The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

The cuneiform tablets which have come from the site are known as “Cappadocian,” and were first noticed by Dr. Pinches. The forms of the characters resemble those of the early Babylonian script, which was still used in Assyria in the age of Khammu-rabi. Many of the proper names, moreover, seem to be distinctive of that period. On the other hand, a large proportion of them contain the name of Asur—often in its primitive form of Asir—or are otherwise characteristic of Assyria. The tablets are further dated by the archons who gave their names to the years, a system of chronology which was peculiar to Assyria and unknown in Babylonia, while the month was divided into “weeks” of five days each. The language of the tablets also, which is full of dialectic mispronunciations and strange words, points to Assyria rather than to the southern kingdom, and we may therefore conclude that the colonists were Assyrians, even though the colony may have been founded when Assyria was still a Babylonian province.

There are indications in the Assyrian inscriptions themselves that the road to Cappadocia was known to the Assyrian princes at an early epoch. The earliest Assyrian kings whose annals have come down to us are Hadad-nirari I. and his son Shalmaneser I. (B.C. 1300). Hadad-nirari tells us that his greatgrandfather, Assur-yuballidh, whose letters form part of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, had subdued “the wide-spread” province of Subari, which lay near the sources of the Euphrates, and in which Kara Eyuk was perhaps included, while he himself restored the cities of the same province which had fallen into ruin. Later, Shalmaneser I. conducted campaign after campaign towards the same region. In his second year he overthrew the king of Malatia, and the combined forces of the other “Hittite” states, who had come to his assistance: “all were conquered,” from the borders of Cappadocia to the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish. A military colony was settled at the head waters of the Tigris which secured the high-road to Asia Minor.

Two centuries later we learn from Tiglath-pileser I. that Moschians and Hittites had overrun part of this Assyrian territory, and occupied some of the Assyrian settlements. Once more, therefore, the Assyrian troops marched to the north-west; the provinces which lay in the valley of the Murad-chai were recovered, and the old province of Subari cleared of intruders. Soon afterwards Tiglath-pileser forced his way into Southern Cappadocia and the valley of the Sarus, making Comana tributary, razing to the ground the fortresses that had resisted him, and erecting on their site chambers of brick, with bronze tablets on which his conquests were recorded. Eastern Cilicia was known at the time to the Assyrians as Muzri, or “the Marchland,” a clear proof that it had long formed a borderland and debatable territory between the Assyrian Empire and the nations of Asia Minor.

It is thus evident that even before the rise of the Assyrian monarchy, the road that led to the mining districts of Cappadocia, along the valleys of the Upper Tigris, Euphrates and Tokhma Su, was not only known to the Assyro-Babylonians, but had actually constituted Assyrian territory, which was colonized by Assyrian garrisons and paid tribute to Nineveh whenever Assyria was strong enough to enforce its authority. At the eastern extremity of the road stood the city of unknown name, now represented by “the Burnt Mound” of Kara Eyuk, whose existence as an Assyro-Babylonian city probably dates back to the age of Khammu-rabi.

It was the outpost of Babylonian culture in Asia Minor. Babylonian art, and, above all, the Babylonian system of writing, were brought by it into the heart of the Hittite region, and the archæological objects found there consequently become important for chronological dating. Not far off, on the other side of the Halys, rose the Hittite capital, now known as Boghaz Keui, the centre from which, as Professor Ramsay has shown,[142] the early roads of Asia Minor radiated in all directions.

Boghaz Keui is being excavated at the present moment. Hundreds of clay tablets have already been found there, inscribed with cuneiform characters, the majority of which are in the native Hittite language, though many are in Semitic Babylonian, including a copy of the famous treaty between Ramses II. and the Hittite king. So far as the tablets have been examined, they show that the Hittite empire extended from the west of Asia Minor to the Egyptian frontier, and that the cuneiform characters were used in ordinary life.

THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI.

By one of those coincidences which sometimes happen in archæological research, the discovery fits with another fact which had long been in the possession of the Assyriologist, though the full meaning of it was unknown to him. Among the Tel el-Amarna letters are two in a language unlike any with which we are acquainted. One of them is from a Hittite leader of condottieri,[143] who has left us two other letters which are in the Assyrian language, and who came from a town in the neighbourhood of Cilicia. The second letter was written to the king of Arzawa by one of the foreign secretaries of the Egyptian Government. But the situation of Arzawa was wholly uncertain; as the king bore the Hittite name of Tarkhundaraba, I suggested that it lay in the Hittite territory, and that consequently in the language of the letter we had a fragment of the Hittite language. For many years, however, this remained a mere conjecture, without any definite proofs.

When the fragmentary tablets from Boghaz Keui came to be copied, it was at once perceived that they were in a language which resembled that of the Arzawa letters, but it was not until the new tablet from Constantinople had been cleaned and copied by Dr. Pinches and myself that the actual facts became clear. The Arzawa and Boghaz Keui texts agree in the forms given to the characters, in grammar and in vocabulary. Arzawa, therefore, must have been the Hittite kingdom which had its centre at Boghaz Keui, and already in the age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty it was employing a form of the cuneiform script which implied a long preceding period of use and adaptation. A new realm has thus to be added to the domain of the cuneiform system of writing; in Syria the Hittite king of Kadesh wrote to the Pharaoh in Babylonian, but in his old home in the north, though the Babylonian syllabary had been adopted, the language it served to express was that of the Hittites themselves.