The Hittites : $b The story of a forgotten empire — John Shaqi
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
The Hittites and Amorites were therefore mingled together in the
mountains of Palestine like the two races which ethnologists tell us go
to form the modern Kelt. But the Egyptian monuments teach us that they
were of very different origin and character. The Hittites were a people
with yellow skins and 'Mongoloid' features, whose receding foreheads,
oblique eyes, and protruding upper jaws, are represented as faithfully
on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot
accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies. If the
Egyptians have made the Hittites ugly, it was because they were so in
reality. The Amorites, on the contrary, were a tall and handsome people.
They are depicted with white skins, blue eyes, and reddish hair, all the
characteristics, in fact, of the white race. Mr. Petrie points out their
resemblance to the Dardanians of Asia Minor, who form an intermediate
link between the white-skinned tribes of the Greek seas and the
fair-complexioned Libyans of Northern Africa. The latter are still found
in large numbers in the mountainous regions which stretch eastward from
Morocco, and are usually known among the French under the name of
Kabyles. The traveller who first meets with them in Algeria cannot fail
to be struck by their likeness to a certain part of the population in
the British Isles. Their clear-white freckled skins, their blue eyes,
their golden-red hair and tall stature, remind him of the fair Kelts of
an Irish village; and when we find that their skulls, which are of the
so-called dolichocephalic or 'long-headed' type, are the same as the
skulls discovered in the prehistoric cromlechs of the country they
still inhabit, we may conclude that they represent the modern
descendants of the white-skinned Libyans of the Egyptian monuments.
In Palestine also we still come across representatives of a
fair-complexioned blue-eyed race, in whom we may see the descendants of
the ancient Amorites, just as we see in the Kabyles the descendants of
the ancient Libyans. We know that the Amorite type continued to exist in
Judah long after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan. The captives taken
from the southern cities of Judah by Shishak in the time of Rehoboam,
and depicted by him upon the walls of the great temple of Karnak, are
people of Amorite origin. Their 'regular profile of sub-aquiline cast,'
as Mr. Tomkins describes it, their high cheek-bones and martial
expression, are the features of the Amorites, and not of the Jews.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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