THE HITTITE LION, BEARING AN INSCRIPTION
(Now in British Museum)
We now come to the oldest inscription of the Assyrian kings, and there, on the stone-tablet of Adad-nirari I (ca. 1340 B.C.), we find that ruler at war with the people of the Lulumi and Shubari, two tribes in northern Syria. These northern countries are directly connected with the Hittites in the great royal annals of Tiglathpileser I (ca. 1100 B.C.), where Column ii. 89 runs, “The land of the Shubari the refractory, the insubordinate, I subdued; on the land of Alzi and the land of Purukhumi which had refused their tribute, I laid the yoke of my lordship; … four thousand inhabitants of Kashka, of Uruma, people of the land of Khatti, the insubordinate who in the pride of their strength had taken towns of the land of Shubartu which were subject to my lord Asshur; they heard of my march against Shubartu, the splendour of my strength overthrew them; they avoided a battle and embraced my feet.”
Further, in Column v. line 48, etc., “[The territory] of the region of the land of Sukhi to Kargamisch [the spelling here indicates the Bible Carchemish] in the land of the Khatti, I plundered in one day,” and finally by way of recapitulation in Column vi. 39, etc., “From the beginning of my rule to the fifth year of my reign my hand has conquered in the whole forty-two countries and defeated their princes from beyond the Lower Zab as far as to beyond the Euphrates and the land of Khatti and the Upper Sea towards the sunset (i.e., Phœnicia).”
From these inscriptions it seems that the term Shubartu (land of the Shubari) had a general significance, and denoted the whole of the mountainous territory in the north of Mesopotamia proper, that is east of Kummukh and on the hither side of the Euphrates. Thus neither Asshur-uballit nor Adad-nirari I penetrated to the narrower sphere of Hittite rule, and it was only towards the end of the twelfth century B.C. that Tiglathpileser I made war against it directly and with success.
This again confirms the view that the most flourishing period of the powerful kingdom of the Hittites and of its civilisation was in the fourteenth and perhaps also in the thirteenth century before Christ.
THE HITTITES AND THE HEBREWS
The Hebrew literature furnishes us with further information. From this we learn that in the year 1000 B.C. and later (in the time of David and Solomon) the Hittites were Israel’s neighbours on the northern frontier, and that intermarriages even took place between the Hittites and the Israelites. For Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, was an Israelitish woman of good family. So far south then did the power of the Hittites extend in the most ancient period of the Israelite kingdom, though the former had been already much endangered by the invasion of a new people, the Aramæans, who had probably wandered there as nomads from the eastern bank of the Euphrates.