During the Seleucid and Byzantine domination, the predominant language of educated people in Syria and Asia Minor was Greek. But in these, as well as in other regions formerly belonging to the Ottoman Empire, we now find the most extraordinary anomalies of linguistic distribution. Thus there are in Anatolia villages whose sole inhabitants are Greeks who belong to the Orthodox Church and where the Greek language is so little understood that the priests, in order to be understood by their people, are obliged to preach and read the services of the church in Turkish. In Cyprus, on the contrary, there are Turkish villages whose inhabitants speak only Greek. But this is no more singular than to find—a frequent occurrence—Turkish newspapers printed in Greek or Armenian characters. These literary curiosities are, however, eclipsed by a Jewish newspaper in Constantinople which is printed in Hebrew characters although the language is Spanish.[283]
I have said that outside of her people I found very little in Aleppo to attract attention. I, of course, visited the great mediæval castle—called the Citadel—that dominates the city and from the summit of which one has a magnificent view of the surrounding country. But this impressed me far less than a small block of basalt which I saw in the south wall of a mosque near the Citadel and which bears a curious inscription like those which have, during the last few decades, been brought to light in ever-increasing numbers throughout the greater part of both Syria and Anatolia. By the superstitious natives it is held in great veneration, for it is supposed to offer a sovereign remedy for all ophthalmic affections. We were assured that the smoothness of the stone’s surface was due to the frequent practice of the afflicted of rubbing their eyes upon it.[284]
The character of this inscription was not new to me for I had seen many similar ones in the Imperial Museum of Constantinople and elsewhere, but its location in this commercial capital of the Near East transported me in fancy back to a period antedating the time when the Patriarch Abraham, according to tradition, was wont to milk his flocks in a cave of the citadel and distribute the milk in alms among the poor.[285] Then Aleppo was in the possession of a power that ranked with Egypt and Assyria; a power which, nearly two thousand years B. C., overthrew the first Babylonian dynasty and made an alliance, on equal terms, with Rameses II, the greatest of the Pharaohs; a power which, in its palmy days, bore rule over the greater part of Syria and Asia Minor.
Until lately it was believed by scholars that there were only two great civilizations in the ancient East—Egypt and Babylonia. But recent discoveries in Sinjerli, Boghaz-Keui, and many other places have proved conclusively that there was a third civilization which was synchronous with those of the Nile and the Tigris and which, in the days of its splendor, prevailed from Nineveh to Smyrna and Ephesus and from the headwaters of the Orontes to the lower reaches of the Halys. Far back in the Mycenean period, when the Cyclops, according to legend, were building the massive acropolis of Tiryns, and when, as far as “the first pale glimmer of Greek tradition” will enable us to judge, the people of Greece “were awakening to intellectual life,” this third civilization—until a half century ago entirely unsuspected—was erecting monuments which are to-day the amazement of the learned world and which have prepared it for revelations as startling as any of those that followed the decipherment of the Rosetta stone by Champollion or the unlocking of the secrets of the cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia by Grotefend and Rawlinson.
In this extended region lived an extraordinary people whose cultural development may probably, according to Messerchmid,[286] “be dated about the third millennium” before our era, and who were known by the ancient Egyptians as the Kheta and by the Assyrians as the Khatti. They were the same people who are spoken of in the Old Testament as Hittites and who are supposed to have, at an early date, extended their migrations as far south as northern Arabia. It was, in the opinion of many investigators, from a Hittite—Ephron—that Abraham bought “the double cave looking towards Mambre” near Hebron, as a family burial place.[287] Referring, apparently to the foundation of Jerusalem the prophet Ezekiel declares that her “father was an Armorite and her mother a Hittite.”[288] There is also reason to believe that the ill-fated “Uriah the Hittite,” the husband of Bethsabee, the mother of Solomon, belonged to the same race.[289] And it was because she bore a son to King David that Bethsabee, the wife of a Hittite, became an ancestress of the Savior of the world.[290]
But these and other obscure references in Scripture to the Hittites threw practically no light on the wonderful people who, during the past half century have been engaging the attention of many of the ablest archæologists and orientalists of Europe and America. In 1812 the famous Swiss traveler, Burckhardt, discovered in Hamath, Syria, a black basaltic block on which were strange hieroglyphic signs.[291] But it was not until sixty years later, when other similar monuments were found in the same place, that scholars began to realize their importance. Systematic investigations were then instituted by individuals and learned societies and it was not long until their labors were rewarded by the most extraordinary finds. Not only hieroglyphic inscriptions, like those on the blocks found at Hamath, were brought to light but also remains of cities with large palaces and fortresses adorned with sculptures of the most surprising character.
Further research by such eminent orientalists as Halevy, in France; Hrozny of Austria; Jensen and Winckler, in Germany; Sayce and Hogarth, in England, showed that the builders of these forgotten cities and the authors of the strange script which was written in boustrephedon fashion were no other than the people of whom the Bible speaks of as the Hettites or Hittites.[292] All our knowledge of this mysterious people, outside of the brief references to them in the Sacred Text, is what has been gained since the publication in this country of the first Hittite inscriptions in 1872. We now know that as a power “The Land of the Hittites” became a memory of the past when the Assyrians took possession of Carchemish and when, following their capture of this celebrated stronghold, they entered Asia Minor in 718 B. C.—but a few years after the foundation of Rome. Thenceforward the region so long inhabited by the Hittites was ruled in succession by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Ottoman Turks.
Notwithstanding, however, the fact that scholars now have at their disposition many and valuable Hittite monuments they have, nevertheless, thus far sought in vain for a bilingual inscription that will serve as a key to the Hittite language and which will force the Hittite sphinx to reveal her long-guarded secret. This much desired key may any day be uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. What the results of such a discovery will be can only be conjectured. Many who are competent to judge think they will compare in importance with those that followed the decipherment of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia—that they will disclose an intimate relation between the culture of the Hittites and the earliest civilizations of Cyprus and Crete, Greece and Italy, and that they will contribute immensely to our knowledge of the earliest connection of the peoples of Western Asia with those of southeastern Europe and of their influences on one another in the divers domains of religion, art, literature, and politics.[293]
As I gazed on the mysterious block of basalt at Aleppo with its soon—one hopes—to-be-deciphered inscription and thought of the wonderful Hittite records that have been unearthed during the last few years and the promise which they hold of priceless contributions to the history of our race, I recalled what the distinguished French savant, the late Vicomte E. M. de Voguë, once said of the East, “L’Orient, qui ne sait plus faire d’histoire, a le noble privilège de conserver intacte celle d’autrefois,” the Orient which no longer makes history has the noble privilege of preserving intact that of former times.