The present volume aims at filling the gap which has already grown too wide. It starts _ab initio_ with a rapid survey of the Hittite lands, and an outline of their history. The Hittite monuments are then passed in review, each described separately and independently, in such a way as to be useful to any one visiting them _in situ_ or in the museums of Constantinople and Berlin, where there are departments devoted specially to this branch of archæology. The bibliography and numerous cross-references in the footnotes will, it is hoped, make the work handy to the archæologist as a book of reference. The author’s own theories are mostly confined to the last chapter, and an effort has been made to distinguish between facts proved or generally accepted and matters of personal opinion. The attempt to reconstruct the history of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. from the archives recently discovered by Dr. Winckler at Boghaz-Keui is put forward tentatively, and would doubtless have been better done by a philologist. It has been found impossible to treat the subject of Hittite art and religious symbolism in general within the limited scope of this volume and its title. Some other points are best noted at the outset. One aim of the book being to interest the English reader in a fascinating but neglected subject, the bibliographical references are given in English wherever translations of foreign authors are available. Unhappily some of the masterpieces of modern scholarship, like Meyer’s _Geschichte des Alterthums_, are not yet rendered into English. The geographical names employed, even at the risk of inconsistency, are those most familiar or in common use. Thus Hamath instead of Hama, Aleppo for Haleb, Carchemish for Jerablus, Tyana for Kilisse Hissar. In regard to the term ‘Hittite,’ also, the word is primarily used in reference to that class of monuments generally known as Hittite, and hence to the ancient people whose handiwork these were. The word Hatti is used in a more restricted sense, to imply the central and at one time dominant Hittite state or states whose seat and centre of organisation was at Boghaz-Keui. But it should not be forgotten that actually the words Hittite and Hatti are interchangeable.