They were the descendants of Heth, son of Canaan (Genesis x. 15), and once settled in Karkhemish, where the chief temple to Atergatis was built (modern Jerabulus), extended their kingdom from the Bosphorus to the confines of Egypt, with whose Pharaohs they fought long and sanguinary battles. Like all peoples in the East, even in the present day, they would appear to have been tribal in constitution, but their chief king was he of Karkhemish, with a lieutenant king at Kadesh in the south. However, their might, long-lived as it was, fell before the onrush of the Assyrians, then but a young race, comparatively newly separated from the Chaldeans and Babylonians, and in 700 B.C. the last of the Hittite kings, who had been for some time tributary to Sargon, rebelled against his stronger neighbours, was defeated, and the last remnant of the Hittite empire, which had grown weak and dismembered, was destroyed and forgotten. At Karkhemish, the capital through so many centuries of the Hittite empire, and chief city of the worship of Atergatis, there remains now but the great mound. War has again raged over the remains of greater combatants, for the Turks were defeated by the Egyptians there half a century ago. Its interest to-day lies in the fact that the Bagdad railway is planned to cross the river just by the mound of Karkhemish, so we may look for bulky volumes in German some day, which will give us fuller particulars of this ancient city than we possess at present. We left Membich very early next morning, and _en route_ discovered that several other carriages had put up in the place during the night; for both behind and before were rumbling, swaying vehicles, two or three full of luggage, and the rest carrying passengers. From Membich the country--as barren as ever--began to get a little hilly, and in the far northern distance we could see the Kurdish mountains in the province of Mamurat ul Aziz, at this time of the year well capped with snow.