The Hittites Part 5

Sandan was identified with the Sun, and hence it happened that when a Semitic language came to prevail in Cilicia he was transformed into a supreme Baal. The same transformation had taken place centuries before in the Hitt.i.te cities of Syria. Beside the Syrian G.o.ddess Kes, who is represented as standing upon a lion, like the great G.o.ddess of Carchemish, the Egyptian monuments tell us of Sutekh, who stands in the same relation to his. .h.i.tt.i.te wors.h.i.+ppers as the Semitic Baal stood to the populations of Canaan. Sutekh was the supreme Hitt.i.te G.o.d, but at the same time he was localised in every city or state in which the Hitt.i.tes lived. Thus there was a Sutekh of Carchemish and a Sutekh of Kadesh, just as there was a Baal of Tyre and a Baal of Tarsos. The forms under which he was wors.h.i.+pped were manifold, but everywhere it was the same Sutekh, the same national G.o.d.

It would seem that the power of Sutekh began to wane after the age of Ramses, and that the G.o.ddess began to usurp the place once held by the G.o.d. It is possible that this was due to Babylonian and a.s.syrian influence. At any rate, whereas it is Sutekh who appears at the head of the Hitt.i.te states in the treaty with Ramses, in later days the chief cult of the 'Holy Cities' was paid to the Mother-G.o.ddess. His place was taken by the G.o.ddess at Carchemish as well as at Mabog, at Boghaz Keui as well as at Komana.

In the Kappadokian Komana the G.o.ddess went under the name of Ma. She was served by 6000 priests and priestesses, the whole city being dedicated to her service. The place of the king was occupied by the Abakles or high-priest. We have seen that the sculptures of Boghaz Keui give us reason to believe that the same was also the case in Pteria; we know that it was so in other 'Holy Cities' of Asia Minor. At Pessinus in Phrygia, where lions and panthers stood beside the G.o.ddess, the whole city was given up to her wors.h.i.+p, under the command of the chief Gallos or priest; and on the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea the Amazonian priestesses of Kybele, who danced in armour in her honour, were imagined by the Greeks to const.i.tute the sole population of an entire country. At Ephesos, in spite of the Greek colony which had found its way there, the wors.h.i.+p of the Mother-G.o.ddess continued to absorb the life of the inhabitants, so that it still could be described in the time of St. Paul as a city which was 'a wors.h.i.+pper of the great G.o.ddess.' Here, as at Pessinus, she was wors.h.i.+pped under the form of a meteoric stone 'which had fallen from heaven.'

We may regard these 'Holy Cities,' placed under the protection of a G.o.ddess and wholly devoted to her wors.h.i.+p, as peculiarly characteristic of the Hitt.i.te race. Their two southern capitals, Kadesh and Carchemish, were cities of this kind, and their stronghold at Boghaz Keui was presumably also a consecrated place. Their progress through Asia Minor was characterised by the rise of priestly cities and the growth of a cla.s.s of armed priestesses. Komana in Kappadokia, and Ephesos on the sh.o.r.es of the aegean, are typical examples of such holy towns. The entire population ministered to the divinity to whom the city was dedicated, the sanctuary of the deity stood in its centre, and the chief authority was wielded by a high-priest. If a king existed by the side of the priest, he came in course of time to fill a merely subordinate position.

These 'Holy Cities' were also 'Asyla' or Cities of Refuge. The homicide could escape to them, and be safe from his pursuers. Once within the precincts of the city and the protection of its deity, he could not be injured or slain. But it was not only the man who had slain another by accident who could thus claim an 'asylum' from his enemies. The debtor and the political refugee were equally safe. Doubtless the right of asylum was frequently abused, and real criminals took advantage of regulations which were intended to protect the unfortunate in an age of lawlessness and revenge. But the inst.i.tution on the whole worked well, and, while it strengthened the power of the priesthood, it curbed injustice and restrained violence.

Now the inst.i.tution of Cities of Refuge did not exist only in Asia Minor and in the region occupied by the Hitt.i.tes. It existed also in Palestine, and it seems not unlikely that it was adopted by the great Hebrew lawgiver, acting under divine guidance, from the older population of the country. The Hebrew cities of refuge were six in number. One of them was 'Kedesh in Galilee,' whose very name declares it to have been a 'Holy City,' like Kadesh on the Orontes, while another was the ancient sanctuary of Hebron, once occupied by Hitt.i.tes and Amorites. Shechem, the third city of refuge on the western side of the Jordan, had been taken by Jacob 'out of the hand of the Amorite' (Gen. xlviii. 22); and the other three cities were all on the eastern side of the Jordan, in the region so long held by Amorite tribes. We are therefore tempted to ask whether these cities had not already been 'asyla' or cities of refuge long before Moses was enjoined by G.o.d to make them such for the Israelitish conquerors of Palestine.

Closely connected with Hitt.i.te religion was. .h.i.tt.i.te art. Religion and art have been often intertwined together in the history of the world, and we can often infer the religion of a people from its art, as in the case of the sculptures of Boghaz Keui. Hitt.i.te art was a modification of that of Babylonia, and bears testimony to the same Babylonian influence as the wors.h.i.+p of the 'Mother-G.o.ddess.' The same Chaldaean culture is presupposed by both.

But while the art of the Hitt.i.tes was essentially Babylonian in origin, it was profoundly modified in the hands of the Hitt.i.te artists. The deities, indeed, were made to ride on the backs of animals, as upon Babylonian cylinders, the walls of the palaces were adorned with long rows of bas-reliefs, as in Chaldaea and a.s.syria, and there was the same tendency to arrange animals face to face in heraldic style; but nevertheless the workmans.h.i.+p and the details introduced into it were purely native. Even a symbol like the winged solar disk a.s.sumes in Hitt.i.te sculpture a special character which can never be mistaken. The Hitt.i.te artist excelled in the representation of animal forms, but the lion, which he seems to have never wearied of designing, is treated in a peculiar way which marks it sharply off from the sculptured lions either of Babylonia or of any other country. So, too, in the case of the human figure, though the general conception has been derived from Babylonian art, the conception is worked out in a new and original manner. Those who have once seen the sculptured image of a Hitt.i.te warrior or a Hitt.i.te G.o.d, can never confuse it with the artistic productions of another race. The figure is clearly drawn from the daily experience of the sculptor's own life. The dress with its peaked shoes, the thick rounded form, the strange protrusive profile, were copied from the costume and appearance of his fellow-countrymen, and the striking agreement that exists between his representation of them and that which we find on the Egyptian monuments proves how faithfully he must have worked. The elements, in short, of Babylonian art are present in the art of the Hitt.i.te, but the treatment and selection are his own.

It is in his selection and combination of these elements that he exhibits most clearly his originality. Monsters, half human, half b.e.s.t.i.a.l, were known to the Babylonians, but it was left to the Hitt.i.te to invent a double-headed eagle, or to plant a human head on a column of lions. The so-called rope-pattern occurs once or twice on Babylonian gems, but it became a distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of Hitt.i.te art, like the employment of the heads only of animals instead of their entire forms.

So, again, the heraldic arrangement of animals face to face, or more rarely back to back, had its first home in Chaldaea, but it was the Hitt.i.tes who raised it into a principle of art. We may perhaps trace their doing so to their love of animal forms.

The influence of Babylonian culture may have made itself first felt in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna represent the Hitt.i.te tribes as descending southward into the Syrian plains. It may on the other hand go back to a much earlier epoch. We have no materials at present for deciding the question. One fact, however, is clear; there was a time when the Hitt.i.tes were profoundly affected by Babylonian civilisation, religion and art. Before this could have been the case they must have been already settled in Syria.

It is more easy to fix the period when the Hitt.i.te sculptor received that inspiration from Egyptian art which produced the sphinxes of Eyuk and the seated image on Mount Sipylos. It can only have been the age of Ramses II., and of the great wars between Egypt and the Hitt.i.te princes in the fourteenth century before our era. The influence of Egypt was but transitory, but it was to it, in all probability, that the Hitt.i.tes owed the idea of hieroglyphic writing.

At a far later date Babylonian influence was superseded by that of a.s.syria. The later sculptures of Carchemish betray the existence of a.s.syrian rather than of Babylonian models. The winged figure of the G.o.ddess of Carchemish now in the British Museum is a.s.syrian in style and character, and it is possible that other draped images of the G.o.ddess may be derived from the same source. In Babylonian art Istar was represented nude.

However this may be, Professor Perrot has made it clear that the beginnings of Hitt.i.te art must be looked for in Syria, on the southern slopes of the Taurus, from whence it spread to the tribes of Kappadokia.

It is in Northern Syria that its rudest and most infantile attempts have been found. The sculptors of Eyuk were already advanced in skill.

To Professor Perrot we also owe the discovery of bronze figures of Hitt.i.te manufacture. The execution of them is at once conventional and barbarous. Nothing can exceed the rudeness of a figure now in the Louvre, which represents a G.o.d with a pointed tiara, standing on the back of an animal. Though the face of the G.o.d has evidently been modelled with care, it is impossible to tell to what zoological species the animal which supports him is intended to belong. Almost equally far removed from nature is the bronze image of a bull which is also in the Louvre.

If these bronzes are to be regarded as the highest efforts of Hitt.i.te metallurgic work, it is not to be regretted that they are few in number.

But it is quite different with the engraved gems which we now know to have been of Hitt.i.te workmans.h.i.+p. Many of them are exceedingly fine; a haemat.i.te cylinder, for instance, which was discovered at Kappadokia, is equal to the best products of Babylonian art. The gems and cylinders were for the most part intended to be used as seals, and some of them are provided with handles cut out of the stone, the seal itself having designs on four, and sometimes on five faces. These handles seem to be a peculiarity of Hitt.i.te art, or at least of the art which derived its inspiration from that of the Hitt.i.tes. Another peculiarity noticeable in many of the gems, consists in enclosing the inner field of the engraved design with one or more concentric circles, each circle containing an elaborate series of ornaments or figures, or even characters, though the characters are usually placed in the central field. Thus two gems have been found at Yuzghat, in Kappadokia, so much alike, that they must have been the work of the same artist. On the larger an inscription has been engraved in the centre, round which runs a circle containing a large number of beautifully-executed figures. The winged solar disk rests upon the symbol of 'kings.h.i.+p,' on either side of which kneels a figure, half man and half bull. On the right and left is the figure of a standing priest, behind whom we see on the left a man adoring what seems to be the stump of a tree, while on the right are a tree, two arrows and a quiver, a basket, a stag's head, and a seated deity, above whose hand is a bird. The two groups are separated by the picture of a boot--the symbol, it may be, of the earth--which rests, like the winged solar disk, on the symbol of royalty. The smaller seal has a different inscription in the centre, encircled by two rings, one containing a row of ornaments, and the other the same figures as those engraved on the larger seal, excepting only that the arrangement of the figures has been changed, and a tree introduced among them. What is curious, however, is that a gem has been found at Aidin, far away towards the western extremity of Asia Minor, containing a central inscription almost identical with that of the smaller Yuzghat seal, though the figures which surround it are not the same.

These circular seals must be regarded not only as characteristic of Hitt.i.te art, but also as a product of Hitt.i.te invention. We meet with nothing resembling them in Babylonia or a.s.syria.

The gems can be traced across the aegean to the sh.o.r.es of Greece. Among the objects discovered by Dr. Schliemann at Mykenae were two rings of gold, on the chatons of which designs are engraved in what we may now recognise as the Hitt.i.te style of art. On one of them are two rows of animals' heads; on the other an elaborate picture, which reminds us of the elaborate designs on the gems of Asia Minor. It represents a woman under a tree, facing two other persons, who wear the upturned boots and flounced dress that we find in Hitt.i.te sculptures, while the background is filled in with the heads of animals.

These gems are not the only indication the ruins of Mykenae have afforded that Hitt.i.te influence was spread beyond the coasts of Asia Minor.

Allusion has already been made to the figures of the Hitt.i.te G.o.ddess and the doves that rested on the pinnacles of her temple; another figure in thin gold gives us a likeness of the Hitt.i.te G.o.ddess seated on the cliff of Sipylos, as she appeared before rain and tempest had changed her into 'the weeping Niobe.' Perhaps, however, the most striking ill.u.s.tration of the westward migration of Hitt.i.te influence, is to be found in the famous lions which stand fronting each other, carved on stone, above the great gate of the ancient Peloponnesian city. The lions of Mykenae have long been known as the oldest piece of sculpture in Europe, but the art which inspired it was of Hitt.i.te origin. A similar bas-relief has been discovered at k.u.mbet, in Phrygia, in the near vicinity of Hitt.i.te monuments; and we have just seen that the heraldic position in which the lions are represented was a peculiar feature of Hitt.i.te art.

Greek tradition affirmed that the rulers of Mykenae had come from Lydia, bringing with them the civilisation and the treasures of Asia Minor. The tradition has been confirmed by modern research. While certain elements belonging to the prehistoric culture of Greece, as revealed at Mykenae and elsewhere, were derived from Egypt and Phoenicia, there are others which point to Asia Minor as their source. And the culture of Asia Minor was. .h.i.tt.i.te. Mr. Gladstone, therefore, may be right in seeing the Hitt.i.tes in the Keteians of Homer--that Homer who told of the legendary glories of Mykenae and the Lydian dynasty which held it in possession.

Even the buckle, with the help of which the prehistoric Greek fastened his cloak, has been shown by a German scholar to imply an arrangement of the dress such as we see represented on the Hitt.i.te monument of Ibreez.

For us of the modern world, therefore, the resurrection of the Hitt.i.te people from their long sleep of oblivion possesses a double interest.

They appeal to us not alone because of the influence they once exercised on the fortunes of the Chosen People, not alone because a Hitt.i.te was the wife of David and the ancestress of Christ, but also on account of the debt which the civilisation of our own Europe owes to them. Our culture is the inheritance we have received from ancient Greece, and the first beginnings of Greek culture were derived from the Hitt.i.te conquerors of Asia Minor. The Hitt.i.te warriors who still guard the Pa.s.s of Karabel, on the very threshold of Asia, are symbols of the position occupied by the race in the education of mankind. The Hitt.i.tes 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. But they never pa.s.sed the boundary themselves; with the conquest of Lydia their mission was accomplished, the work that had been appointed them was fulfilled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN INSCRIPTION FOUND AT CARCHEMISH (_now destroyed_).]

CHAPTER VII.

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 Hitt.i.tes until their few and fragmentary inscriptions are deciphered? The answer to this question will have been furnished by the preceding pages. Though the Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.tes 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 a.s.syria, 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 Hitt.i.te inscriptions have not been altogether useless. They have helped to connect together the scattered monuments of Hitt.i.te dominion, and to prove that the peculiar art they display was of Hitt.i.te origin.

It was the Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs which accompany the figure of the warrior in the Pa.s.s of Karabel, and of the sitting G.o.ddess on Mount Sipylos, that proved these sculptures to be of Hitt.i.te origin. It has similarly been inscriptions containing Hitt.i.te characters which have enabled us to trace the march of the Hitt.i.te armies along the high-roads of Asia Minor, and to feel sure that Hitt.i.te princes once reigned in the city of Hamath.

The Hitt.i.te 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 a.s.syrians, the question arises whether the Greeks did not learn to write in such a fas.h.i.+on from neighbours who made use of the Hitt.i.te script.

Another characteristic of Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs from those of Egypt.

But a very short inspection of the characters is enough to show that the Hitt.i.tes could not have borrowed them from the Egyptians. The two forms of writing are utterly and entirely distinct. Two of the most common Hitt.i.te characters represent the snow-boot and the fingerless glove, which, as we have seen, indicate the northern ancestry of the Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.tes 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 Hitt.i.te genius the idea of inventing a similar means of intercommunication for his own people.

At any rate, it is pretty clear that the Hitt.i.te 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 cla.s.s 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 Hitt.i.tes 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 Hitt.i.tes were their plates of metal, on the surface of which the characters were hammered out from behind.

The Hitt.i.te 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 G.o.d Sutekh embracing the Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te wife of Ramses, is discovered, it is possible that a Hitt.i.te copy of the famous treaty may be found among its contents.

At all events, it is clear that already at this period the Hitt.i.tes 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 Hitt.i.te monarch was accompanied to battle by his scribes.

If Kirjath-sepher or 'Book-town,' in the neighbourhood of Hebron, was of Hitt.i.te origin, the Hitt.i.tes would have possessed libraries like the a.s.syrians, 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 Hitt.i.tes 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 Hitt.i.te region of the world. Cuneiform tablets have been purchased at Kaisariyeh 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 Hitt.i.te sculptures of Sinjirli in the ancient Komagene. If the Hitt.i.te 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 Archaeology, which announced the discovery of a Hitt.i.te empire and the connection of the curious art of Asia Minor with that of Carchemish, I had fallen across a bilingual inscription in Hitt.i.te and cuneiform characters. This was on the silver boss of King Tarkondemos, the only key yet found to the interpretation of the Hitt.i.te texts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Hitt.i.te, and I guessed that the 'symbols' which accompanied it would turn out to be Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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. Francois 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.