Archibald Henry Sayce

“ Never were the precepts of thy mouth transgressed, nor have I broken thy commandments in any respect. Sovran lord of Egypt, who makest the peoples that withstand thee to bow down, what are these people of Asia to thy heart? Amun brings them low who know not God. ”

“ Contingents came not only from Kummukh and from the Patinians, but from Cilicia and the mountain ranges of Asia Minor. It was, however, of no avail. The Hittite forces were driven from the field, and their leaders were compelled to purchase peace by the payment of tribute. Once more Carchemish gave up its gold and silver, its bronze and copper, its purple vestures and curiously-adorned thrones, and the daughter of Sangara himself was carried away to the harem of the Assyrian king. Pethor, the city of Balaam, was turned into an Assyrian colony, its very name being changed to an Assyrian one. ”

“ The Hittite artist excelled in the representation of animal forms, but the lion, which he seems to have never wearied of designing, is treated in a peculiar way which marks it sharply off from the sculptured lions either of Babylonia or of any other country. So, too, in the case of the human figure, though the general conception has been derived from Babylonian art, the conception is worked out in a new and original manner. Those who have once seen the sculptured image of a Hittite warrior or a Hittite god, can never confuse it with the artistic productions of another race. ”

“ Carchemish was, in fact, the centre of the overland trade in Western Asia. It commanded the high-road which brought the products of Phoenicia and the West to the civilised populations of Assyria and Babylon. It was this which made its possession so greatly coveted by the Assyrian kings. Its capture assured to Sargon the command of the Mediterranean coast, and the transference to Assyrian hands of the commerce and wealth which had flowed in to the merchant-princes of the Hittite city. ”

“ Hard by is the likeness of two men, one of whom carries a lyre, the other a goat; while on another stone a man is represented with little regard to perspective in the act of climbing a ladder. Another relief introduces to us three rams and a goat whose horn is grasped by a shepherd; elsewhere again we see a goddess seated in a chair of peculiar construction, with her feet upon a stool and objects like flowers in her hand. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our culture is the inheritance we have received from ancient Greece, and the first beginnings of Greek culture were derived from the Hittite conquerors of Asia Minor. The Hittite warriors who still guard the Pass of Karabel, on the very threshold of Asia, are symbols of the position occupied by the race in the education of mankind. The Hittites carried the time-worn civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt to the furthest boundary of Asia, and there handed them over to the West in the grey dawn of European history. ”

“ 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. ”

“ HITTITE TRADE AND INDUSTRY.
THE Hittites shone as much in the arts of peace as in the arts of war. The very fact that they invented a system of writing speaks highly for their intellectual capacities. It has been granted to but few among the races of mankind to devise means of communicating their thoughts otherwise than by words; most of the nations of the world have been content to borrow from others not only the written characters they use but even the conception of writing itself.
We know from the ruins of Boghaz Keui and Eyuk that the Hittites were no mean architects. ”

“ This alternate or boustrophedon mode of writing also characterises early Greek inscriptions, and since it was not adopted by either Phœnicians, Egyptians, or Assyrians, the question arises whether the Greeks did not learn to write in such a fashion from neighbours who made use of the Hittite script.
Another characteristic of Hittite writing is the frequent employment of the heads of animals and men. It is very rarely that the whole body of an animal is drawn; the head alone was considered sufficient. This peculiarity would of itself mark off the Hittite hieroglyphs from those of Egypt. ”

“ Light has been cast upon a dark page in the history of Western Asia, and therewith upon the sacred record of the Old Testament, and a people has advanced into the forefront of modern knowledge who exercised a deep influence upon the fortunes of Israel, though hitherto they had been to us little more than a name. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not until we leave the mountainous region originally occupied by the Hittite race, and descend into the valleys of Syria, that the annals of their neighbours begin to tell us something about their fortunes and achievements. The history of their two southern capitals, Carchemish and Kadesh, broken and imperfect though it may be, is not an utter blank. ”

“ Carchemish enjoyed a long history. When first we hear of it in the Egyptian records it was already in Hittite hands. Thothmes III. fought beneath its walls, and his bravest warriors plunged into the Euphrates in their eagerness to capture the foe. Tiglath-pileser I. had seen its walls from the opposite shore of the Euphrates, but had not ventured to approach them. Assurnatsir-pal and his son Shalmaneser had received tribute from its king, and when it finally surrendered to the armies of Sargon it was made the seat of an Assyrian satrap. ”

“ Almost equally far removed from nature is the bronze image of a bull which is also in the Louvre.
If these bronzes are to be regarded as the highest efforts of Hittite metallurgic work, it is not to be regretted that they are few in number. But it is quite different with the engraved gems which we now know to have been of Hittite workmanship. Many of them are exceedingly fine; a hæmatite cylinder, for instance, which was discovered at Kappadokia, is equal to the best products of Babylonian art. ”

“ A beginning has already been made. Within a month after my Paper had been read before the Society of Biblical Archæology, which announced the discovery of a Hittite empire and the connection of the curious art of Asia Minor with that of Carchemish, I had fallen across a bilingual inscription in Hittite and cuneiform characters. This was on the silver boss of King Tarkondêmos, the only key yet found to the interpretation of the Hittite texts. ”

“ It is more doubtful whether Tou or Toi, whose son came to David with an offer of alliance, bears a name which can be explained from the Semitic lexicon.
In the fastnesses of the Taurus, however, the Hittite dialects were slow in dying. In the days of St. Paul the people of Lystra still spoke 'the speech of Lykaonia,' although the official language of Kappadokia had long since become Aramaic. But the Aramaic was itself supplanted by Greek, and before the downfall of the Roman empire Greek was the common language of all Asia Minor. ”

“ To Professor Perrot we also owe the discovery of bronze figures of Hittite manufacture. The execution of them is at once conventional and barbarous. Nothing can exceed the rudeness of a figure now in the Louvre, which represents a god with a pointed tiara, standing on the back of an animal. Though the face of the god has evidently been modelled with care, it is impossible to tell to what zoological species the animal which supports him is intended to belong. ”

“ When a lasting treaty of peace was at last concluded in the twenty-first year of Ramses, its conditions show that 'the great king of the Hittites' treated on equal terms with the great king of Egypt, and that even Ramses himself, whom later legend magnified into the Sesostris of the Greeks, was fain to acknowledge the power of his Hittite adversaries. The treaty was sealed by the marriage of the Pharaoh with the daughter of the Hittite king. ”

“ We may regard these 'Holy Cities,' placed under the protection of a goddess and wholly devoted to her worship, as peculiarly characteristic of the Hittite race. Their two southern capitals, Kadesh and Carchemish, were cities of this kind, and their stronghold at Boghaz Keui was presumably also a consecrated place. Their progress through Asia Minor was characterised by the rise of priestly cities and the growth of a class of armed priestesses. ”

“ The extraordinary resemblance between the Hittite faces drawn by the Egyptian artists and those depicted by themselves in their bas-reliefs and their hieroglyphs, is a convincing proof of the faithfulness of the Egyptian representations, as well as of the identity of the Hittites of the Egyptian inscriptions with the Hittites of Carchemish and Kappadokia. ”

“ The legend on the boss of Tarkondêmos is not long enough to carry us far through the mazes of Hittite decipherment; before much progress can be made it must be supplemented by another inscription of the same kind. But the fact that one bilingual inscription has been found is an earnest that other bilingual inscriptions have existed, and may yet be brought to light. We may live in confident expectation that the mute stones will yet be taught to speak, and that we shall learn how the empire of the Hittites was founded and preserved, not from the annals of their enemies, but from their own lips. ”

“ One of the bravest of his captains tells us on the walls of his tomb how he had captured prisoners in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, and had waded through the waters of the Euphrates when his master assaulted the mighty Hittite fortress of Carchemish. Kadesh on the Orontes had already fallen, and for a time all Western Asia did homage to the Egyptian monarch, even the king of Assyria sending him presents and courting, as it would seem, his alliance. The Egyptian empire touched the land of Naharina on the east and the 'great land of the Hittites' on the north. ”

“ The Hittites were a people with yellow skins and 'Mongoloid' features, whose receding foreheads, oblique eyes, and protruding upper jaws, are represented as faithfully on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies. If the Egyptians have made the Hittites ugly, it was because they were so in reality. The Amorites, on the contrary, were a tall and handsome people. ”

“ Considering how intimately the prehistoric art of Mykenæ seems to have been connected with that of Asia Minor, it is hardly too much to suppose that the symbol of the dove had made its way across the Ægean through the help of the Hittites, and that in the pinnacled temple of Mykenæ, with its two doves, we may see a picture of a Hittite temple in Lydia or Kappadokia. ”

“ In the neighbourhood of Carchemish Hittites and Arameans were mingled together, and Pethor was at once a Hittite and an Aramean town. In short, the Hittites in Syria were like a conquering race everywhere; they formed merely the governing and upper class, which became smaller and smaller the further removed they were from their original seats. Like the Normans in Sicily or the Etruscans in ancient Italy, they tended gradually to disappear or else to be absorbed into the subject race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of Elisha they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days of Jehoram they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of Judah. ”