The Egyptian artists have left us portraits of the Hittite race. Their features and dress were alike peculiar, and both reappear without change on certain monuments which have been found in Asia Minor and Syria, thus fixing the character of the latter beyond dispute. The monuments are covered with a still undeciphered system of hieroglyphic writing, and among the hieroglyphs are numerous human heads with the strange profile of the Hittite face. The nose and upper jaw protrude, the forehead is high and receding, the cheeks smooth, while we learn from the paintings of Egypt that the skin was yellow and the hair and the eyes were black. The hair was gathered together in a kind of ‘pig-tail,’ and the feet were shod with the shoes of mountaineers, the toes of which rose upwards into a point.[65] Why should not a body of Hittites have settled in Southern Palestine, and there have been, as it were, interlocked with the older Amorite inhabitants, as they were according to the testimony of the Egyptian inscriptions at Kadesh on the Lake of Homs? Indeed, there is indirect evidence that such was really the case. Thothmes III., who conquered Syria for the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, tells us that he received tribute from the king of ‘the greater Hittite land.’ There was then a lesser Hittite land; and as the ‘greater Hittite land’ was in the north, it is reasonable to look for the lesser land in the south. Half a century later, at a time when the Tel el-Amarna correspondence was being carried on, the Hittites were actively interfering in the internal politics of Canaan; and in one of the bas-reliefs of Ramses II. at Karnak the vanquished population of Ashkelon—in the near neighbourhood of Hebron—is represented with the peculiar Hittite type of face.[66] At a still earlier date, when the Assyrians first became acquainted with Western Asia, the dominant people there were the Hittites. In the Assyrian inscriptions, accordingly, the whole of Syria, including Palestine, came to be known as ‘the land of the Hittites.’ Shalmaneser II. even speaks of Ahab of Israel and Baasha of Ammon as ‘Hittite’ kings.[67] ‘The land of the Hittites’ in the Assyrian texts thus corresponds with the ‘land of the Amorites’ in the texts of Babylonia. Just as Canaan was ‘the land of the Amorites’ to the Babylonian of the age of Abraham, so too it was ‘the land of the Hittites’ to the Assyrian of the age of Moses. Before Assyria had become acquainted with the shores of the Mediterranean, the Hittites had taken the place of the Amorites and become the leading power in the West.