and Kara Eyuk an Assyrian colony, the form of the cuneiform script that was used in Cappadocia was of Babylonian origin.

The writing material of “Minoan” Krete, we now know, consisted of clay tablets. The fact is a proof that the influence of Babylonian culture had extended thus far. But it was an indirect influence only. Though the clay tablet was employed, the characters impressed upon it were the native Kretan. This in itself, however, demonstrates how strong the influence must have been, for the Kretan characters, whether hieroglyphic or linear, were less easy to inscribe on clay than the cuneiform. Krete, moreover, is a land of rock and stone rather than of clay. We may infer, therefore, from the use of the Babylonian material that the first impulse to write was inspired by the civilization of Babylonia.

How it was brought to Krete we do not know. It may have passed over from the shores of Canaan; it may have come from Cyprus or Asia Minor. A seal-cylinder, which I have lately published, and which was found in the early copper-age cemetery of Agia Paraskevi in Cyprus, shows that the so-called Cypriote syllabary was already in use in the island at a remote date,[152] and this syllabary is closely connected with the linear characters of Krete. Inscriptions in the same form of script have been found on the site of Troy, and the pre-Israelitish pottery of Southern Palestine is marked with signs which seem to be derived from it. So, too, is certain Egyptian pottery of the age of the Eighteenth dynasty, and even of the age of the Twelfth.[153]

It is possible that Krete was the birthplace of the picture writing which developed into the linear script of Knossos and the Cypriote syllabary; it is possible that it was rather Cyprus. I do not think, as I once did, that it comes from Asia Minor, for Asia Minor had its own pictographic system, which we see represented in the Hittite inscriptions, and an increased knowledge of this system tends to dissociate it from the pictographs and syllabaries of Krete and Cyprus.

Wherever it arose, however, it was associated with the Babylonian writing material and the Babylonian seal-cylinder. So far as our present knowledge goes, Cyprus is more likely than any other part of the world to have been the meeting-point of Babylonian culture and the nascent civilization of the West. The numerous seal-cylinders which characterize the early copper age of the island are native imitations of Babylonian seal-cylinders of the epoch of Sargon of Akkad, when the boundaries of the Babylonian Empire were pushed to the coasts of the Mediterranean, if not into Cyprus itself, and the great eastern plain of Cyprus was better fitted to provide clay for the tablet than any other Mediterranean district with which I am acquainted.

That no written tablets have been found by the excavators in Cyprus is not surprising. In an island climate where heavy rains occur the unbaked tablet soon becomes hardly distinguishable from the earth in which it is embedded. It was almost by accident that even the practised eye of Dr. A. J. Evans was first led to notice the clay tablets of Knossos.

The Greek term δέλτος, which was borrowed from the language of Canaan, is evidence that the tablet was once known to the Greeks. For the letters of the Phœnician and Greek alphabet rolls of papyrus or leather were needed; the fact that the writing material was a tablet and not a roll refers us back to Babylonia. With the introduction of the Phœnician letters the word δέλτος necessarily changed its meaning, and became synonymous with a wooden board. But it is possible that a reminiscence of its original signification is preserved in a famous passage of the Iliad (vi. 169), where the later “board” has been substituted for the earlier “tablet.” Here we are told how Bellerophon carried with him to Lycia “baleful signs”—which may have been the pictographs of Krete or the Hittites, or even cuneiform characters—written upon “a folded board.” The expression would have most naturally originated in the folded clay tablet of early Babylonia, the inner tablet being enclosed in an envelope on which the address or a description of the contents of the document is written.

On the literary side, however, this is the utmost contribution that we can claim for Babylonia to have made to historical Greece. In the sphere of religion it is possible that the anthropomorphism of Greece was influenced by the anthropomorphism of Babylonia through Asia Minor, where the rock sculptures of Boghaz Keui show how the primitive Hittite fetishes had become human deities like those of Chaldæa; in the sphere of philosophy Thales and Anaximander clothed in a Greek dress the cosmological theories of the Babylonians; and in the domain of art the heraldry and composite monsters of Babylonia made their way to Europe, while the Ionic artists of Ephesus carved ivories into forms so Oriental in character that similar figures found in the palace of Sargon have been pronounced to be the work of Phœnicians. But the literary culture of historical Greece did not begin until the tide of Babylonian influence had already rolled back from Western Asia, when the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the cuneiform syllabary in Syria, and the Hittite populations of Asia Minor had returned to their clumsy hieroglyphs.

It is, however, remarkable how very nearly the cuneiform script became what the Phœnician alphabet has been called, “the mother of the alphabets of the world.” At one time it covered nearly the whole area of the civilized globe. A seal-cylinder with a cuneiform inscription in an unknown language has been discovered on the hills near Herat;[154] in the west its use extended as far as Cappadocia, perhaps further. Northward it made its home in Armenia; southward it obliged even the Egyptian Foreign Office to employ it for correspondence, while military scribes wrote in it their memoranda of the Pharaoh’s campaigns. In both Mitanni and Van the syllabary was on the high-road to becoming an alphabet; in Persia it actually became one.

But this final evolution came too late. A simpler script had already entered the field, and won its way in lands where clay was scarce and other writing materials more easily procurable. Indeed, it is probable that the presence or absence of clay suitable for writing purposes had quite as much to do with the spread of the cuneiform script as the political events which transformed the map of Western Asia. Canaan still continued to write in cuneiform characters after the empire of Babylonia had been exchanged for that of Egypt, while the use of the script never penetrated far into the limestone regions of the Mediterranean. It was probably the geological formation of Europe more than anything else which saved us to-day from having to learn the latest modification of the cursive writing of the Babylonian plain.

But it had been a potent instrument of civilization in its day, perhaps more potent even than the Phœnician alphabet, for its sway lasted for thousands of years. It was at once the symbol and the inspiring spirit of a culture whose roots go back to the very beginnings of human civilization, and to which we still owe part of our own heritage of civilized life. Babylonia was the mother-land of astronomy and irrigation; from thence a knowledge of copper seems to have spread through Western Asia; it was there that the laws and regulations of trade were first formulated, and the earliest legal code, so far as we know, was compiled. Babylonian theology and cosmology left their impress upon beliefs and views of the world which have passed through Judæa to Europe, and the astrology and magic which played so active a part in the mental history of the Middle Ages were Babylonian creations. It is not a little remarkable that an Etruscan model of the liver in bronze (discovered at Piacenza), divided and inscribed for the purposes of haruspicy, finds its counterpart and probably also its prototype in the clay copy of a liver, similarly divided and inscribed, which was found in Babylonia.[155] We are children of our fathers, and amongst our spiritual fathers must be reckoned the Babylonians.