THE INSCRIPTIONS.
How can the history of a lost people be recovered, it may be asked,
except through the help of the records they have left behind them? How
can we come to know anything about the Hittites until their few and
fragmentary inscriptions are deciphered? The answer to this question
will have been furnished by the preceding pages. Though the Hittite
inscriptions are still undeciphered, though the number of them is still
very small, there are other materials for reconstructing the history of
the race, and these materials have now found their interpreter. The
sculptured monuments the Hittites have left behind them, the seals they
engraved, the cities they inhabited, the memorials of them preserved in
the Old Testament, in the cuneiform tablets of Assyria, and in the
papyri of Egypt, have all served to build up afresh the fabric of a
mighty empire which once exercised so profound an influence on the
destinies of the civilised world.
But the Hittite inscriptions have not been altogether useless. They have
helped to connect together the scattered monuments of Hittite dominion,
and to prove that the peculiar art they display was of Hittite origin.
It was the Hittite hieroglyphs which accompany the figure of the warrior
in the Pass of Karabel, and of the sitting goddess on Mount Sipylos,
that proved these sculptures to be of Hittite origin. It has similarly
been inscriptions containing Hittite characters which have enabled us to
trace the march of the Hittite armies along the high-roads of Asia
Minor, and to feel sure that Hittite princes once reigned in the city of
Hamath.
The Hittite texts are distinguished by two characteristics. With hardly
an exception, the hieroglyphs that compose them are carved in relief
instead of being incised, and the lines read alternately from right to
left and from left to right. The direction in which the characters look
determines the direction in which they should be read. This alternate or
_boustrophedon_ mode of writing also characterises early Greek
inscriptions, and since it was not adopted by either Phoenicians,
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.
But a very short inspection of the characters is enough to show that the
Hittites could not have borrowed them from the Egyptians. The two forms
of writing are utterly and entirely distinct. Two of the most common
Hittite characters represent the snow-boot and the fingerless glove,
which, as we have seen, indicate the northern ancestry of the Hittite
tribes, while the ideograph which denotes a 'country' is a picture of
the mountain peaks of the Kappadokian plateau. It would therefore seem
that the system of writing was invented in Kappadokia, and not in the
southern regions of Syria or Canaan.
We may gather, however, that the invention took place after the contact
of the Hittites with Egypt, and their consequent acquaintance with the
Egyptian form of script. Similar occurrences have happened in modern
times. A Cheroki Indian in North America, who had seen the books of the
white man, was led thereby to devise an elaborate mode of writing for
his own countrymen, and the curious syllabary invented for the Vei
negroes by one of their tribe originated in the same manner. So, too, we
may imagine that the sight of the hieroglyphs of Egypt, and the
knowledge that thoughts could be conveyed by them, suggested to some
Hittite genius the idea of inventing a similar means of
intercommunication for his own people.
At any rate, it is pretty clear that the Hittite characters are used
like the Egyptian, sometimes as ideographs to express ideas, sometimes
phonetically to represent syllables and sounds, sometimes as
determinatives to denote the class to which the word belongs to which
they are attached. It is probable, moreover, that a word or sound was
often expressed by multiplying the characters which expressed the whole
or part of it, just as was the case in Egyptian writing in the age of
Ramses II. At the same time the number of separate characters used by
the Hittites was far less than that employed by the Egyptian scribes. At
present not 200 are known to exist, though almost every fresh
inscription adds to the list.
The oldest writing material of the Hittites were their plates of metal,
on the surface of which the characters were hammered out from behind.
The Hittite copy of the treaty with Ramses II. was engraved in this
manner on a plate of silver, its centre being occupied with a
representation of the god Sutekh embracing the Hittite king, and a short
line of hieroglyphs running round him. This central ornamentation,
surrounded with a circular band of figures, was in accordance with the
usual style of Hittite art. The Egyptian monuments show us what the
silver plate was like. It was of rectangular shape, with a ring at the
top by which it could be suspended from the wall. If ever the tomb of
Ur-Maa Noferu-Ra, the Hittite wife of Ramses, is discovered, it is
possible that a Hittite copy of the famous treaty may be found among its
contents.
At all events, it is clear that already at this period the Hittites were
a literary people. The Egyptian records make mention of a certain
Khilip-sira, whose name is compounded with that of Khilip or Aleppo, and
describe him as 'a writer of books of the vile Kheta.' Like the Egyptian
Pharaoh, the Hittite monarch was accompanied to battle by his scribes.
If Kirjath-sepher or 'Book-town,' in the neighbourhood of Hebron, was of
Hittite origin, the Hittites would have possessed libraries like the
Assyrians, which may yet be dug up. Kirjath-sepher was also called
Debir, 'the sanctuary,' and we may therefore conclude that the library
was stored in its chief temple, as were the libraries of Babylonia.
There was another Debir or Dapur further north, in the vicinity of
Kadesh on the Orontes, which is mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions;
and since this was in the land of the Amorites, while Kirjath-sepher is
also described as an Amorite town, it is possible that here too the
relics of an ancient library may yet be found. We must not forget that
in the days of Deborah, 'out of Zebulon,' northward of Megiddo, came
'they that handle the pen of the writer' (Judg. v. 14).
The inscriptions recently discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt have
shown that in the century before the Exodus the common medium of
literary intercourse in Western Asia was the language and cuneiform
script of Babylonia. It was subsequently to this that the Hittites
forced their way southward, bringing with them their own peculiar system
of hieroglyphic writing. But the cuneiform characters still continued to
be used in the Hittite region of the world. Cuneiform tablets have been
purchased at Kaisarîyeh which come from some old library of Kappadokia,
the site of which is still unknown, and Dr. Humann has lately discovered
a long cuneiform inscription among the Hittite sculptures of Sinjirli in
the ancient Komagênê. If the Hittite texts are ever deciphered, it will
probably be through the help of the cuneiform script.
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.
[Illustration: THE BILINGUAL BOSS OF TARKONDEMOS.]
The story of the boss is a strange one. It was purchased many years ago
at Smyrna by M. Alexander Jovanoff, a well-known numismatist of
Constantinople, who showed it to the Oriental scholar Dr. A. D.
Mordtmann. Dr. Mordtmann made a copy of it, and found it to be a round
silver plate, probably the head of a dagger or dirk, round the rim of
which ran a cuneiform inscription. Within, occupying the central field,
was the figure of a warrior in a new and unknown style of art. He stood
erect, holding a spear in the right hand, and pressing the left against
his breast. He was clothed in a tunic, over which a fringed cloak was
thrown; a close-fitting cap was on the head, and boots with upturned
ends on the feet, the upper part of the legs being bare, while a dirk
was fastened in the belt. On either side of the figure was a series of
'symbols,' the series on each side being the same, except that on the
right side the upper 'symbols' were smaller, and the lower 'symbols'
larger than the corresponding ones on the left side.
In an article published some years later on the cuneiform inscriptions
of Van, Dr. Mordtmann referred to the boss, and it was his description
of the figure in the centre of it which arrested my attention. I saw at
once that the figure must be in the style of art I had just determined
to be Hittite, and I guessed that the 'symbols' which accompanied it
would turn out to be Hittite hieroglyphs. Dr. Mordtmann stated that he
had given a copy of the boss in 1862 in the 'Numismatic Journal which
appears in Hanover.' After a long and troublesome search I found that
the publication meant by him was not a Journal at all, and had appeared
at Leipzig, not at Hanover, in 1863, not in 1862. The copy of the boss
contained in it showed that I was right in believing Dr. Mordtmann's
'symbols' to be Hittite characters.
It now became necessary to know how far the copy was correct, and to
ascertain whether the original were still in existence. A reply soon
came from the British Museum. The boss had once been offered to the
Museum for sale, but rejected, as nothing like it had ever been seen
before, and it was therefore suspected of being a forgery. Before its
rejection, however, an electrotype had been taken of it, an impression
of which was now sent to me.
Shortly afterwards came another communication from M. François
Lenormant, one of the most learned and brilliant Oriental scholars of
the present century. He had seen the original at Constantinople some
twenty years previously, and had there made a cast of it, which he
forwarded to me. The cast and the electrotype agreed exactly together.
There could accordingly be no doubt that we had before us, if not the
original itself, a perfect facsimile of it. The importance of this fact
soon became manifest, for the original boss disappeared after M.
Jovanoff's death, and in spite of all enquiries no trace of it can be
discovered. It may be recovered hereafter in the bazaars of
Constantinople or in some private house at St. Petersburg; at present
there is no clue whatever to its actual possessor.
The reading of the cuneiform legend offers but little difficulty. It
gives us the name and title of the king whose figure is engraved within
it--'Tarqu-dimme king of the country of Erme.'
The name Tarqu-dimme is evidently the same as that of the Cilician
prince Tarkondêmos or Tarkon-dimotos, who lived in the time of our Lord.
The name is also met with in other parts of Asia Minor under the forms
of Tarkondas and Tarkondimatos; and we may consider it to be of a
distinctively Hittite type. Where the district was over which
Tarqu-dimme ruled we can only guess. It may have been the range of
mountains called Arima by the classical writers, which lay close under
the Hittite monuments of the Bulgar Dagh. In this case Tarkondemos would
have been a Cilician king.
The twice-repeated Hittite version of the cuneiform legend has been the
subject of much discussion. The arrangement of the characters, due more
to the necessity of filling up the vacant space on the boss than to the
requirements of their natural order, allowed more than one
interpretation of them. But there were two facts which furnished the key
to their true reading. On the one hand, the inscription is divided into
two halves by two characters whose form and position in other Hittite
texts show them to signify 'king' and 'country'; on the other hand, the
first two characters are made, as it were, to issue from the mouth of
the king, and thus to express his name. We thus obtain the reading:
'Tarku-dimme king of the country of Er-me,' the syllables _tarku_ and
_me_ being denoted by the head of a goat and the numeral 'four,' while
the ideographs of 'king' and 'country' are represented by the royal
tiara worn by gods and monarchs in the Hittite sculptures, and by the
picture of a mountainous land. In the ideograph of 'country' Mordtmann
had already seen a likeness of the shafts of rock which rise out of the
Kappadokian plateau.
The bilingual boss accordingly furnishes us with two important
ideographs, and the phonetic values of four other characters. Armed with
these, we can attack the other texts, and learn something about them. It
becomes clear that the inscriptions from Carchemish now in the British
Museum are the monuments of a king whose name ends in -me-Tarku, and who
records the names of his father and grandfather. To the grandfather
belonged an inscription copied by Mr. Boscawen among the ruins of
Carchemish, but unfortunately never brought to England, and probably
long since destroyed.
On the lion of Merash, moreover, a king similarly records his name
along with those of his two immediate ancestors. The same king's name is
found at Hamath as that of the father of the sovereign mentioned in the
other inscriptions that come from there, and we may perhaps infer that
the monuments of Hamath are the memorials of a Komagenian monarch who
carried his victorious arms thus far to the south. The time will
doubtless come when we shall be able to read these mysterious characters
without difficulty, and we shall then know whether or not our inference
is correct.
[Illustration: THE LION OF MERASH.]
Meanwhile we must be content to await the discovery of another bilingual
text. 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.
It is not probable that the Hittite system of writing passed away
without leaving its influence behind it. As the culture and art which
the Hittites carried to the barbarous nations of Asia Minor became
implanted among them and bore abundant fruit, so too we may believe that
the knowledge of the Hittite writing did not perish utterly. There is
reason to think that the curious syllabary which continued to be used in
Cyprus as late as the age of Alexander the Great was derived from the
Hittite hieroglyphs. It was singularly unfitted to express the sounds of
the Greek language, as it was required to do in Cyprus, and it has been
shown that it was but a branch of a syllabary once employed throughout a
large part of Asia Minor, the very country in which the Hittites
engraved their own written monuments. It seems likely, therefore, that
the Hittite characters became a syllabary in which each character
represented a separate syllable, and survived in this form to a late
age.
It is also possible that the names assigned to the letters even of the
Phoenician alphabet were influenced by the hieroglyphs of the Hittites.
When the Phoenicians borrowed the letters of the Egyptian alphabet they
gave them names beginning in their own language with the sound
represented by each letter. _A_ was called _aleph_ because the
Phoenician word _aleph_ 'an ox' began with that sound, _k_ was _kaph_
'the hand' because _kaph_ in Phoenician began with _k_. It was but an
early application of the same principle which made our forefathers
believe that the child would learn his alphabet more quickly if he was
taught that '_A_ was an archer who shot at a frog.'
But the names must have been assigned to the letters not only because
they commenced with corresponding sounds, but also because of their
fancied resemblance to the objects denoted by the names. Now in some
instances the resemblance is by no means clear. The earliest forms of
the letters called _kaph_ and _yod_, for example, both of which words
signify a 'hand,' have little likeness to the human hand. If we turn to
the Hittite hieroglyphs, however, we find among them two representations
of the hand, encased in the long Hittite glove, which are almost
identical with the Phoenician letters in shape. It is difficult,
therefore, to resist the conviction that the letters _kaph_ and _yod_
received their names from Syrians who were familiar with the appearance
of the Hittite characters. It is the same in the case of _aleph_. Here
too the old Phoenician letter does not in any way resemble an ox, but it
bears a very close likeness to the head of a bull, which occupies a
prominent place in the Hittite texts. _Aleph_ became the Greek _alpha_
when the Phoenician alphabet was handed on to the Greeks, and in the
word _alphabet_ has become part of our own heritage. Like _yod_, which
has passed through the Greek _iota_ into the English _jot_, it is thus
possible that there are still words in daily use among ourselves which
can be traced, if not to the Hittite language, at all events to the
Hittite script.
What the language of the Hittites was we have yet to learn. But the
proper names preserved on the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments show that
it did not belong to the Semitic family of speech, and an analysis of
the Hittite inscriptions further makes it evident that it made large use
of suffixes. But we must be on our guard against supposing that the
language was uniform throughout the district in which the Hittite
population lived. Different tribes doubtless spoke different dialects,
and some of these dialects probably differed widely from each other. But
they all belonged to the same general type and class of language, and
may therefore be collectively spoken of as the Hittite language, just as
the various dialects of England are collectively termed English. Indeed,
we find the same type of language extending far eastward of Kappadokia,
if we may trust the proper names recorded in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Names of a distinctively Hittite cast are met with as far as the
frontiers of the ancient kingdom of Ararat, and it may be that the
language of Ararat itself, the so-called Vannic, may belong to the same
family of speech. As the cuneiform inscriptions in which this language
is embodied have now been deciphered, we shall be able to determine the
question as soon as the Hittite texts also render up their secrets.
In the south of Palestine the Hittites must have lost their old language
and have adopted that of their Semitic neighbours at an early period. In
Northern Syria the change was longer in coming about. The last king of
Carchemish bears a non-Semitic name, but a Semitic god was worshipped at
Aleppo, and Kadesh on the Orontes remained a Semitic sanctuary. The
Hittite occupation of Hamath seems to have lasted for a short time only.
Its king, who appears on the Assyrian monuments as the contemporary of
Ahab, has the Semitic name of Irkhulena, 'the moon-god belongs to us';
and his successors were equally of Semitic origin. 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. In its turn Greek has been superseded in
these modern times by Turkish.
Languages, however, may change and perish, but the races that have
spoken them remain. The characteristics of race, once acquired, are slow
to alter. Though the last echoes of Hittite speech have died away
centuries ago, the Hittite race still inhabits the region from which in
ancient days it poured down upon the cities of the south. We may still
see in it all the lineaments of the warriors of Karabel or the
sculptured princes of Carchemish; even the snow-shoe and fingerless
glove are still worn on the cold uplands of Kappadokia.