THE HITTITE EMPIRE.
We have seen that the Egyptian monuments bear witness to an extension of
Hittite power into the distant regions of Asia Minor. When the kings of
Kadesh contended with the great Pharaoh of the Oppression they were able
to summon to their aid allies from the Troad, as well as from Lydia and
the shores of the Cilician sea. A century later Egypt was again invaded
by a confederacy, consisting partly of the Hittite rulers of Carchemish
and Aleppo, partly of Libyans and Teukrians, and other populations of
Asia Minor. If any trust can be placed in the identifications proposed
by Egyptian scholars for the countries from whence the vassals and
allies of the Hittites came it is clear that memorials of Hittite power
and conquest ought to be found in Asia Minor.
And they were found as soon as it was recognised that the curious
monuments of Asia Minor, of which the warriors of Karabel and the
sculptures of Ibreez are examples, were actually inspired by Hittite
art. As soon as it was known that the art these monuments represented,
and the peculiar form of writing which accompanied them, had their
earliest home in the Syrian cities of the Hittite tribes, a new light
broke over the prehistoric past of Asia Minor. These Hittite monuments
can be traced in two continuous lines from Northern Syria and
Kappadokia to the western extremity of the peninsula. They follow the
two highways which once led out of Asia to Sardes and the shores of the
Ægean. In the south they form as it were a series of stations at Ibreez
and Bulgar Maden in Lykaonia, at Fassiler and Tyriaion between Ikonion
and the Lake of Beyshehr, and finally in the Pass of Karabel. Northwards
the line runs through the Taurus by Merash, and carries us first to the
defile of Ghurun, and then to the great Kappadokian ruins of Boghaz Keui
and Eyuk, from whence we pass by Ghiaur-kalessi and the burial-place of
the old Phrygian kings, until we again reach the Lydian capital and the
Pass of Karabel.
Westward of the Halys and Kappadokia they are marked by certain
peculiarities. They are found either in the vicinity of silver mines,
like those of Lykaonia, or else on the line of the ancient roads, which
finally converged in Lydia. None have been discovered in the central
plateau of Asia Minor, in the mountains of Lykia in the south, or the
wide-reaching coast-lands of the north. They mark the sites of small
colonies, or else the lines of road that connected them. Moreover, with
the exception of the image of the goddess who sits on her throne in
Mount Sipylos, the western monuments represent the figures of warriors
who are in the act of marching forward. This is the case at Karabel; it
is also the case at Ghiaur-kalessi, where the rock on which the two
Hittite warriors are carved lies close below the remains of a
pre-historic fortress.
Such facts admit of only one explanation. The Hittite monuments of
Western Asia Minor must be memorials of military conquest and supremacy.
In the warriors whose figures stood on either side of the Pass of
Karabel, the sculptor must have seen the visible symbols of Hittite
power. They showed that the Hittite had won and kept the pass by force
of arms. They are emblems of conquest, not creations of native art.
But it was inevitable that conquest should bring with it a civilising
influence. The Hittites could not carry with them the art and culture
they had acquired in the East without influencing the barbarous
populations over whom they claimed to rule. The vassal chieftains of
Lydia and the Troad could not lead their forces into Syria, or assist in
the invasion of Egypt, without learning something of that ancient
civilisation with which they had come in contact. The Hittites, in fact,
must be regarded as the first teachers of the rude populations of the
West. They brought to them a culture the first elements of which had
been inspired by Babylonia; they brought also a system of writing out of
which, in all probability, the natives of Asia Minor afterwards
developed a writing of their own.
It is possible, therefore, that some of the Hittite monuments of Asia
Minor are the work, not of the Hittites themselves, but of the native
populations whom they had civilised and instructed. It may be that this
is the case at Ibreez, where the faces of the god and his worshipper
have Jewish features very unlike those found on monuments of purely
Hittite origin. But apart from such instances, where the monument is due
to Hittite influence rather than to Hittite artists, it is certain that
most of the Hittite memorials of Asia Minor are the productions of the
Hittites themselves. This is proved by the hieroglyphs which are
attached to them, as well as by the uniform type of feature and dress
which prevails from Carchemish to the Ægean. It is impossible to explain
such an uniformity, and still more the extraordinary resemblance between
the characters engraved at Karabel, or on Mount Sipylos, and those which
meet us in the inscriptions of Hamath and Carchemish, except on the
supposition that the monuments were executed by men who belonged to the
same race and spoke the same language. Wherever Hittite inscriptions
occur, we find in them the same combinations of hieroglyphs as well as
the use of the same characters to denote grammatical suffixes.
We may, then, rest satisfied with the conclusion that the existence of a
Hittite empire extending into Asia Minor is certified, not only by the
records of ancient Egypt, but also by Hittite monuments which still
exist. In the days of Ramses II., when the children of Israel were
groaning under the tasks allotted to them, the enemies of their
oppressors were already exercising a power and a domination which
rivalled that of Egypt. The Egyptian monarch soon learned to his cost
that the Hittite prince was as 'great' a king as himself, and could
summon to his aid the inhabitants of the unknown north. Pharaoh's claim
to sovereignty was disputed by adversaries as powerful as the ruler of
Egypt, if indeed not more powerful, and there was always a refuge among
them for those who were oppressed by the Egyptian king.
When, however, we speak of a Hittite empire we must understand clearly
what that means. It was not an empire like that of Rome, where the
subject provinces were consolidated together under a central authority,
obeying the same laws and the same supreme head. It was not an empire
like that of the Persians, or of the Assyrian successors of
Tiglath-pileser III., which represented the organised union of numerous
states and nations under a single ruler. Such a conception of empire was
due to Tiglath-pileser III., and his successor Sargon; it was a new idea
in the world, and had never been realised before. The first Assyrian
empire, like the foreign empire of Egypt, was of an altogether different
character. It depended on the military enterprise and strength of
individual monarchs. As long as the Assyrian or Egyptian king could lead
his armies into distant territories, and compel their inhabitants to pay
him tribute and homage, his empire extended over them. But hardly had he
returned home laden with spoil than we find the subject populations
throwing off their allegiance and asserting their independence, while
the death of the conqueror brought with it almost invariably the general
uprising of the tribes and cities his arms had subdued. Before the days
of Tiglath-pileser, in fact, empire in Western Asia meant the power of a
prince to force a foreign people to submit to his rule. The conquered
provinces had to be subdued again and again; but as long as this could
be done, as long as the native struggles for freedom could be crushed by
a campaign, so long did the empire exist.
It was an empire of this sort that the Hittites established in Asia
Minor. How long it lasted we cannot say. But so long as the distant
races of the West answered the summons to war of the Hittite princes, it
remained a reality. The fact that the tribes of the Troad and Lydia are
found fighting under the command of the Hittite kings of Kadesh, proves
that they acknowledged the supremacy of their Hittite lords, and
followed them to battle like the vassals of some feudal chief. If
Hittite armies had not marched to the shores of the Ægean, and Hittite
princes been able from time to time to exact homage from the nations of
the far west, Egypt would not have had to contend against the
populations of Asia Minor in its wars with the Hittites, and the figures
of Hittite warriors would not have been sculptured on the rocks of
Karabel. 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. The older
dynasty of Lydian kings traced its descent from Bel and Ninos, the
Babylonian or Assyrian gods, whose names had been carried by the
Hittites into the remote west. The Lydian hero Kayster, who gave his
name to the Kaystrian plain, was fabled to have wandered into Syria, and
there, after wooing Semiramis, to have been the father of Derketo, the
goddess of Carchemish. A Lydian was even said to have drowned Derketo in
the sacred lake of Ashkelon; and Eusebius declares that Sardes, the
Lydian capital, was captured for the first time in B. C. 1078, by a
horde of invaders from the north-western regions of Asia.
But it is in the famous legend of the Amazons that we must look for the
chief evidence preserved to us by classical antiquity of the influence
once exercised by the Hittites in Asia Minor. The Amazons were imagined
to be a nation of female warriors, whose primitive home lay in
Kappadokia, on the banks of the Thermodon, not far from the ruins of
Boghaz Keui. From hence they had issued forth to conquer the people of
Asia Minor and to found an empire which reached to the Ægean Sea. The
building of many of the most famous cities on the Ægean coast was
ascribed to them,--Myrina and Kyme, Smyrna and Ephesos, where the
worship of the great Asiatic goddess was carried on with barbaric
ceremonies into the later age of civilised Greece.
Now these Amazons are nothing more than the priestesses of the Asiatic
goddess, whose cult spread from Carchemish along with the advance of the
Hittite armies. She was served by a multitude of armed priestesses and
eunuch priests; under her name of Ma, for instance, no less than six
thousand of them waited on her at Komana in Kappadokia. Certain cities,
in fact, like Komana and Ephesos, were dedicated to her service, and a
large part of the population accordingly became the armed ministers of
the mighty goddess. Generally these were women, as at Ephesos in early
days, where they obeyed a high-priestess, who called herself 'the
queen-bee.' When Ephesos passed into Greek hands, the goddess worshipped
there was identified with the Greek Artemis, and a high-priest took the
place of the high-priestess. But the priestess of Artemis still
continued to be called 'a bee,' reminding us that Deborah or 'Bee' was
the name of one of the greatest of the prophetesses of ancient Israel;
and the goddess herself continued to be depicted under the same form as
that which had belonged to her in Hittite days. On her head was the
so-called mural crown, the Hittite origin of which has now been placed
beyond doubt by the sculptures of Boghaz Keui, while her chariot was
drawn by lions. It was from the Hittites, too, that Artemis received her
sacred animal, the goat.
The 'spear-armed host' of the Amazons, which came from Kappadokia, which
conquered Asia Minor, and was so closely connected with the worship of
the Ephesian Artemis, can be no other than the priestesses of the
Hittite goddess, who danced in her honour armed with the shield and bow.
In ancient art the Amazons are represented as clad in the Hittite tunic
and brandishing the same double-headed axe that is held in the hands of
some of the Hittite deities on the rocks of Boghaz Keui, while the
'spear' lent to them by the Greek poet brings to our recollection the
spear held by the warriors of Karabel. We cannot explain the myth of the
Amazons except on the supposition that they represented the armed
priestesses of the Hittite goddess, and that a tradition of the Hittite
empire in Asia Minor has entwined itself around the story of their
arrival in the West. The cities they are said to have founded must have
been the seats of Hittite rule.
The Hittites were intruders in Syria as well as in Western Asia Minor.
Everything points to the conclusion that they had descended from the
ranges of the Taurus. Their costume was that of the inhabitants of a
cold and mountainous region, not of the warm valleys of the south. In
place of the trailing robes of the Syrians, the national costume was a
tunic which did not quite reach to the knees. It was only after their
settlement in the Syrian cities that they adopted the dress of the
country; the sculptured rocks of Asia Minor represent them with the same
short tunic as that which distinguished the Dorians of Greece or the
ancient inhabitants of Ararat. But the most characteristic portion of
the Hittite garb were the shoes with upturned ends. 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. The fact that it was
still used by the Hittites of Kadesh in the warm fertile valley of the
Orontes proves better than any other argument that they must have come
from the snow-clad mountains of the north. It is like the shoe of
similar shape which the Turks have carried with them in their migrations
from the north and introduced amongst the natives of Syria and Egypt. It
indicates with unerring certainty the northern origin of the Turkish
conqueror. He stands in the same relation to the modern population of
Syria that the Hittites stood to the Arameans of Kadesh three thousand
years ago.
Equally significant is the long fingerless glove which is one of the
most frequent of Hittite hieroglyphs. The thumb alone is detached from
the rest of the bag in which the fingers were enclosed. Such a glove is
an eloquent witness to the wintry cold of the regions from which its
wearers came, and a similar glove is still used during the winter months
by the peasants of modern Kappadokia.
We may find another evidence of the northern descent of the Hittite
tribes in the hieroglyph which is used in the sense of 'country.' It
represents two, or sometimes three, pointed mountains, whose forms, as
was remarked some years ago, resemble those of the mountains about
Kaisariyeh, the Kappadokian capital.
If we leave Kadesh and proceed northwards, the local names bear more and
more the peculiar stamp of a Hittite origin. We leave Semitic names
like Kadesh, 'the sanctuary,' behind us, and at length find ourselves
in a district where the geographical names no longer admit of a Semitic
etymology. It is just this district, moreover, in which Hittite
inscriptions first become plentiful. The first met with to the south are
the stones of Hamath and the lost inscription of Aleppo; but from
Carchemish northwards we now know that numbers of them still exist. The
territory covered by them is a square, the base of which is formed by a
line running from Carchemish through Antioch into Lykaonia, while the
remains at Boghaz Keui and Eyuk constitute its northern limit. We must
regard this region as having been the primeval home and starting-point
of the Hittite race. They will have been a population which clustered
round the two flanks of the Taurus range, extending far into Kappadokia
on the north, and towards Armenia on the east.
They preserved their independence on the banks of the Halys in
Kappadokia for nearly two hundred years after the fall of Carchemish. It
was not long before the overthrow of Lydia by Cyrus that Kroesos, the
Lydian king, destroyed the cities of Pteria, where the ruins of Boghaz
Keui and Eyuk now stand, and enslaved their inhabitants, thus avenging
upon them the conquest of his own country by their ancestors so many
centuries before. Herodotos calls them 'Syrians,' a name which is
qualified as 'White Syrians' by the Greek geographer Strabo. It was in
this way that the Greek writer wished to distinguish them from the
dark-coloured Syrians of Aramean or Jewish birth, with whom he was
otherwise acquainted; and it reminds us that, whereas the Egyptian
artists painted the Hittites with yellow skins, they painted the Syrians
with red. It is an interesting fact that the memory of their
relationship to the population on the Syrian side of the Taurus should
have been preserved so long among these Hittites of Kappadokia.
[Illustration: THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE OF EYUK.]
Boghaz Keui and Eyuk are situated in the district known as Pteria to the
Greeks. At Eyuk there are remains of a vast palace, which stood on an
artificial platform of earth, like the palaces of Assyria and Babylon.
The walls of the palace, formed of huge blocks of cut stone, can still
be traced in many places. It was approached by an avenue of sculptured
slabs, on which lions were represented, some of them in the act of
devouring a ram. The head and attitude of one that is preserved remind
us of the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes which led to the temple of
Karnak at Thebes. The entrance of the palace was flanked on either side
by two enormous monoliths of granite, on the external faces of which
were carved in relief the images of a sphinx. But though the artist had
clearly gone to Egypt for his model, it is also clear that he had
modified the forms he imitated in accordance with national ideas. The
head-dress, like the feet, of the sphinxes is non-Egyptian, the necklace
passes under the chin instead of falling across the breast, and the
sphinx itself is erect, not recumbent, as in Egypt. On the right hand
the same block of stone which bears the figure of the sphinx bears also,
on the inner side, the figure of a double-headed eagle, with an animal
which Professor Perrot believes to be a hare in either talon, and a man
standing upon its twofold head. The same double-headed eagle, supporting
the figure of a man or a god, is met with at Boghaz Keui, and must be
regarded as one of the peculiarities of Hittite symbolism and art. The
symbol was adopted in later days by the Turkoman princes, who had
perhaps first seen it on the Hittite monuments of Kappodokia; and the
Crusaders brought it to Europe with them in the 14th century. Here it
became the emblem of the German Emperors, who have passed it on to the
modern kingdoms of Russia and Austria. It is not the only heirloom of
Hittite art which has descended to us of to-day.
The lintel of the palace gate at Eyuk was of solid stone, and, if
Professor Perrot is right, the huge stone lintel, adorned with a lion's
head, still lies in fragments on the ground. The entrance was flanked
with walls on which bas-reliefs were carved, as in the palaces which
were built by the kings of Assyria. They formed, in fact, a dado, the
rest of the wall above them being probably of brick covered with stucco
and painted with bright colours. Many of the sculptured blocks still lie
scattered on the ground. Here we have the picture of a priest before an
altar, there of a sacred bull mounted on a pedestal. 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. A similar piece of
sculpture has been found at Merash, on the southern side of the Taurus,
within the limits of the ancient Komagênê, even such details as the form
of the chair and stool being alike in the two cases. The two reliefs
might have been executed by the same hand.
The sphinxes which guarded the entrance of the palace of Eyuk and the
avenue which led up to them bear unmistakable testimony to the influence
of Egyptian art upon its builders. They take us back to a period when
the Hittites of Kappadokia were in contact with the people of the Nile,
and thus confirm the evidence of the Egyptian records. There must have
been a time when the population of distant Kappadokia held intercourse
with that of Egypt, and this time, as we learn from the Egyptian
monuments, was the age of Ramses II. It is perhaps not going too far to
assume that the palace of Eyuk was erected in the 13th century before
our era, and is a relic of the period when the sway of the Hittite
princes of Kadesh or Carchemish extended as far north as the
neighbourhood of the Halys. It is indeed possible that the palace was
originally the summer residence of the kings whose homes were in the
south. The plateau on which Eyuk and Boghaz Keui stand is more than 2000
feet above the level of the sea, and the winters there are intensely
cold. From December onwards the ground is piled high with snow. It is
well known that the descendants of races which have originally come from
a cold climate endure the heats of a southern summer with impatience;
and the same causes which make the English rulers of India to-day retire
during the summer to the mountain heights, may have made the Hittite
lords of Syria build their summer palace in the Kappadokian highlands.
[Illustration: SCULPTURES AT BOGHAZ KEUI.]
The sculptures of Boghaz Keui belong to a somewhat later date than those
of Eyuk. Boghaz Keui is five hours to the south-west of Eyuk, and marks
the site of a once populous town. A stream that runs past it separates
the ruins of the city from a remarkable series of sculptures carved on
the rocks of the mountains which overlooked the city. The city was
surrounded by a massive wall of masonry, and within it were two citadels
solidly built on the summits of two shafts of rock. The wall was
without towers, but at its foot ran a moat cut partly through the rock,
partly through the earth, the earth being coated with a smooth and
slippery covering of masonry. The most important building in the city
was the palace, a plan of which has been made by modern travellers. Like
the palace of Eyuk, it was erected on an artificial mound or terrace of
earth, and its ornamentation seems to have been similar to that of Eyuk.
But little is left of it save the foundations of the walls and the
overturned throne of stone which once stood in the central court
supported on the bodies of two lions. Lions' heads were also carved on
the columns which formed the doorposts of the city-gate.
The interest of Boghaz Keui centres in the sculptures which have been
carved with so much care on the rocky walls of the mountains. Here
advantage has been taken of two narrow recesses, the sides and floors of
which have been artificially shaped and levelled. The first and largest
recess may be described as of rectangular shape. Along either side of
it, as along the dado of a room, run two long lines of figures in
relief, which eventually meet at the end opposite the entrance. On the
left-hand side we see a line of men, almost all clad alike in the short
tunic, peaked tiara, and boots with upturned ends that characterise
Hittite art. At times, however, they are interrupted by other figures in
the long Syrian robe, who may perhaps be intended for women. Among them
are two dwarf-like creatures upholding the crescent disk of the moon,
and after a while the procession becomes that of a number of deities,
each with his name written in Hittite hieroglyphs at his side. After
turning the corner of the recess, the procession consists of three
gods, two of whom stand on mountain-peaks, while the foremost (with a
goat beside him) is supported on the heads of two adoring priests.
Facing him is the foremost figure of the other procession, which starts
from the eastern side of the recess, and finally meets the first on its
northern wall. This figure is that of the great Asiatic goddess, who
wears on her head the mural crown and stands upon a panther, while
beside her, as beside the god she is greeting, is the portraiture of a
goat. Behind her a youthful god, with the double-headed battle-axe in
his hand, stands upon a panther, and behind him again are two
priestesses with mural crowns, whose feet rest upon the heads and wings
of a double-headed eagle. This eagle, whose form is but a reproduction
of that sculptured at Eyuk, closes the series of designs represented on
the northern wall. The eastern wall is occupied with a long line, first
of goddesses and then of priestesses. Where the line breaks off at last
we come upon a solitary piece of sculpture. This is the image of an
eunuch-priest, who stands on a mountain and holds in one hand a curved
augural wand, in the other a strange symbol representing a priest with
embroidered robes, who stands upon a shoe with upturned ends, and
supports a winged solar disk, the two extremities of which rest upon
baseless columns.
[Illustration: SCULPTURES AT BOGHAZ KEUI.]
The entrance to the second recess is guarded on either side by two
winged monsters, with human bodies and the heads of dogs. It leads into
an artificially excavated passage of rectangular shape, on the rocky
walls of which detached groups of figures and emblems are engraved. On
the western wall is a row of twelve priests or soldiers, each of whom
bears a scythe upon his shoulder; facing them on the eastern wall are
two reliefs of strange character. One of them depicts the youthful god,
whose name perhaps was Attys, embracing with his left arm the
eunuch-priest, above whose head is engraved the strange symbol that has
been already described. The other represents a god's head crowned with
the peaked tiara, and supported on a double-headed lion, which again
stands on the hinder feet of two other lions, whose heads rest on a
column or stem. All these sculptures were once covered with stucco, and
thus preserved from the action of the weather.
It is evident that in these two mountain recesses we have a sanctuary,
the forms and symbols of whose deities were sculptured on its walls of
living rock. It was a sanctuary too holy to be confined within the walls
of the city, and the supreme deities to whom it was dedicated were a god
and a goddess, served by a multitude of male and female priests. In
fact, as Prof. Perrot remarks, Boghaz Keui must have been a sacred city
like Komana, whose citizens were consecrated to the chief divinities
adored by the Hittites, and were governed by a high-priest. It was as
much a 'Kadesh' or 'Hierapolis,' as much a 'holy city,' as Carchemish
itself.
It is not its sculptures only which prove to us that it was a city of
the Hittites. The figures of the deities have attached to them, as at
Eyuk, the same hieroglyphs as those which meet us in the inscriptions of
Hamath and Aleppo, of Carchemish and Merash, and within its walls,
southward of the ruins of its palace, Prof. Perrot discovered a long
text of nine or ten lines cut out of the rock, and though worn and
disfigured by time and weather, still showing the forms of many Hittite
characters. So far as can be judged from a photograph of it he has
published, the forms are the same as those which are found on the
Hittite monuments of Syria.
Tedious as all these details may seem to be, it has been necessary to
give them, since they tell us what was the appearance and construction
of a Hittite city, a Hittite palace, and the interior of a Hittite
temple. The discoveries recently made in the Hittite districts south of
the Taurus, show us that here too the palaces and temples were like
those of Eyuk and Boghaz Keui. Here too we find the same dados
sculptured with the same figures dressed in the same costume; here too
we meet with the same lions, and the same winged deities standing on the
backs of animals. A photograph of a piece of sculpture on a block of
basalt at Carchemish, taken by Dr. Gwyther, might have been taken at
Boghaz Keui. The art, the forms, and the symbolism are all the same.
The high-road from Boghaz Keui to Merash must have passed through the
defile of Ghurun, where Sir Charles Wilson discovered Hittite
inscriptions carved upon the cliff. But there may have been a second
road which led through Kaisariyeh, the modern capital of Kappadokia,
southward to Bor or Tyana, where Prof. Ramsay found a Hittite text, and
from thence to the silver mines of the Bulgar Dagh. The bas-reliefs of
Ibreez are not far distant from the famous Cilician gates which led the
traveller from the great central plateau of Asia Minor to Tarsus and the
sea.
It would seem that the silver mines of the Bulgar Dagh were first worked
by Hittite miners. Silver had a special attraction for the Hittite race.
The material on which the Hittite version of the treaty between the
Hittite king of Kadesh and the Egyptian Pharaoh was written was a tablet
of that metal. That such tablets were in frequent use, results from the
fact that nearly all the Hittite inscriptions known to us are not
incised, but cut in relief upon the stone. It is therefore obvious that
the Hittites must have first inscribed their hieroglyphs upon metal,
rather than upon wood or stone or clay; it is only in the case of metal
that it is less laborious to hammer or cast in relief than to cut the
metal with a graving tool, and nothing can prove more clearly how long
accustomed the Hittite scribes must have been to doing so, than their
imitation of this work in relief when they came to write upon stone. It
is possible that most of the silver of which they made use came from the
Bulgar Dagh. The Hittite inscription found near the old mines of these
mountains by Mr. Davis, proves that they had once occupied the locality.
It is even possible that their settlement for a time in Lydia was also
connected with their passion for 'the bright metal.' At all events the
Gumush Dagh, or 'Silver Mountains,' lie to the south of the Pass of
Karabel, and traces of old workings can still be detected in them.
However this may be, the Hittite monuments of Asia Minor confirm in a
striking way the evidence of the Egyptian inscriptions. They show us
that the Hittites worked for silver in the mountains which looked down
upon the Cilician plain, from whence the influence of their art and
writing extended into the plain itself. They further show that the
central point of Hittite power was a square on either side of the Taurus
range, which included Carchemish and Komagênê in the south, the
district eastwards of the Halys on the north, and the country of which
Malatiyeh was the capital in the east. The Hittite tribes, in fact, were
mountaineers from the plateau of Kappadokia who had spread themselves
out in all directions. A time came when, under the leadership of
powerful princes, they marched along the two high-roads of Asia Minor
and established their supremacy over the coast-tribes of the far west.
The age to which this military empire belongs is indicated by the
Egyptian character of the so-called image of Niobê on the cliff of
Sipylos, as well as by the sphinxes which guarded the entrance to the
palace of Eyuk. It goes back to the days when the rulers of Kadesh could
summon to their aid the vassal-chieftains of the Ægean coast. The
monuments the Hittites have left behind them in Asia Minor thus bear the
same testimony as the records of Egypt. The people to whom Uriah, and it
may be Bath-sheba, belonged, not only had contended on equal terms with
one of the greatest of Egyptian kings; they had carried their arms
through the whole length of Asia Minor, they had set up satraps in the
cities of Lydia, and had brought the civilisation of the East to the
barbarous tribes of the distant West.