The Hittites: The story of a Forgotten Empire

by A. H. Sayce

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 Krœsos, 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.

THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE OF EYUK.