Hittites

“ This would indicate a Hittite population at Lachish about 1500 B.C. or earlier, who were subject to an Egyptian overlord, and added a native inscription to the royal seal. There is nothing improbable in this view, when we remember that the Hittites lived not far off at Hebron in the time of Abraham, and that the Hyksos are thought to have belonged to the same stock, and adored the same God (Set) worshipped by the Hittites. ”

“ Of all invasions from the north, that of the Hittites is the most important and the most confusing. The Hittites appear to have moved south from Cappadocia about 2000 B.C., and they are found warring against Babylonia in the eighteenth century. A Hittite dynasty flourished at Mittanni 1420-1411 and in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries they conquered and largely occupied Syria [1154] . Invasions of Phrygians and Philistines from the west followed the breaking up of the Hittite Empire. The last great Semitic migration was the most widespread of all. ”

“ 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." A. H. Sayee, The Hittites, chapter 4. ALSO IN: W. Wright, The Empire of the Hittites. See, also, AMORITES; and ITALY, ANCIENT: EARLY ITALIANS. HIVITES, The. The "Midlanders," who dwelt in the middle of Canaan when the Israelites invaded it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 people of Heth, another son of Canaan, became in later times a very powerful nation, whose history has only recently been brought to light. Their name as Hittites has been found in the Egyptian records, from which it is shown that at one time, so early as that of Moses, they were sufficiently powerful to resist the forces of the king, Rameses II., of Egypt. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those only who enjoyed the quiet of a peaceful and wealthy life would have gratified the taste for animals which the monuments reveal, by importing an animal like the monkey from the distant south. The Hittites were doubtless a warlike people when they first swooped down upon the plains of Syria, but they soon began to cultivate the arts of peace and to become one of the great mercantile peoples of the ancient world.
We learn from the Books of Kings that horses and chariots were exported from Egypt for the Hittite princes, the Israelites serving as intermediaries in the trade. ”

“ In the various lists of races who were to be displaced by Israel, according to the covenant God made with Abraham, the Hittites are frequently named. Without any reservation or qualification whatever, this text which we have just cited states that the Hittites were Canaanites. According to Genesis 10:15, the Canaanitish people came through the line of Sidon and Heth. It is apparent also from Genesis 10:6, where Canaan the son of Ham first comes into the record, that these Hittites, if they had existed, would have been akin to the early population of Chaldea and Babylon. ”

“ If another shall come as an enemy to the lands of Ramessu Mi-Amun, the great prince of Egypt, then let him send an embassy to the great king of the Hittites to this effect: “Come, and make me stronger than him.” Then shall the great king of the Hittites (assemble his warriors) , and the king of the Hittites (shall come) and smite his enemies. But if it should not be the wish of the great king of the Hittites to march out in person, then he shall send his warriors and his chariots that they may smite his enemies. ”

“ The earliest mention of the Hittites outside the Bible is in the Egyptian monuments, where, in the annals of Thothmes III., it is recorded for the year 1470 b.c., that the king proceeded to the banks of the Euphrates, and received tribute from “the greater” land of the Hittites. In the year 1463 b.c., the king of this district again paid tribute. During the reign of Thothmes IV., grandson of Thothmes III., the relations between the two countries must have changed, and the Egyptian king had to repel an attack made by the Hittites upon Tunib (now Tennib) in Northern Syria. ”

“ Since it has become evident that the Hittites were a great people, and not a petty local tribe like the Hivites or the Perizzites, scholars have naturally turned again to the Bible references to see what they really imply. On careful examination the Bible passages are seen to be all consistent with the idea that the Hebrew writers were well acquainted with the power and greatness of the Hittites. Their greatness is nowhere denied ”

“ And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and an horse for an hundred and fifty: and so for all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did they bring them out by their means.' The Hebrew merchants, in fact, were the mediatories between Egypt and the north, and exported the horses of Egypt not only for the king of Israel but for the kings of the Hittites as well. ”

“ The Hittite colony in Palestine, moreover, was confined to a small district in the mountains of Judah: their strength lay far away in the north, where the Amorites were comparatively weak. It is true that Kadesh on the Orontes was in the hands of the Hittites; but it is also true that it was 'in the land of the Amorites,' and this implies that they were its original occupants. We must regard the Amorites as the earlier population, among a part of whom the Hittites in later days settled and intermarried. ”

“ Hittite art was originally borrowed from Babylonia, but modified by the borrowers in a peculiar way. The borrowing took place before the rise of Assyria. The astronomical and astrological tablets belonging to the great work on the heavenly bodies which was compiled for the library of Sargon I of Accad speak from time to time of the Khattâ or Hittites, a clear proof that already at that remote epoch they had moved down from their northern home into their new quarters in Syria. ”

“ I lodge with thee, I trusted thee with my property, and
Thou wilt answer."
The worthy Asarhadon began to scratch his shoulder-blades.
"Man of a distant region," continued he, in a lower voice, "ye Hittites and we Phoenicians are brothers, hence I advise thee sincerely not to turn to an Egyptian court, for it has only one door, that by which a man enters, but none by which he goes out."
"The gods can conduct an innocent man through a wall," said the
Hittite. ”

“ But the Canaanite population was already threatened by an enemy from the north. These were the Hittites, to whom references are made in several of the despatches from Syria and Phœnicia. After the weakening of the Egyptian power, in consequence of the religious troubles which followed the death of Khu-en-Aten, the Hittites were enabled to complete their conquests in the south, and to drive a wedge between the Semites of the East and the West. With the revival of the Egyptian empire under the rulers of the nineteenth dynasty the southward course of Hittite conquest was checked ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Hittites would seem to have brought with them (sooner or later) a new cycle of deities, with Babylonian prototypes, including their national Sandes or Sandan, lord of heaven, a god of the skies with lightning in his hand, in one of his various forms; and they seem to have absorbed into their pantheon a number of acceptable nature-cults, like the worship of mountains and streams and of the mother-goddess of earth, already practised by an earlier population whom they overlaid. ”

“ Passing some tribes whose names imply rather geographical than ethnical distinctions, we come to the Hittites, the powerful people of whom in recent years we have learned something. At one time these Hittites were practically masters of the wide region from Ephesus in the west of Asia Minor to Carchemish on the Euphrates, and from the shores of the Black Sea to the south of Palestine. ”

“ The Hittites became historical to the modern scholar from the records of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. They become real to us from their own inscriptions.
Nowhere in all the records of human research and endeavour is it possible to find a greater and more complete assembling of the vindication of the integrity of the Word of God. Even though the hand of the Almighty must shake the very foundations of ancient history, He has sworn that His Word shall be maintained. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The majority of scholars has always regarded the Hittites proper as, at any rate, non-Semitic, and some leading authorities have called them proto-Armenian, and believed that they have modern descendants in the Caucasus. This racial question can hardly be determined till those Hatti records, whether in cuneiform or pictographic script, which are couched in a native tongue, not in Babylonian, are read. In the meantime we have proper names to argue from; and these give us at least the significant indication that the Hittite nominative ended in s and the accusative in m. ”

“ The Hittites were thus seated in a region north of Palestine proper; but they appear to have had colonies in the country, and it is these isolated settlements which are classed with the small nations of Canaan by the Bible writer. When Abraham, at Hebron, required a parcel of earth in which to bury his wife Sarah, he bought it of Ephron the Hittite; whence it is clear that there were Hittites owning land in the south. ”

“ As regards the test, then, that we are at present applying, it seems that the Hittite and the Mesopotamian religions were more or less on the same plane, though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger in the former. It is also important for our purpose to register in passing the clear proof of certain religious approximations, probably in the second millennium B.C., between the Hittites and the Assyrian-Babylonian kingdom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After 950 B.C. the Hittites of North Syria, having shaken off the last semblance of Assyrian authority, revived their power, and enjoyed a full century of independence and prosperity. In Cappadocia their kinsmen had freed themselves at an earlier period from the yoke of the Muski, who had suffered so severely at the hands of Tiglath-pileser I. The Hittite buildings and rock sculptures of this period testify to the enduring character of the ancient civilization of the "Hatti". ”

“ William Wright independently started the same idea, and gave it expression in his book, The Empire of the Hittites, 1884, 2d ed., 1885. At this period it was impossible to discern more than that there had been a widely scattered Hittite civilization, which might have been an empire.
2. Hittite Monuments.—This civilization, it was seen, had left its monuments at Hamath in Syria, at Carchemish on the Euphrates, at various points in ancient Cappadocia, Lycaonia, and Phrygia, [Pg 69] as well as near Smyrna in Asia Minor and on the Lydian mountains to the west of Sardis. ”

“ Now the name is Hittite. In the account of the campaign of Ramses II. against the Hittites it appears as Tidcal, and one of the Hittite kings of Boghaz-Keui bears the same name, which is written Dud-khaliya in cuneiform. The name is evidently a compound of Dud or Tud—with which we may compare Tadu-Khipa—and the territorial divinity Khaliya (Greek Halys; cp. the Lydian Alyattes) .
‘In the Bogche inscription [p. 155] the king who erected the monument is called Khaleis “the Khalian,” and we probably have the same name in Khulli, the father of the Cilician Amris. ”