Fig. 161.—Tomb of Gherdek-Kaïasi (after Perrot and Guillaume).
All these scenes are priestly and religious, and not, as in Assyria, devoted to the glory of the king and to the memory of his warlike exploits. They refer to the worship of the god Mên or of the goddess Mâ or Enio, the Cappadocian name of Anaïtis or Astarte, whose rites Strabo describes as performed in the two towns of Comana.
To this Cappadocian civilisation, again, purely oriental and anterior to Greek influence as it is, the sculpture of tombs observed at Gherdek-Kaïasi, near Boghaz-Keui and Euyuk, must be referred. The principal of these caves hewn in the rock, like those of Phœnicia and Nakhsh-i-Rustam, has a façade adorned with a portico with three low colonnades, the style of which closely resembles the Greek Doric order ([fig. 161]). At the extremities of this portico are the doors of two chambers intended to contain sarcophagi. Both of them have windows opened in the wall of rock; the sepulchral couches are hewn in the wall like alcoves. There is something in these monuments which partakes of the character both of the Phrygian tombs and of those of Nakhsh-i-Rustam; and perhaps they are not anterior to the destruction of Pteria by Crœsus in B.C. 549.
To sum up: we must conclude, with M. Perrot,[73] that the monuments of Boghaz-Keui and Euyuk, witnesses of primitive Cappadocian civilisation, underwent Assyrian influence as well as those of Northern Syria. The palaces look like “a reduced copy of the great royal edifices on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.” The winged figures, the monsters with eagles’ and lions’ heads, are Assyrian, and so are the deities borne on the backs of different quadrupeds, the flowers in the hands of the figures and the winged disk, the symbol of the deity. Various elements of the Cappadocian sculptures seem, upon no less evidence, to have been borrowed from Egypt, Persia, and even from the Greeks of Asia Minor, but this is exceptional. In any case there is nothing original and individual in this Hittite art of Pteria, except the eagle with two heads ([fig. 162]), which is evidently connected with the most ancient Asiatic worship, and suggests reminiscences of the Sirens; except also the long curved lituus, the robe cut in the form of a chasuble, the peaked tiara, the pointed shoes; details of dress more interesting for the history of costume than for that of art.
Fig. 162.—Sculpture at Iasili-Kaïa.
The connection of the sculptures of Pteria with those of Hittite Syria is quite clear; there are the same hieroglyphs, the same short tunic, the same long robe, the same shoes, the same peaked tiara, and the same round skull-cap. The female garments are almost identical at Marash and Iasili-Kaïa; the deities have similar attributes; the lion and the bull are the animals which both regions prefer to represent. We must conclude that the same semi-barbarous race, powerless to free itself, whether in art or politics, from the yoke of Egypt and Assyria, inhabited both the slopes of the Taurus; we will now examine how far this Hittite race extended its branches towards the west, and what monuments it left in Asia Minor beyond the Halys.