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    The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire
    The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire
    The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire

    By A.H. Sayce

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    A.H. Sayce was one of the foremost experts on the Near East during the late 19th century and early 20th century, authoring many books on the region. The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire is a wonderful history of the Hittite civilization. The Hittites are an ancient people who remain somewhat enigmatic, and perhaps little known to most people, but their influence on the ancient Near East is undeniable. From high on their capital of Hattusa in central Anatolia, the Hittites were able to conquer and control a kingdom that roughly comprised the area of the modern nation-states of Turkey, Syria, and parts of Iraq and Lebanon through a combination of brute military force and shrewd diplomatic machinations. 


    Compared to some of their contemporaries – including the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians – the Hittites were somewhat distant both culturally and geographically. The Hittites were an Indo-European speaking in an ocean of Afro-Asiatic and Semitic groups, their homeland was to the north of Mesopotamia, and it contained no major river like the Nile, Tigris, or Euphrates Rivers. The Hittite empire was also far less enduring than its neighbors, as it only existed from about 1800-1200 BCE (van de Mieroop 2007, 156), which was considerably shorter than most of the other major kingdoms of the Near East. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKrill Press
    Release dateDec 5, 2015
    ISBN9781518326868
    The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire

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      Book preview

      The Hittites - A.H. Sayce

      THE HITTITES: THE STORY OF A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE

      ..................

      A.H. Sayce

      AMULET PRESS

      Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review, or connect with the author.

      This book is a work of nonfiction and is intended to be factually accurate.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2015 by A.H. Sayce

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Preface

      CHAPTER I. THE HITTITES OF THE BIBLE

      CHAPTER II. THE HITTITES ON THE MONUMENTS OF EGYPT AND ASSYRIA

      CHAPTER III. THE HITTITE MONUMENTS.

      CHAPTER IV. THE HITTITE EMPIRE.

      CHAPTER V. THE HITTITE CITIES AND RACE.

      CHAPTER VI. HITTITE RELIGION AND ART

      CHAPTER VII. THE INSCRIPTIONS

      CHAPTER VIII. HITTITE TRADE AND INDUSTRY.

      The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire

      By

      A.H. Sayce

      The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire

      Published by Amulet Press

      New York City, NY

      First published 1888

      Copyright © Amulet Press, 2015

      All rights reserved

      Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

      About Amulet Press

      Amulet Press is a publishing company that specializes in reproducing the finest works ever written about the ancient world, with a focus on Egypt and the Near East.

      PREFACE

      ..................

      THE DISCOVERY OF THE IMPORTANT place once occupied by the Hittites has been termed the romance of ancient history. Nothing can be more interesting than the resurrection of a forgotten people, more especially when that people is so intimately connected with Old Testament story, and with the fortunes of the Chosen Race. How the resurrection has been accomplished by putting together the fragmentary evidence of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, of strange-looking monuments in Asia Minor, and of still undeciphered hieroglyphics, will be described in the following pages. It is marvelous to think that only ten years ago the romance could not have been written, and that the part played by the Hittite nations in the history of the world was still unsuspected. Yet now we have become, as it were, familiar with the friends of Abraham and the race to which Uriah belonged.

      Already a large and increasing literature has been devoted to them. The foundation stone, which was laid by my paper On the Monuments of the Hittites in 1880, has been crowned with a stately edifice in Dr. Wright’s Empire of the Hittites, of which the second edition appeared in 1886, and in the fourth volume of the magnificent work of Prof. Perrot and M. Chipiez, Histoire de l’Art dans Antiquité, published at Paris a year ago. Profusely illustrated, the latter work sets before us a life-like picture of Hittite architecture and art.

      It cannot be long before the inscriptions left to us by the Hittites, in their peculiar form of hieroglyphic writing, are also made to reveal their secrets. All that is required are more materials upon which to work, and we shall then know which, if any, of the attempts hitherto made to explain them has hit the truth. Major Conder’s system of decipherment has not yet obtained the adhesion of other scholars; neither has the rival system of Mr. Ball, ingenious and learned as it is. But if we may judge from the successes of the last few years, it cannot be long before we know as much about the Hittite language and writing as we now know about Hittite art and civilization. To quote the words of Dr. Wright: We must labor to unloose the dumb tongue of these inscriptions, and to unlock their mysteries, not with the view of finding something sensational in them, or for the purpose of advancing some theory, but for the love of knowing what they really contain; and I doubt not that, proceeding in the right method of investigation, we shall reach results satisfactory to the Oriental scholar, and confirmatory of Divine truth.

      CHAPTER I. THE HITTITES OF THE BIBLE

      ..................

      WE ARE TOLD IN THE Second Book of Kings (VII. 6) that when the Syrians were encamped about Samaria and the Lord had sent a panic upon them, they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us. Nearly forty years ago a distinguished scholar selected this passage for his criticism. Its unhistorical tone, he declared, is too manifest to allow of our easy belief in it. No Hittite kings can have compared in power with the king of Judah, the real and near ally, who is not named at all ... nor is there a single mark of acquaintance with the contemporaneous history.

      Recent discoveries have retorted the critic’s objections upon himself. It is not the Biblical writer but the modern author who is now proved to have been unacquainted with the contemporaneous history of the time. The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of Elisha they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days of Jehoram they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of Judah.

      But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the Israelitish conquest of Canaan. The references to them in the later historical books of the Old Testament Canon are rare and scanty. The traitor who handed over Bethel to the house of Joseph fled into the land of the Hittites (Judg. I. 26), and there built a city which he called Luz. Mr. Tomkins thinks he has found it in the town of Latsa, captured by the Egyptian king Ramses II, which he identifies with Qalb Luzeh, in Northern Syria. However this may be, an emended reading of the text, based upon the Septuagint, transforms the unintelligible Tahtim-hodshi of 2 Sam. XXIV. 6 into the Hittites of Kadesh, a city which long continued to be their chief stronghold in the valley of the Orontes.

      It was as far as this city, which lay at the entering in of Hamath, on the northern frontier of the Israelitish kingdom, that the officers of David made their way when they were sent to number Israel.

      Lastly, in the reign of Solomon the Hittites are again mentioned (1 Kings X. 28-29) in a passage where the authorized translation has obscured the sense. It runs in the Revised Version: And the horses which Solomon had were brought out of Egypt; and the king’s merchants received them in droves, each drove at a price. And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for one hundred and fifty: and so for all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did they bring them out by their means.

      The Hebrew merchants, in fact, were the mediatories between Egypt and the north, and exported the horses of Egypt not only for the king of Israel but for the kings of the Hittites as well.

      The Hittites whose cities and princes are thus referred to in the later historical books of the Old Testament belonged to the north, Hamath and Kadesh on the Orontes being their most southerly points. But the Book of Genesis introduces us to other Hittites—the children of Heth, as they are termed—whose seats were in the extreme south of Palestine. It was from Ephron the Hittite that Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah at Hebron (Gen. XXIII), and Esau took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite (Gen. XXVI. 34), or, as it is given elsewhere, Adah the daughter of Elon the Hittite (Gen. XXXVI). It must be to these Hittites of the south that the ethnographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis refers when it is said that Canaan begat Sidon his first-born, and Heth, and in no other way can we explain the statement of Ezekiel (XVI. 3-45) that the father of Jerusalem was an Amorite and its mother a Hittite. Uriah the Hittite, too, the trusty officer of David, must have come from the neighborhood of Hebron, where David had reigned for seven years, rather than from among the distant Hittites of the north. Besides the latter there was thus a Hittite population which clustered round Hebron, and to whom the origin of Jerusalem was partly due.

      Now it will be noticed that the prophet ascribes the foundation of Jerusalem to the Amorite as well as the Hittite. The Jebusites, accordingly, from whose hands the city was wrested by David, must have belonged to one or other of these two great races; perhaps, indeed, to both. At all events, we find elsewhere that the Hittites and Amorites are closely interlocked together. It was so at Hebron, where in the time of Abraham not only Ephron the Hittite dwelt, but also the three sons of the Amorite Mamre (Gen. XIV. 13). The Egyptian monuments show that the two nations were similarly confederated together at Kadesh on the Orontes. Kadesh was a Hittite stronghold; nevertheless it is described as being in the land of the Amaur or Amorites, and its king is depicted with the physical characteristics of the Amorite, and not of the Hittite. Further north, in the country which the Hittites had made peculiarly their own, cities existed which bore names, it would seem, compounded with that of the Amorite, and the common Assyrian title of the district in which Damascus stood, Garemeris, is best explained as the Gar of the Amorites. Shechem was taken

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