We have made this digression to establish certain facts, the appreciation of which seems to us fundamental to a right consideration of the problem of the sculptures. Briefly put, these are: that Boghaz-Keui marks the site of the Hittite capital at the time of the greatest Hittite extension (in the xivth and xiiith centuries B.C.); that the constitution of the Hittite power at this time was a confederacy of states from both sides of the Taurus; and that the sanctuary of Iasily Kaya was contemporary with this period. We may expect then to find the national deities most prominent in the sculptures. Again, having due regard to the nature of the states, each ruled by its own king or priest-king, each separated from its neighbour by the broken nature of the country, developing its own customs, ritual, and religion, it is not to be supposed that any common national cult could supplant or greatly change the local worships. The definite history of later times leads us to infer the contrary; and we are again confirmed in this conclusion by the evidence of the treaty, to the sacredness of which the numerous gods of states were called as witness.[562] With some of the states the national deity, or the national word for a deity (Sutekh), is associated; others mention their separate deities by name. Let us return now to the sculptures. The first two figures on the right hand, the female and the youth who ride the backs of lionesses, are recognised almost unanimously by scholars as prototypes of the great Mother-goddess (MA) of Asia Minor and her Lover-son, identified on the one hand with Cybele and Attis, as with Istar and Tammuz on the other. This identification, while it helps us to conjecture the local attributes of the deities, enables us also to recognise at once the national character of the leaders in the procession, for the cult of the Nature goddess was world-wide. Her association with the lioness is familiar in her many guises, as for instance in Phrygia, where she rides in a lion-drawn car. Doubtless in the Lion-goddess accompanied by the Lion-son there is a reminiscence of some primitive worship, the origins of which perhaps were already lost to view, and which we must seek somewhere in the hilly borders of the Euphrates valley. The Lion pair is followed by the twin deities of the Double Eagle, goddesses both.[563] The significance of the double-headed eagle is unknown. But that there was a local worship associated with the eagle is indicated alike by the discovery at Boghaz-Keui of a sculptured head of this bird, in black stone, larger than natural size,[564] and by a newly deciphered cuneiform fragment from the same site, on which mention is made in ideographic writing of the house or temple of the eagle.[565] That such a cult was general within the circuit of the Halys is suggested by the great monument which now lies prone in a wild spot overlooking the river near to Yamoola,[566] and by various smaller objects. At Eyuk