The Hittites: The story of a Forgotten Empire

by A. H. Sayce

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.

THE BILINGUAL BOSS OF TARKONDEMOS.