Fig. 65.
Fig. 65.—Signs on Potsherds at Tell-el-Hesy compared with Ægean Forms
This syllabary, as its name implies, is found in the island of Cyprus,which, lying only sixty miles from Asia Minor, might be expected to yield many traces of active intercourse therewith from prehistoric times. The affinity of its ancient script with those of Western Asia, which may be looked upon as settled, had, therefore, much to commend it at the outset of the inquiry. It stands in nearest relation, possibly as its direct descendant, to the syllabary of the Hittites. References to these people come apace nowadays, and their history has been padded out in portly volumes, but, in truth, we know no more about them than we do about the Phœnicians and Phrygians, which means that we know very little indeed. Through the mists of the past, with the help of such light as is thrown by tablets from Tell-el-Amarna, sculptures from Karnak, and by Hebrew and other records, we have glimpses of a great and powerful empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the Euxine, pushing its borders to the confines of Egypt, against which, on the one hand, and Assyria on the other, it waged war for a thousand years. In 1270 b.c. Rameses III. had to face the onrush of the Hittites and other confederated peoples, whom he defeated at Migdol. They "had overrun Syria. The islands and shores of the Mediterranean gave forth their piratical hordes; the sea was covered with their light galleys, and swept by their strong oars." (Rawlinson's History of Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. p. 271.) According to Dr. Wright, the Hittites appear in history for the first time "in the inscription of Sargon I., King of Agané, about 1900 b.c., and disappear from history in the inscriptions of Sargon 717 b.c." (Empire of the Hittites, p. 122.) Until some thirty years ago no monumental remains had come to light concerning an empire whose high place among ancient nations is attested by the discovery of a treaty (the oldest known example of its kind) with Egypt, in which each recognised the other as a power equal in rank to itself, and agreed to help it in case of need. The first Hittite relic, a block of basalt engraved with strange hieroglyphic signs, was found by the traveller Burckhardt in 1812 at Hamah, on the Orontes, but he could not decipher the characters, and the matter was forgotten till 1870, when the stone was rediscovered, and similar relics brought to light. But to this day the key of interpretation is lacking, and scholars await the unearthing of some bilingual monument which shall do for the Hittite hieroglyphs what the Rosetta Stone did for the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Behistun rock for cuneiform writing. Till this, and more, is effected, we remain in the realm of conjecture about the mighty nation whose beardless soldiers are depicted with daggers in their belts and double-headed axes in their hands on the sculptures of the Nile Valley. Minimising, however, our knowledge of the Hittites to the uttermost, their widely distributed relics evidence their proficiency in certain departments of the arts. They smelted silver and wrought in bronze, they were skilful lapidaries and carvers in ivory, and "the independent system of picture-writing which they possessed offers an obvious source from which the Asianic syllabary might have been obtained." In the Hamah inscriptions the characters are raised, and run in parallel transverse lines.
Fig. 67.—Hittite Inscription at Hamah.
"The lines of inscriptions and their boundaries are clearly defined by raised bars about four inches apart. The interstices between the bars and characters have been cut away." The inscriptions are read from right to left and vice versâ in "boustrophedon" style (bous, "an ox," and strephō, "to turn," therefore, as an ox ploughs), as in ancient Greek modes of writing.
Returning to Crete, we have to consider its relation to the Mycenæan type of civilisation, under which term is included civilisation in pre-Homeric Greece and the Ægean Sea, crossing thence to Hissarlik, the ancient Troy. The spade has made havoc with some of our standard "authorities." Grote refers to the city of Mycenæ only once in his well-known work, and then incidentally speaks of it as the seat of a legendary dynasty. Sir George Cox, in his Mythology of the Aryan Nations, endorses Professor Max Müller's theory (to which, in part, the veteran philologist still adheres), that the siege of Troy "is a reflection of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the West," and adds that this theory is "supported by a mass of evidence which probably hereafter will be thought ludicrously excessive in amount." The laugh is on the other side now. Schliemann and his successors have broken into the areas within Cyclopean walls whose massive blocks aroused wonder long ages back, giving birth to tales of giant hands that reared them. They have disinterred relics proving an historic element in old traditions, and a nucleus of fact beneath the encrustation of fable over famous names. Like the Empress Helena, who, in searching for the True Cross, of course found that for which she looked, Schliemann too readily assumed that he had discovered the bones of Agamemnon, and the cup from which Nestor drank. But he brought to light the relics of a culture, knowledge of which involves neither more nor less than the re-writing of the history of man in the Eastern Mediterranean, and, by consequence, in Western Europe.
Fig. 68.—Signs on Vase-handle (Mycenæ)