The reason of this lay in the fact that the Hittites were intruders in the Semitic territory of Syria. Their origin must be sought in the highlands of Kappadokia, and from hence they descended into the regions of the south, at that time occupied by Semitic Arameans. Hamath and Kadesh had once been Aramean cities, and when they were again wrested from the possession of the Hittites they did but return to their former owners. The fall of Carchemish meant the final triumph of the Semites in their long struggle with the Hittite stranger. Even in their southern home the Hittites preserved the dress of the cold mountainous country from which they had come. They are characterised by boots with turned-up toes, such as are still worn by the mountaineers of Asia Minor and Greece. They were thick-set and somewhat short of limb, and the Egyptian artists painted them without beards, of a yellowish-white colour, with dark black hair. In short, as M. Lenormant has pointed out, they had all the physical characteristics of a Caucasian tribe. Their descendants are still to be met with in the defiles of the Taurus and on the plateau of Kappadokia, though they have utterly forgotten the language or languages their forefathers spoke. What this language was is still uncertain, though the Hittite proper names which occur on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria show that it was neither Semitic nor Indo-European. With the help of the bilingual inscription in cuneiform and Hittite, already mentioned, Professor Sayce believes that he has determined the values of a few characters and partially read three or four names, but until more inscriptions are brought to light it is impossible to proceed further. Only it is becoming every day more probable that the hieroglyphics in which the inscriptions are written were the origin of a curious syllabary once used throughout Asia Minor, which survived in Cyprus into historical times.