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[Illustration: SLABS WITH HITTITE SCULPTURE.]
By-Paths of Bible Knowledge.
XII.
THE HITTITES
The Story of a Forgotten Empire.
by
A. H. SAYCE, LL.D.
Deputy Professor of Philology, Oxford;
Author of 'Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments,'
'Assyria, Its Princes, Priests and People,' etc., etc.
Second Edition
The Religious Tract Society,
56 Paternoster Row, 65 St. Paul's Churchyard, and 164 Piccadilly.
1890.
Oxford
Horace Hart, Printer to the University
PREFACE.
The discovery of the important place once occupied by the Hittites has
been termed 'the romance of ancient history.' Nothing can be more
interesting than the resurrection of a forgotten people, more especially
when that people is so intimately connected with Old Testament story,
and with the fortunes of the Chosen Race. How the resurrection has been
accomplished, by putting together the fragmentary evidence of Egyptian
and Assyrian inscriptions, of strange-looking monuments in Asia Minor,
and of still undeciphered hieroglyphics, will be described in the
following pages. It is marvellous to think that only ten years ago 'the
romance' could not have been written, and that the part played by the
Hittite nations in the history of the world was still unsuspected. Yet
now we have become, as it were, familiar with the friends of Abraham and
the race to which Uriah belonged.
Already a large and increasing literature has been devoted to them. The
foundation stone, which was laid by my paper 'On the Monuments of the
Hittites' in 1880, has been crowned with a stately edifice in Dr.
Wright's _Empire of the Hittites_, of which the second edition appeared
in 1886, and in the fourth volume of the magnificent work of Prof.
Perrot and M. Chipiez, _L'Histoire de l'Art dans l'Antiquité_,
published at Paris a year ago. Profusely illustrated, the latter work
sets before us a life-like picture of Hittite architecture and art.
It cannot be long before the inscriptions left to us by the Hittites, in
their peculiar form of hieroglyphic writing, are also made to reveal
their secrets. All that is required are more materials upon which to
work, and we shall then know which, if any, of the attempts hitherto
made to explain them has hit the truth. Major Conder's system of
decipherment has not yet obtained the adhesion of other scholars;
neither has the rival system of Mr. Ball, ingenious and learned as it
is. But if we may judge from the successes of the last few years, it
cannot be long before we know as much about the Hittite language and
writing as we now know about Hittite art and civilisation. To quote the
words of Dr. Wright: 'We must labour to unloose the dumb tongue of these
inscriptions, and to unlock their mysteries, not with the view of
finding something sensational in them, or for the purpose of advancing
some theory, but for the love of knowing what they really contain; and I
doubt not that, proceeding in the right method of investigation, we
shall reach results satisfactory to the Oriental scholar, and
confirmatory of Divine truth.'
A. H. SAYCE.
QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD.
_October_ 1888.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE HITTITES OF THE BIBLE 11
II. THE HITTITES ON THE MONUMENTS OF EGYPT AND ASSYRIA 19
III. THE HITTITE MONUMENTS 54
IV. THE HITTITE EMPIRE 73
V. THE HITTITE CITIES AND RACE 97
VI. HITTITE RELIGION AND ART 104
VII. THE INSCRIPTIONS 122
VIII. HITTITE TRADE AND INDUSTRY 136
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
SLABS WITH HITTITE SCULPTURE AT KELLER NEAR AINTAB _Frontispiece_
MAP ILLUSTRATING THE EXTENT OF THE HITTITE EMPIRE 10
A SLAB FOUND AT MERASH 54
SLABS WITH HITTITE SCULPTURES FOUND AT KELLER NEAR AINTAB 63
THE PSEUDO-SESOSTRIS CARVED ON THE ROCK IN THE PASS OF KARABEL 67
MONUMENT OF A HITTITE KING FOUND AT CARCHEMISH 72
THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE OF EYUK 84
SCULPTURES AT BOGHAZ KEUI 88
SCULPTURES AT BOGHAZ KEUI 91
AN INSCRIPTION FOUND AT CARCHEMISH (_now destroyed_) 122
THE BILINGUAL BOSS OF TARKONDEMOS 127
THE LION OF MERASH 131
[Illustration: MAP ILLUSTRATING THE EXTENT OF THE HITTITE EMPIRE.
(_Copied by permission from 'The Empire of the Hittites.'_)]
THE HITTITES
THE STORY OF A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE.
CHAPTER I.
THE HITTITES OF THE BIBLE.
We are told in the Second Book of Kings (vii. 6) that when the Syrians
were encamped about Samaria and the Lord had sent a panic upon them,
'they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us
the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon
us.' Nearly forty years ago a distinguished scholar selected this
passage for his criticism. Its 'unhistorical tone,' he declared, 'is too
manifest to allow of our easy belief in it.' 'No Hittite kings can have
compared in power with the king of Judah, the real and near ally, who is
not named at all ... nor is there a single mark of acquaintance with the
contemporaneous history.'
Recent discoveries have retorted the critic's objections upon himself.
It is not the Biblical writer but the modern author who is now proved to
have been unacquainted with the contemporaneous history of the time. 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.
But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old
Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than
the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the
Israelitish conquest of Canaan. The references to them in the later
historical books of the Old Testament Canon are rare and scanty. The
traitor who handed over Beth-el to the house of Joseph fled 'into the
land of the Hittites' (Judg. i. 26), and there built a city which he
called Luz. Mr. Tomkins thinks he has found it in the town of Latsa,
captured by the Egyptian king Ramses II., which he identifies with Qalb
Luzeh, in Northern Syria. However this may be, an emended reading of the
text, based upon the Septuagint, transforms the unintelligible
Tahtim-hodshi of 2 Sam. xxiv. 6 into 'the Hittites of Kadesh,' a city
which long continued to be their chief stronghold in the valley of the
Orontes. It was as far as this city, which lay at 'the entering in of
Hamath,' on the northern frontier of the Israelitish kingdom, that the
officers of David made their way when they were sent to number Israel.
Lastly, in the reign of Solomon the Hittites are again mentioned
(1 Kings x. 28, 29) in a passage where the authorised translation has
obscured the sense. It runs in the Revised Version: 'And the horses
which Solomon had were brought out of Egypt; and the king's merchants
received them in droves, each drove at a price. 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 Hittites whose cities and princes are thus referred to in the later
historical books of the Old Testament belonged to the north, Hamath and
Kadesh on the Orontes being their most southernly points. But the Book
of Genesis introduces us to other Hittites--'the children of Heth,' as
they are termed--whose seats were in the extreme south of Palestine. It
was from 'Ephron the Hittite' that Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah
at Hebron (Gen. xxiii.), and Esau 'took to wife Judith the daughter of
Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite' (Gen.
xxvi. 34), or, as it is given elsewhere, 'Adah the daughter of Elon the
Hittite' (Gen. xxxvi. 2). It must be to these Hittites of the south that
the ethnographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis refers when it
is said that 'Canaan begat Sidon his first-born, and Heth' (ver. 15),
and in no other way can we explain the statement of Ezekiel (xvi. 3, 45)
that 'the father' of Jerusalem 'was an Amorite and' its 'mother a
Hittite.' 'Uriah the Hittite,' too, the trusty officer of David, must
have come from the neighbourhood of Hebron, where David had reigned for
seven years, rather than from among the distant Hittites of the north.
Besides the latter there was thus a Hittite population which clustered
round Hebron, and to whom the origin of Jerusalem was partly due.
Now it will be noticed that the prophet ascribes the foundation of
Jerusalem to the Amorite as well as the Hittite. The Jebusites,
accordingly, from whose hands the city was wrested by David, must have
belonged to one or other of these two great races; perhaps, indeed, to
both. At all events, we find elsewhere that the Hittites and Amorites
are closely interlocked together. It was so at Hebron, where in the time
of Abraham not only Ephron the Hittite dwelt, but also the three sons of
the Amorite Mamre (Gen. xiv. 13). The Egyptian monuments show that the
two nations were similarly confederated together at Kadesh on the
Orontes. Kadesh was a Hittite stronghold; nevertheless it is described
as being 'in the land of the Amaur' or Amorites, and its king is
depicted with the physical characteristics of the Amorite, and not of
the Hittite. Further north, in the country which the Hittites had made
peculiarly their own, cities existed which bore names, it would seem,
compounded with that of the Amorite, and the common Assyrian title of
the district in which Damascus stood, Gar-emeris, is best explained as
'the _Gar_ of the Amorites.' Shechem was taken by Jacob 'out of the hand
of the Amorite' (Gen. xlviii. 22), and the Amorite kingdom of Og and
Sihon included large tracts on the eastern side of the Jordan. South of
Palestine the block of mountains in which the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea
stood was an Amorite possession (Gen. xiv. 7, Deut. i. 19, 20); and we
learn from Numb. xiii. 29, that while the Amalekites dwelt 'in the land
of the south' and the Canaanites by the sea and in the valley of the
Jordan, the Hittites and Jebusites and Amorites lived together in the
mountains of the interior. Among the five kings of the Amorites against
whom Joshua fought (Josh. x. 5) were the king of Jerusalem and the king
of Hebron.
The Hittites and Amorites were therefore mingled together in the
mountains of Palestine like the two races which ethnologists tell us go
to form the modern Kelt. But the Egyptian monuments teach us that they
were of very different origin and character. 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.
They are depicted with white skins, blue eyes, and reddish hair, all the
characteristics, in fact, of the white race. Mr. Petrie points out their
resemblance to the Dardanians of Asia Minor, who form an intermediate
link between the white-skinned tribes of the Greek seas and the
fair-complexioned Libyans of Northern Africa. The latter are still found
in large numbers in the mountainous regions which stretch eastward from
Morocco, and are usually known among the French under the name of
Kabyles. The traveller who first meets with them in Algeria cannot fail
to be struck by their likeness to a certain part of the population in
the British Isles. Their clear-white freckled skins, their blue eyes,
their golden-red hair and tall stature, remind him of the fair Kelts of
an Irish village; and when we find that their skulls, which are of the
so-called dolichocephalic or 'long-headed' type, are the same as the
skulls discovered in the prehistoric cromlechs of the country they
still inhabit, we may conclude that they represent the modern
descendants of the white-skinned Libyans of the Egyptian monuments.
In Palestine also we still come across representatives of a
fair-complexioned blue-eyed race, in whom we may see the descendants of
the ancient Amorites, just as we see in the Kabyles the descendants of
the ancient Libyans. We know that the Amorite type continued to exist in
Judah long after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan. The captives taken
from the southern cities of Judah by Shishak in the time of Rehoboam,
and depicted by him upon the walls of the great temple of Karnak, are
people of Amorite origin. Their 'regular profile of sub-aquiline cast,'
as Mr. Tomkins describes it, their high cheek-bones and martial
expression, are the features of the Amorites, and not of the Jews.
Tallness of stature has always been a distinguishing characteristic of
the white race. Hence it was that the Anakim, the Amorite inhabitants of
Hebron, seemed to the Hebrew spies to be as giants, while they
themselves were but 'as grasshoppers' by the side of them (Numb. xiii.
33). After the Israelitish invasion remnants of the Anakim were left in
Gaza and Gath and Ashkelon (Josh. xi. 22), and in the time of David
Goliath of Gath and his gigantic family were objects of dread to their
neighbours (2 Sam. xxi. 15-22).
It is clear, then, that the Amorites of Canaan belonged to the same
white race as the Libyans of Northern Africa, and like them preferred
the mountains to the hot plains and valleys below. The Libyans
themselves belonged to a race which can be traced through the peninsula
of Spain and the western side of France into the British Isles. Now it
is curious that wherever this particular branch of the white race has
extended it has been accompanied by a particular form of cromlech, or
sepulchral chamber built of large uncut stones. The stones are placed
upright in the ground and covered over with other large slabs, the whole
chamber being subsequently concealed under a tumulus of small stones or
earth. Not unfrequently the entrance to the cromlech is approached by a
sort of corridor. These cromlechs are found in Britain, in France, in
Spain, in Northern Africa, and in Palestine, more especially on the
eastern side of the Jordan, and the skulls that have been exhumed from
them are the skulls of men of the dolichocephalic or long-headed type.
It has been necessary to enter at this length into what has been
discovered concerning the Amorites by recent research, in order to show
how carefully they should be distinguished from the Hittites with whom
they afterwards intermingled. They must have been in possession of
Palestine long before the Hittites arrived there. They extended over a
much wider area, since there are no traces of the Hittites at Shechem or
on the eastern side of the Jordan, where the Amorites established two
powerful kingdoms; while the earliest mention of the Amorites in the
Bible (Gen. xiv. 7) describes them as dwelling at Hazezon-tamar, or
En-gedi, on the shores of the Dead Sea, where no Hittites are ever known
to have settled. 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. At what epoch that event took place
we are still unable to say.