The Hittites : $b The story of a forgotten empireSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
History
The Hittites : $b The story of a forgotten empire
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Hittites
Equally significant is the long fingerless glove which is one of the
most frequent of Hittite hieroglyphs. The thumb alone is detached from
the rest of the bag in which the fingers were enclosed. Such a glove is
an eloquent witness to the wintry cold of the regions from which its
wearers came, and a similar glove is still used during the winter months
by the peasants of modern Kappadokia.
We may find another evidence of the northern descent of the Hittite
tribes in the hieroglyph which is used in the sense of 'country.' It
represents two, or sometimes three, pointed mountains, whose forms, as
was remarked some years ago, resemble those of the mountains about
Kaisariyeh, the Kappadokian capital.
If we leave Kadesh and proceed northwards, the local names bear more and
more the peculiar stamp of a Hittite origin. We leave Semitic names
like Kadesh, 'the sanctuary,' behind us, and at length find ourselves
in a district where the geographical names no longer admit of a Semitic
etymology. It is just this district, moreover, in which Hittite
inscriptions first become plentiful. The first met with to the south are
the stones of Hamath and the lost inscription of Aleppo; but from
Carchemish northwards we now know that numbers of them still exist. The
territory covered by them is a square, the base of which is formed by a
line running from Carchemish through Antioch into Lykaonia, while the
remains at Boghaz Keui and Eyuk constitute its northern limit. We must
regard this region as having been the primeval home and starting-point
of the Hittite race. They will have been a population which clustered
round the two flanks of the Taurus range, extending far into Kappadokia
on the north, and towards Armenia on the east.
They preserved their independence on the banks of the Halys in
Kappadokia for nearly two hundred years after the fall of Carchemish. It
was not long before the overthrow of Lydia by Cyrus that Kroesos, the
Lydian king, destroyed the cities of Pteria, where the ruins of Boghaz
Keui and Eyuk now stand, and enslaved their inhabitants, thus avenging
upon them the conquest of his own country by their ancestors so many
centuries before. Herodotos calls them 'Syrians,' a name which is
qualified as 'White Syrians' by the Greek geographer Strabo. It was in
this way that the Greek writer wished to distinguish them from the
dark-coloured Syrians of Aramean or Jewish birth, with whom he was
otherwise acquainted; and it reminds us that, whereas the Egyptian
artists painted the Hittites with yellow skins, they painted the Syrians
with red. It is an interesting fact that the memory of their
relationship to the population on the Syrian side of the Taurus should
have been preserved so long among these Hittites of Kappadokia.
[Illustration: THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE OF EYUK.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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