7. Discoveries Which Illumine the Bible.—Discoveries in Babylonia and Assyria which illumine the Biblical narratives are numerous. The sites of many cities, such as Ur of the Chaldees, Erech, Babylon, Ashur, Nineveh, and Calah, have been excavated. The number of documents which have come to light which in one way or another have a bearing on the Bible is too numerous to mention here. An effort has been made in [Part II] to translate examples of most of them. Indeed, the greater part of the material in Part II was recovered by excavations in these countries.
To Babylonia and to Egypt mankind owes the working out of the initial problems of civilization, the processes of agriculture, the making of bricks, the working of stone, the manufacture and use of the ordinary implements of life, the development of elementary mathematics and astronomy, etc. These problems were by slow processes independently worked out in each country through long ages. The higher spiritual concepts which have now become the heritage of man neither Babylonia nor Egypt was fitted to contribute. These came through the agency of other peoples.
CHAPTER III
THE HITTITES
A Forgotten Empire. Hittite Monuments: Sendjirli. Boghaz Koi. Other recent excavations. Hittite Decipherment: Sayce’s early work. Peiser. Jensen. Conder. Sayce’s later work. Thompson. Delitzsch. Hittite History: First appearance. Hyksos possibly Hittites. The Mitanni. Kingdom of “Hittite City.” Carchemish. Samal and Yadi. Hamath.
1. A Forgotten Empire.—Among the peoples who are said to have been in Palestine in the Patriarchal age are the Hittites (Gen. 23:10; 26:34, etc.). They are mentioned most often in the list of peoples whom the Israelites drove out of the country when they conquered it: “the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite,” and the man is still living who first suspected that anything more than this could be known of them. This man was Prof. Sayce, of Oxford. In the inscriptions of the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties there is frequent mention of a people called Kheta. In the inscriptions of Assyrian kings there is also frequent mention of a people called Kha-at-tu. Slowly, too, during the nineteenth century rock-carvings, often accompanied by inscriptions in a peculiar hieroglyph, were found scattered through northern Syria and Asia Minor. The figures of gods and men on these carvings usually wore caps of a peculiarly pointed type and shoes turned far up at the toe. In 1876 it dawned upon Prof. Sayce that these were all references to the Biblical Hittites. He proceeded to elaborate this view in two articles published in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, Vols. V and VII.
About the same time the Rev. William Wright independently started the same idea, and gave it expression in his book, The Empire of the Hittites, 1884, 2d ed., 1885. At this period it was impossible to discern more than that there had been a widely scattered Hittite civilization, which might have been an empire.
2. Hittite Monuments.—This civilization, it was seen, had left its monuments at Hamath in Syria, at Carchemish on the Euphrates, at various points in ancient Cappadocia, Lycaonia, and Phrygia, as well as near Smyrna in Asia Minor and on the Lydian mountains to the west of Sardis. In 1891 Prof. W. Max Müller, of Philadelphia, reached the conclusion from a study of the Egyptian inscriptions that the Hittites had come into Syria from the northwest, and that their main strength was in Asia Minor. Among the letters found at El-Amarna in Egypt in 1887-1888 were some from Dushratta, a king of Mitanni. A study of these made it clear that the Mitanni inhabited the region on both sides of the Euphrates north of Carchemish, and that they were of the same stock as the Hittites. Our sources of information indicate that the territory of the Mitanni lay east of the Euphrates, but scattered monuments of the Hittite type are found on the west of that river.