THE EMPIRE OF THE HITTITES.

Discovery of traces of an ancient Hittite Empire. — Scripture references to the Hittites. Professor Sayce’s discovery. — The inscriptions at Hamath. — The Hittite race.—Hittite art.

Five years ago there was no one who suspected that a great empire had once existed in Western Asia and contended on equal terms with both Egypt and Assyria, the founders of which were the little-noticed Hittites of the Old Testament. Still less did any one dream that these same Hittites had once carried their arms, their art, and their religion to the shores of the Æegean, and that the early civilisation of Greece and Europe was as much indebted to them as it was to the Phœnicians.

The discovery was made in 1879. Recent exploration and excavation had shown that the primitive art and culture of Greece, as revealed, for example, by Dr. Schliemann's excavations at Mykenæ, were influenced by a peculiar art and culture emanating from Asia Minor. Here, too, certain strange monuments had been discovered, which form a continuous chain from Lydia in the west to Kappadokia and Lykaonia in the east. The best known of these are certain rock sculptures found at Boghaz Keui and Eyuk, on the eastern side of the Halys, and two figures in relief in the Pass of Karabel, near Sardes, which the old Greek historian, Herodotus, had long ago supposed to be memorials of the Egyptian conqueror Sesostris, or Ramses II.

Meanwhile other discoveries were being made in lands more immediately connected with the Bible. Scholars had learned from the Egyptian inscriptions that before the days of the Exodus the Egyptian monarchs had been engaged in fierce struggles with the powerful nation of the Hittites, whose two chief seats were at Kadesh on the Orontes and Carchemish on the Euphrates, and who were able to summon to their aid subject-allies not only from Palestine, but also far away from Lydia and the Troad, on the western coast of Asia Minor. Ramses II himself, the Pharaoh of the oppression, had been glad to make peace with his antagonists; and the treaty, which provided, among other things, for the amnesty of political offenders who had found a shelter during the war among one or other of the two combatants, was cemented by the marriage of the Egyptian king with the daughter of his rival. A century or two afterwards Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria found his passage across the Euphrates barred by the Hittites of Carchemish and their Kolkhian mercenaries. From this time forward the Hittites proved dangerous enemies to the Assyrian kings in their attempts to extend the empire towards the west, until at last in b.c. 717 Sargon succeeded in capturing their rich capital, Carchemish, and in making it the seat of an Assyrian satrap. Henceforth the Hittites disappear from history.

But they had already left their mark on the pages of the Old Testament. The Canaanite who had betrayed his fellow-citizens at Beth-el to the Israelites dared not entrust himself to his countrymen, but went away “into the land of the Hittites” (Judges i. 26). Solomon imported horses from Egypt, which he sold to the Syrians and the Hittites (1 Kings x. 28, 29), and when God had sent a panic upon the camp of the Syrians before Jerusalem, they had imagined that “the king of Israel had hired against them the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians” (2 Kings vii. 6). Kadesh itself, the southern Hittite capital, is mentioned in a passage where the Hebrew text is unfortunately corrupt (2 Sam. xxiv. 6). Here the Septuagint shows us that the officers sent by David to number the people, in skirting the northern frontier of his kingdom, came as far as “Gilead and the land of the Hittites of Kadesh.” In the extreme south of Palestine an offshoot of the race had been settled from an early period. These are the Hittites of whom we hear in Genesis in connection with the patriarchs. Hebron was one of their cities, and Hebron, we are told (Numb. xiii. 22), “was built seven years before Zoan,” or Tanis, the capital of the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt. This suggests that the Hittites formed part of the Hyksos forces, and that some of them, instead of entering Egypt, remained behind in Southern Canaan. The suggestion is confirmed by a statement of the Egyptian historian Manetho, who asserts that Jerusalem was founded by the Hyksos after their expulsion from Egypt; and Jerusalem, it will be remembered, had, according to Ezekiel (xvi. 3), a Hittite mother.

Another Hittite city in the south of Judah was Kirjath-sepher, or “Booktown,” also known as Debir, “the sanctuary,” a title which reminds us of that of Kadesh, “the holy city.” We may infer from its name that Kirjath-sepher contained a library stocked with Hittite books. That the Hittites were a literary people, and possessed a system of writing of their own, we learn from the Egyptian monuments. What this writing was has been revealed by recent discoveries. Inscriptions in a peculiar kind of hieroglyphics or picture-writing have been found at Hamath, Aleppo, and Carchemish, in Kappadokia, Lykaonia, and Lydia. They are always found associated with sculptures in a curious style of art, some of which from Carchemish, the modern Jerablûs, are now in the British Museum. The style of art is the same as that of the monuments of Asia Minor mentioned above.

It was the discovery of this fact by Professor Sayce, in 1879, which first revealed the existence of the Hittite empire and its importance in the history of civilisation. Certain hieroglyphic inscriptions, originally noticed by the traveller Burckhardt at Hamah, the ancient Hamath, had been made accessible to the scientific world by the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the conjecture had been put forward that they represented the long-lost writing of the Hittites. The conjecture was shortly afterwards confirmed by the discovery of similar inscriptions at Jerablûs, which Mr. Skene and Mr. George Smith had already identified with the site of Carchemish. If, therefore, the early monuments of Asia Minor were really of Hittite origin, as Professor Sayce supposed, it was clear that they ought to be accompanied by Hittite hieroglyphics. And such turned out to be the case. On visiting the sculptured figure in the Pass of Karabel, in which Herodotus had seen an image of the great opponent of the Hittites, he found that the characters engraved by the side of it were all of them Hittite forms.

Hittite inscriptions have since been discovered attached to another archaic monument of Lydia, the sitting figure of the great goddess of Carchemish, carved out of the rocks of Mount Sipylos, which the Greeks fancied was the Niobê of their mythology as far back as the age of Homer; and similar inscriptions also exist at Boghaz Keui and Eyuk, in Kappadokia, as well as near Ivris, in Lykaonia. Others have been discovered in various parts of Kappadokia and in the Taurus range of mountains, while a silver boss, which bears a precious inscription both in Hittite hieroglyphics and in cuneiform characters, seems to belong to Cilicia. In fact, there is now abundant evidence that the Hittites once held dominion throughout the greater portion of Asia Minor, so that we need no longer feel surprised at their being able to call Trojans and Lydians to their aid in their wars against Egypt.

The existence of Hittite inscriptions at Hamath goes to show that Hamath also was once under Hittite rule. This throws light on several facts recorded in sacred history. David, after his conquest of the Syrians, became the ally of the Hamathite king, and the alliance seems to have lasted down to the time when Hamath was finally destroyed by the Assyrians, since it is implied in the words of 2 Kings xiv. 28, as well as in the alliance between Uzziah and Hamath, of which we are informed by the Assyrian monuments. Hamath and Judah, in fact, each had a common enemy in Syria, and were thus drawn together by a common interest. It was only when Assyria threatened all the populations of the west alike, that Hamath and Damascus were found fighting side by side at the battle of Karkar. Otherwise they were natural foes.

The reason of this lay in the fact that the Hittites were intruders in the Semitic territory of Syria. Their origin must be sought in the highlands of Kappadokia, and from hence they descended into the regions of the south, at that time occupied by Semitic Arameans. Hamath and Kadesh had once been Aramean cities, and when they were again wrested from the possession of the Hittites they did but return to their former owners. The fall of Carchemish meant the final triumph of the Semites in their long struggle with the Hittite stranger.

Even in their southern home the Hittites preserved the dress of the cold mountainous country from which they had come. They are characterised by boots with turned-up toes, such as are still worn by the mountaineers of Asia Minor and Greece. They were thick-set and somewhat short of limb, and the Egyptian artists painted them without beards, of a yellowish-white colour, with dark black hair. In short, as M. Lenormant has pointed out, they had all the physical characteristics of a Caucasian tribe. Their descendants are still to be met with in the defiles of the Taurus and on the plateau of Kappadokia, though they have utterly forgotten the language or languages their forefathers spoke. What this language was is still uncertain, though the Hittite proper names which occur on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria show that it was neither Semitic nor Indo-European. With the help of the bilingual inscription in cuneiform and Hittite, already mentioned, Professor Sayce believes that he has determined the values of a few characters and partially read three or four names, but until more inscriptions are brought to light it is impossible to proceed further. Only it is becoming every day more probable that the hieroglyphics in which the inscriptions are written were the origin of a curious syllabary once used throughout Asia Minor, which survived in Cyprus into historical times.

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. Besides the art of Babylonia they also borrowed several of the Babylonian deities and religious legends. The supreme goddess of Carchemish was the Babylonian Istar or Ashtoreth, and the representation of her found on early Babylonian cylinders was carried by the Hittites to the western coasts of Asia Minor, and from thence made its way across the Ægean Sea to Greece. Even the Amazons of Greek mythology were really nothing more than the priestesses of this Hittite divinity, who wore arms in honour of the goddess. The cities which according to the Greeks were founded by the Amazons were all of Hittite origin.

We may expect to discover hereafter that the influence exercised by the Hittites upon their Syrian neighbours was almost as profound as that exercised by them upon their neighbours in Asia Minor, and through these upon the fathers of the Greeks. For the present, however, we must be content with the startling results that have already been obtained in this new field of research. A people that once played an important part in the history of the civilised world has been again revealed to us after centuries of oblivion, and a forgotten empire has been again brought to light. The first chapter has been opened of a new history, which can only be completed when more Hittite inscriptions have been discovered, and the story they contain has been deciphered. All that is now needed are explorers and excavators, who shall do for the buried cities of the Hittites what Botta and Layard have done for Nineveh or Schliemann for Mykenæ and Troy.