. The Hebrews from the days of Abraham to the age of Nehemiah and the Captivity, called them חתים, Khitím (our Hittites), or the ‘children of Heth.’[535] A hunting-inscription of Tiglath-Pileser (Tigulti-pal-Tsira) the First, b.c. 1120–1100, mentions the
, Kha-at-te (Khatte);[536] he makes them dwell on ‘the upper Ocean of the Setting Sun.’ The Greeks translated from Hebrew Γῆ Χεττιεὶμ, and termed the race Χεττιὶμ and Χεττεινί. They are the ἑταῖροι Κήτειοι (Keteian or Cetian[537] auxiliaries) of Homer (‘Odys.’ xi. 520), whose leader Eurypylus, was slain with ‘the copper’ (Sword), and of whom many perished around him ‘on account of gifts to a woman.’
The cradle of this race, which took the lead of Western Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries b.c., was the rolling prairie between the Orontes and the Euphrates. Joshua represents the Lord saying: ‘From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast’ (i. 4). In their palmy days they covered the interval between Egypt and Assyria, extending northwards to Phrygia and Cilicia; eastwards to Mesopotamia and westwards to the Mediterranean. They had walled and fortified cities as ‘Tunep or Tunipa (Daphne) in the land Naharayn’[538]—the latter here meaning Upper Palestine—Arathu (Aradus); Hamatu (Hamath, the high city); Khalbu or Khilibu (Aleppo);[539] Kazantana (Gozanitis); Nishiba (Nisipis) and Patena, which gave rise to ‘Padan-Aram’ and to ‘Batanæa.’ Their northern capital was Carchemish (the Gr. Hierapolis and the modern Yaráblus),[540] on the Euphrates, lately explored: some explain the word as ‘Kar’ (town of) ‘Chemish’ the Moab-god); others by ‘Khem’ or ‘Chemmis,’ the Egyptian Pan. It was captured by Sargon (b.c. 717), and became the head-quarters of an Assyrian Satrapy. Their sacred city was Kadesh (Κάδης, the holy), a synonym of El-Kuds, the Arabic name for Jerusalem; and even of the City of David it was said (Ezek. xvi. 3), ‘her father was an Amorite and her mother a Hittite.’ A Hittite tribe extended to the southernmost frontiers of Palestine (Gen. xxiii. passim); Hebron, one of their settlements, was founded, we are told, seven years before Zoan (‘a station for loading animals’), alias San or Tanis, the capital of the Egyptian ‘Shepherd-Kings.’ But the allusion must be to Sesostris-Ramses (II.), who also made San his capital under the name of ‘Pi- (city of) Ramessu,’ not to the original building by King Pepi of the Sixth Dynasty, who preceded Abraham by a thousand years.
THE HITTITES.
Fig. 195.—Cyprian Dagger.
The Hittites were governed by twelve ‘kings,’ probably satraps, under the Khita-sir or supreme chief. The ‘kings of the Hittites’ are mentioned as joining the Egyptians (2 Kings iii. 6).[541] Although the Hebrews were ordered utterly to destroy the race, their books prove that the Khita were often in intimate relation with the intruders, as in the case of Uriah the Hittite, one of the thirty of David’s body-guard. They worshipped Baal Sutech (Sutekh) the War-god, the ‘man of war,’ a counterpart of Amun, with his wife (Sakti or active energy), Astartha-Anata, and they also venerated Targatha, Derketo or Atargatis—two Syro-Greek words for one and the same person. The Egyptians at times rank the Khita as a ‘great people,’ and their habitat as a ‘great country’; holding them, in fact, almost as their peers: they also speak with reverence of their gods. Like their neighbours of Kemi, the ‘Hittites’ were a literary nation: the monuments of Nile-land mention a certain Kirab-sar (or sir), ‘writer of the books of the Chief of the Khita,’ and the determinative is papyrus or parchment. Hebron was also originally called Kirjath- (Kariyat) Sepher’—settlement of books.
The Khita were formidable opponents to Kemi between the seventeenth and the fourteenth centuries b.c. They fought doughtily against Thut-mes III. (circa b.c. 1600) during his Syrian campaign, when this ‘Alexander the Great of Egyptian history’ overthrew the chief of Kadesh, built a fortress on the Lebanon-range and mastered ‘Naharayn.’[542] Three centuries later, Kadesh was taken by Osirei or Seti I. (b.c. 1366). A few years afterwards took place the great campaign of his son,[543] Ramses II., or the Great, ‘who made Egypt anew,’ and who is famous as the Sesostris of Herodotus.[544] He was nearly defeated at the historic battle of ‘Kadesh, the wicked’;[545] but at last he succeeded in ‘throwing the foe one upon another, head over heels into the waters of the Orontes.’ Wilkinson (i. 400) shows a city with a double moat, crossed by two bridges: at the outer defence, formed by the river running into a lake, a phalanx of the Khita is drawn up as a reserve corps. ‘Wonderfully rich,’ says Brugsch, ‘is the great picture which represents the fight of the chariots: while the gigantic form of Ramses,[546] in the very midst of the hostile war-cars, performs deeds of derring-do, astonishing friend and foe, his gallant son, Prahiunamif, commander-in-chief of the charioteers, heads the attack upon those of the enemy. The Khita warriors are thrown into the river, and among them is the King of Khilibi (Aleppo), whom the warriors try to revive by holding his legs in the air with his head hanging down.’[547] This was the victory that gave birth to the first of Epic poems, the ‘Song of Pentaur the Scribe.’
THE HITTITE SWORD.