For us of the modern world, therefore, the resurrection of the Hittite people from their long sleep of oblivion possesses a double interest. They appeal to us not alone because of the influence they once exercised on the fortunes of the Chosen People, not alone because a Hittite was the wife of David and the ancestress of Christ, but also on account of the debt which the civilisation of our own Europe owes to them. Our culture is the inheritance we have received from ancient Greece, and the first beginnings of Greek culture were derived from the Hittite conquerors of Asia Minor. The Hittite warriors who still guard the Pass of Karabel, on the very threshold of Asia, are symbols of the position occupied by the race in the education of mankind. The Hittites carried the time-worn civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt to the furthest boundary of Asia, and there handed them over to the West in the grey dawn of European history. But they never passed the boundary themselves; with the conquest of Lydia their mission was accomplished, the work that had been appointed them was fulfilled. [Illustration: AN INSCRIPTION FOUND AT CARCHEMISH (_now destroyed_).] CHAPTER VII. THE INSCRIPTIONS. How can the history of a lost people be recovered, it may be asked, except through the help of the records they have left behind them? How can we come to know anything about the Hittites until their few and fragmentary inscriptions are deciphered? The answer to this question will have been furnished by the preceding pages. Though the Hittite inscriptions are still undeciphered, though the number of them is still very small, there are other materials for reconstructing the history of the race, and these materials have now found their interpreter. The sculptured monuments the Hittites have left behind them, the seals they engraved, the cities they inhabited, the memorials of them preserved in the Old Testament, in the cuneiform tablets of Assyria, and in the papyri of Egypt, have all served to build up afresh the fabric of a mighty empire which once exercised so profound an influence on the destinies of the civilised world. But the Hittite inscriptions have not been altogether useless. They have helped to connect together the scattered monuments of Hittite dominion, and to prove that the peculiar art they display was of Hittite origin. It was the Hittite hieroglyphs which accompany the figure of the warrior in the Pass of Karabel, and of the sitting goddess on Mount Sipylos, that proved these sculptures to be of Hittite origin. It has similarly been inscriptions containing Hittite characters which have enabled us to trace the march of the Hittite armies along the high-roads of Asia Minor, and to feel sure that Hittite princes once reigned in the city of Hamath.