At the outset of our undertaking we are faced by a considerable perplexity, in that the land we are setting forth to examine is practically undefined. We are guided indeed by vague and scanty historical references towards the north of Syria and the east of Asia Minor, but for a wider and surer delimitation, however incomplete, we must rely on the evidence afforded by the disposition of the Hittite monuments themselves. These cannot fix for us any certain boundaries, nor does the area throughout which they have as yet been found coincide with any great natural landmarks such as are wont to form the frontiers of nations. On the other hand, their curious disposition, and the very disunity of the tract they indicate, awaken our interest by a suggestion of unusual circumstances that could weld together, in political unity, peoples whose conditions of life so differed. And though mostly in the heart of a peninsula washed by the blue waves of two great inland seas, no part of the long coast-line can be included, upon present evidence, in our territory. Maybe the cause is only that the conditions there are not favourable to the preservation or recovery of monuments; but none the less it is to be noted that no trace of Hittite handiwork has yet been found around the coast, whether along the wooded shores of the Black Sea in the north, on the fertile inlets of the west,[1] or on the rocky passes of the Syrian seaboard; nor has any clear connection yet been shown between the Hittite confederated peoples and those sea-rovers who, from their harbours under the southern shelter of the Taurus, made piratical descents upon the Egyptian Delta in the thirteenth century B.C.[2]