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
Kadesh must have been one of the last conquests made by the Hittites in
Syria, and their retention of it was the visible sign of their supremacy
over Western Asia. We do not know when they were forced to yield up its
possession to others. As has been pointed out, the correct reading of 2
Sam. xxiv. 6 informs us that the northern limit of the kingdom of David
was formed by 'the Hittites of Kadesh,' 'the entering in of Hamath,' as
it seems to be called elsewhere. In the age of David, accordingly,
Kadesh must still have been in their hands, but it had already ceased to
be so when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. led his armies to the
west. No allusion to the city and its inhabitants occurs in the Assyrian
inscriptions, and we may conjecture that it had been destroyed by the
Syrians of Damascus. As Membij took the place of Carchemish, so Emesa or
Homs took the place of Kadesh.
We have seen that the Hittites were a northern race. Their primitive
home probably lay on the northern side of the Taurus. What they were
like we can learn both from their own sculptures and from the Egyptian
monuments, which agree most remarkably in the delineation of their
features. The extraordinary resemblance between the Hittite faces drawn
by the Egyptian artists and those depicted by themselves in their
bas-reliefs and their hieroglyphs, is a convincing proof of the
faithfulness of the Egyptian representations, as well as of the identity
of the Hittites of the Egyptian inscriptions with the Hittites of
Carchemish and Kappadokia.
It must be confessed that they were not a handsome people. They were
short and thick of limb, and the front part of their faces was pushed
forward in a curious and somewhat repulsive way. The forehead retreated,
the cheek-bones were high, the nostrils were large, the upper lip
protrusive. They had, in fact, according to the craniologists, the
characteristics of a Mongoloid race. Like the Mongols, moreover, their
skins were yellow and their eyes and hair were black. They arranged the
hair in the form of a 'pig-tail,' which characterises them on their own
and the Egyptian monuments quite as much as their snow-shoes with
upturned toes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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