We are quite certain that several centuries before our era the Hittites founded a powerful empire in Western Asia, probably with outlying provinces in Africa, and even in Europe as far west as Italy. The greatness of this nation we are able to conjecture from the numerous references made to it in the Bible and Egyptian history, and from the mighty monuments of its power that still exist. The carved figures on these monuments and the representations given by the Egyptians, prove the Hittites to have been of an altogether different physical type from the Semites, and, therefore, of a different race; but their origin has not been clearly determined. The burden of proof appears to favour a Mongol ancestry, and is supported by physical and lingual characteristics common to both races.
Their primitive home is thought to have been in that part of Armenia where the Euphrates, the Halys, and Lycus approach nearest to one another; and it is even asserted that the modern Armenians are descendants of the old Hittites. From this point they began their career of conquests, probably under the leadership of some able and vigorous chief, whose ambition overleaped his native boundaries. One conquest led to another. Their leaders acquired great armies, and subdued many nations, until the Hittites became one of the most powerful peoples of ancient times, and their kings were able successfully to defy even Egypt, at that time the strongest nation on the globe. Then began their decline. They came in conflict with the more progressive Semitic race, and finally were subdued or exterminated by them.
This, in brief, gives the meagre results of modern Hittite research; but the details of the conjecture and theories evolved by the antiquarians concerning this remarkable people would fill many volumes, and be of interest only to historians and antiquarians. A few of the more important facts may be stated however.[ab]
Traces of Hittite influence have been discovered all over Asia Minor, and the oldest inhabitants of the peninsula seem to have been closely allied both by race and language with this non-Semitic people of northern Syria. Rather more than two thousand years before Christ the Hittites were, as the cuneiform inscriptions testify, the northwestern neighbours of the territory of the Euphrates. The great astrological work of the old king Sargon of Agade contains this entry:
“On the 16th (of the month of Abu) there was an eclipse; the king of Agade died; the god Nergal (i.e., war) devoured the land.
“On the 20th (of the month Abu) there was an eclipse; the king of the land of the Khatti made an attack (?) and gained possession of the throne.”
THE HITTITES AND THE EGYPTIANS
We do not again hear of the Hittites until near the close of the seventeenth century before Christ, but then it is from contemporary Egyptian records. Ramses I had made an offensive and defensive treaty with them, which a sense of their power encouraged them to break and thus involve themselves in a war with Seti I, in which the latter was successful.
In the fifth year of the reign of Ramses the Great a great war broke out between the Kheta and the Egyptians, and the king of the enemy, Kheta-sar, assembled his troops and auxiliaries at Kadesh. Various texts, amongst which is the famous heroic poem once credited to a copyist, Pentaur, have commemorated the great battle of Kadesh; in this way we may easily read between the lines that the triumph which Ramses gained there was a Pyrrhic victory.
It was followed by a peace between Ramses and Kheta-sar, a copy of which is still preserved on a stele of a southern wall of the great hypostyle of Karnak. This highly interesting document “compels,” as Ebers says, the greatest “respect for the high state of civilisation in the Asiatic kingdom and the advanced political organisation of the two nations bound by this document.” This treaty, which in Brugsch’s translation fills seven large octavo pages, emanated from the Kheta king who had a draft of it on a silver tablet submitted to Ramses in the twenty-first year of the latter’s reign. In the centre of this tablet was a portrait in relief of the chief god of the Kheta, “Sutekh, king of heaven and earth.” Ramses was glad to be able to end the long war in so honourable a fashion, and most willingly accepted the proposal of the great king of the Kheta, the “powerful.” We even know the nature of the characters which are engraved on that silver tablet, and can obtain, from a crowd of proper names, a clew to the family to which the Hittite language did, or, what is almost as good, to that to which it did not belong. We learn that it cannot in any case have been a Semitic tongue, and finally we are in a position to form a good idea from the representations on the walls of the Egyptian temples, as well as from recently discovered Hittite monuments, of the dress and even the colour of the skin of this ancient civilised nation. But first let us briefly outline the remainder of its history.