But though the Hittites have vanished utterly for so many thousand years, we may still trace their influence in the handiwork of the natives to this day. The villages which border the Euphrates--and a few others nearer Aleppo--are entirely distinct in character from all those in the districts around. The houses are not square and flat-roofed like those in ordinary villages; but circular conical buildings, of a shape between a beehive and a sugar-loaf, built of sun-dried mud, and packed tightly together within a walled enclosure, looking exactly like the haycocks in a crowded rick-yard in England. Houses of precisely this shape are represented on the Egyptian bas-reliefs recording the conquest of the _Khati_ by the Pharaoh Rameses II; and there can be little doubt that the type has persisted continuously down to the present time. It may even perhaps be argued with a certain amount of plausibility that the men who build such villages are remotely of Hittite blood! The villages in Asiatic Turkey are ordinarily the property of some landowner; and the system of tenure is worth mentioning, for it must date from Patriarchal times. The Government claims as revenue an eighth of all the produce;[5] and the remaining seven-eighths is divided equally between the village owner and the cultivators. The villagers have also to pay to the Government an eighth of the value of the fodder computed to have been consumed by their flocks and herds; and have further to deliver the Government eighth free of charge at the tax-farmers' storehouses. By law this obligation is restricted to one hour's journey--_i.e._ there is supposed to be a storehouse in every village--but in practice they have often to carry it three or four times as far. They have also to pay a land tax of about 5 per cent. They keep all the straw as their perquisite; and it is the landlord's duty to provide them with the seed grain. This sounds as if the landlord got the lion's share of the profits. And if he be miserly he does; but most of them interpret their signoral duties in a more liberal spirit. The landlord is expected to keep a guest house in his village, and a man in charge of it. Here anyone, be he villager or traveller, can get a free meal and free lodging. One big man in this district is reputed to expend food to the value of £1000 annually in such hospitality, including corn to the value of £400 in bread alone. Moreover, the landlord acts as a sort of savings bank to his villagers. If any of them is in distress and applies to him, he will relieve him. He will never think of sparing as long as his barns hold anything. He lives simply, as they do; and he holds that "Allah will provide."