In the foregoing chapter it has incidentally become apparent that the northern capital arose to greatness as the centre of a military organisation rather than as the geographical or economic focus of a country. The alliance between the states, though seen to us mainly as a confederacy in arms, cannot have been without effect in tending to some extent to unify, if not to nationalise, the local customs and institutions. On the other hand, they were separated in many cases by physical boundaries that must otherwise have fostered and emphasised their natural differences. In passing then to examine such of these minor capitals as have been sufficiently disclosed to us by excavation, it will be a special and constant interest to note how far a common or mutual influence in art and architecture can be traced among their ruins. The result is, on the whole, surprising. We can only single out for comparison one site from Asia Minor and two neighbouring sites in the North of Syria; and though the inquiry is rendered difficult through insufficient chronological material, and the result complicated by the intrusion of other influences more potent on the one side than the other, nevertheless we shall find a correspondence in general features and in some detail which is sufficient at any rate to stamp them as products of the same civilisation, all dominated by a common motive, even though separated by some generations or maybe centuries in point of time. We begin with the site of Eyuk, a village situated some twenty miles northwards from Boghaz-Keui, sufficiently near to have been closely in touch with the activities and culture-progress of the capital, albeit sufficiently far to have maintained some local peculiarities. Here the ruins which we now know to be Hittite were lighted upon by Hamilton,[579] ‘the prince of travellers,’ in 1835; subsequently they were visited by Barth[580] and Van Lennep.[581] The account of them given by the last-named, who was for thirty years a missionary in Turkey, was the first attempt to hand down a reliable and complete description, accompanied by a rough plan of a building and sketches of the sculptures which adorned its portico. Then came Professor Ramsay, in 1881, and in the record[582] of his visit to these monuments we have the first scholar’s impression of their meaning and significance. M. Perrot visited the site and incorporated his notes in his great work on _Exploration Archéologique_,[583] and many inquirers have followed in his wake. The Liverpool Expedition of 1907 called here and secured a complete series of photographs and a measured plan;[584] and subsequently in the same year the Ottoman Government was enabled to make some useful clearances in front of the now famous portico of sphinxes, adding considerable information, and bringing to light two interesting sculptures which had lain previously buried.[585] The accounts of these various writers,