Part 1 (2/2)

It is clear, then, that the Amorites of Canaan belonged to the same white race as the Libyans of Northern Africa, and like them preferred the mountains to the hot plains and valleys below. The Libyans themselves belonged to a race which can be traced through the peninsula of Spain and the western side of France into the British Isles. Now it is curious that wherever this particular branch of the white race has extended it has been accompanied by a particular form of cromlech, or sepulchral chamber built of large uncut stones. The stones are placed upright in the ground and covered over with other large slabs, the whole chamber being subsequently concealed under a tumulus of small stones or earth. Not unfrequently the entrance to the cromlech is approached by a sort of corridor. These cromlechs are found in Britain, in France, in Spain, in Northern Africa, and in Palestine, more especially on the eastern side of the Jordan, and the skulls that have been exhumed from them are the skulls of men of the dolichocephalic or long-headed type.

It has been necessary to enter at this length into what has been discovered concerning the Amorites by recent research, in order to show how carefully they should be distinguished from the Hitt.i.tes with whom they afterwards intermingled. They must have been in possession of Palestine long before the Hitt.i.tes arrived there. They extended over a much wider area, since there are no traces of the Hitt.i.tes at Shechem or on the eastern side of the Jordan, where the Amorites established two powerful kingdoms; while the earliest mention of the Amorites in the Bible (Gen. xiv. 7) describes them as dwelling at Hazezon-tamar, or En-gedi, on the sh.o.r.es of the Dead Sea, where no Hitt.i.tes are ever known to have settled. The Hitt.i.te colony in Palestine, moreover, was confined to a small district in the mountains of Judah: their strength lay far away in the north, where the Amorites were comparatively weak. It is true that Kadesh on the Orontes was in the hands of the Hitt.i.tes; but it is also true that it was 'in the land of the Amorites,' and this implies that they were its original occupants. We must regard the Amorites as the earlier population, among a part of whom the Hitt.i.tes in later days settled and intermarried. At what epoch that event took place we are still unable to say.

CHAPTER II.

THE HITt.i.tES ON THE MONUMENTS OF EGYPT AND a.s.sYRIA.

In the preceding chapter we have seen what the Bible has to tell us about 'the children of Heth.' They were an important people in the north of Syria who were ruled by 'kings' in the days of Solomon, and whose power was formidable to their Syrian neighbours. But there was also a branch of them established in the extreme south of Palestine, where they inhabited the mountains along with the Amorites, and had taken a share in the foundation of Jerusalem. It was from one of the latter, Ephron the son of Zohar, that Abraham had purchased the cave of Machpelah at Hebron; and one of the wives of Esau was of Hitt.i.te descent. In later times Uriah the Hitt.i.te was one of the chief officers of David, and his wife Bath-sheba was not only the mother of Solomon, but also the distant ancestress of Christ. For us, therefore, these Hitt.i.tes of Judaea have a very special and peculiar interest.

The decipherment of the inscriptions of Egypt and a.s.syria has thrown a new light upon their origin and history, and shown that the race to which they belonged once played a leading part in the history of the civilised East. On the Egyptian monuments they are called Kheta (or better Khata), on those of a.s.syria Khatta or Khate, both words being exact equivalents of the Hebrew Kheth and Khitti.

The Kheta or Hitt.i.tes first appear upon the scene in the time of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty. The foreign rule of the Hyksos or Shepherd princes had been overthrown, Egypt had recovered its independence, and its kings determined to retaliate upon Asia the sufferings brought upon their own country by the Asiatic invader. The war, which commenced with driving the Asiatic out of the Delta, ended by attacking him in his own lands of Palestine and Syria. Thothmes I. (about B.C. 1600) marched to the banks of the Euphrates and set up 'the boundary of the empire' in the country of Naharina. Naharina was the Biblical Aram Naharaim or 'Syria of the two rivers,' better known, perhaps, as Mesopotamia, and its situation has been ascertained by recent discoveries. It was the district called Mitanni by the a.s.syrians, who describe it as being 'in front of the land of the Hitt.i.tes,' on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, between Carchemish and the mouth of the river Balikh. In the age of Thothmes I., it was the leading state in Western Asia. The Hitt.i.tes had not as yet made themselves formidable, and the most dangerous enemy the Egyptian monarch was called upon to face were the people over whom Chushan-risha-thaim was king in later days (Judg. iii.

8). It is not until the reign of his son, Thothmes III., that the Hitt.i.tes come to the front. They are distinguished as 'Great' and 'Little,' the latter name perhaps denoting the Hitt.i.tes of the south of Judah. However this may be, Thothmes received tribute from 'the king of the great land of the Kheta,' which consisted of gold, negro-slaves, men-servants and maid-servants, oxen and servants. Whether the Hitt.i.tes were as yet in possession of Kadesh we do not know. If they were, they would have taken part in the struggle against the Egyptians which took place around the walls of Megiddo, and was decided in favour of Thothmes only after a long series of campaigns.

Before Thothmes died, he had made Egypt mistress of Palestine and Syria as far as the banks of the Euphrates and the land of Naharina. One of the bravest of his captains tells us on the walls of his tomb how he had captured prisoners in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, and had waded through the waters of the Euphrates when his master a.s.saulted the mighty Hitt.i.te fortress of Carchemish. Kadesh on the Orontes had already fallen, and for a time all Western Asia did homage to the Egyptian monarch, even the king of a.s.syria sending him presents and courting, as it would seem, his alliance. The Egyptian empire touched the land of Naharina on the east and the 'great land of the Hitt.i.tes' on the north.

But neighbours so powerful could not remain long at peace. A fragmentary inscription records that the first campaign of Thothmes IV., the grandson of Thothmes III., was directed against the Hitt.i.tes, and Amenophis III., the son and successor of Thothmes IV., found it necessary to support himself by entering into matrimonial alliance with the king of Naharina. The marriage had strange consequences for Egypt.

The new queen brought with her not only a foreign name and foreign customs, but a foreign faith as well. She refused to wors.h.i.+p Amun of Thebes and the other G.o.ds of Egypt, and clung to the religion of her fathers, whose supreme object of adoration was the solar disk. The Hitt.i.te monuments themselves bear witness to the prevalence of this wors.h.i.+p in Northern Syria. The winged solar disk appears above the figure of a king which has been brought from Birejik on the Euphrates to the British Museum; and even at Boghaz Keui, far away in Northern Asia Minor, the winged solar disk has been carved by Hitt.i.te sculptors upon the rock.

Amenophis IV., the son of Amenophis III., was educated in the faith of his mother, and after his accession to the throne endeavoured to impose the new creed upon his unwilling subjects. The powerful priesthood of Thebes withstood him for a while, but at last he a.s.sumed the name of Khu-n-Aten, 'the refulgence of the solar disk,' and quitting Thebes and its ancient temples he built himself a new capital dedicated to the new divinity. It stood on the eastern bank of the Nile, to the north of a.s.siout, and its long line of ruins is now known to the natives under the name of Tel el-Amarna. The city was filled with the adherents of the new creed, and their tombs are yet to be found in the cliffs that enclose the desert on the east. Its existence, however, was of no long duration. After the death of Khu-n-Aten, 'the heretic king,' his throne was occupied by one or two princes who had embraced his faith; but their reigns were brief, and they were succeeded by a monarch who returned once more to the religion of his forefathers. The capital of Khu-n-Aten was deserted, and the objects found upon its site show that it was never again inhabited.

Among its ruins a discovery has recently been made which casts an unexpected light upon the history of the Oriental world in the century before the Exodus. A large collection of clay tablets has been found, similar to those disinterred from the mounds of Nineveh and Babylonia, and like the latter inscribed in cuneiform characters and in the a.s.syro-Babylonian language. They consist for the most part of letters and despatches sent to Khu-n-Aten and his father, Amenophis III., by the governors and rulers of Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia, and they prove that at that time Babylonian was the international language, and the complicated cuneiform system of writing the common means of intercourse, of the educated world. Many of them were transferred by Khu-n-Aten from the royal archives of Thebes to his new city at Tel el-Amarna; the rest were received and stored up after the new city had been built. We learn from them that the Hitt.i.tes were already pressing southward, and were causing serious alarm to the governors and allies of the Egyptian king. One of the tablets is a despatch from Northern Syria, praying the Egyptian monarch to send a.s.sistance against them as soon as possible.

The 'heresy' of Khu-n-Aten brought trouble and disunion into Egypt, and his immediate successors seem to have been forced to retire from Syria.

So far from being able to aid their allies, the Egyptian generals found themselves no match for the Hitt.i.te armies. Ramses I., the founder of the Nineteenth Dynasty, was compelled to conclude a treaty, defensive and offensive, with the Hitt.i.te king Saplel, and thus to recognise that Hitt.i.te power was on an equality with that of Egypt.

From this time forward it becomes possible to speak of a Hitt.i.te empire.

Kadesh was once more in Hitt.i.te hands, and the influence formerly enjoyed by Egypt in Palestine and Syria was now enjoyed by its rival.

The rude mountaineers of the Taurus had descended into the fertile plains of the south, interrupting the intercourse between Babylonia and Canaan, and superseding the cuneiform characters of Chaldaea by their own hieroglyphic writing. From henceforth the Babylonian language ceased to be the language of diplomacy and education.

With Seti I., the son and successor of Ramses, the power of Egypt again revived. He drove the Beduin and other marauders across the frontiers of the desert and pushed the war into Syria itself. The cities of the Philistines again received Egyptian garrisons; Seti marched his armies as far as the Orontes, fell suddenly upon Kadesh and took it by storm.

The war was now begun between Egypt and the Hitt.i.tes, which lasted for the next half-century. It left Egypt utterly exhausted, and, in spite of the vainglorious boasts of its scribes and poets, glad to make a peace which virtually handed over to her rivals the possession of Asia Minor.

But at first success waited on the arms of Seti. He led his armies once more to the Euphrates and the borders of Naharina, and compelled Mautal, the Hitt.i.te monarch, to sue for peace. The natives of the Lebanon received him with acclamations, and cut down their cedars for his s.h.i.+ps on the Nile.

When Seti died, however, the Hitt.i.tes were again in possession of Kadesh, and war had broken out between them and his son Ramses II. The long reign of Ramses II. was a ceaseless struggle against his formidable foes. The war was waged with varying success. Sometimes victory inclined to the Egyptians, sometimes to their Hitt.i.te enemies. Its chief result was to bring ruin and disaster upon the cities of the Canaanites. Their land was devastated by the hostile armies which traversed it; their towns were sacked, now by the Hitt.i.te invaders from the north, now by the soldiers of Ramses from the south. It was little wonder that their inhabitants fled to island fastnesses like Tyre, deserting the city on the mainland, which an Egyptian traveller of the age of Ramses tells us had been burnt not long before. We can understand now why they offered so slight a resistance to the invading Israelites. The Exodus took place shortly after the death of Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the oppression; and when Joshua entered Palestine he found there a disunited people and a country exhausted by the long and terrible wars of the preceding century. The way had been prepared by the Hitt.i.tes for the Israelitish conquest of Canaan.

Pentaur, a sort of Egyptian poet laureate, has left us an epic which records the heroic deeds of Ramses in his first campaign against the Hitt.i.tes. The actual event which gave occasion to it was an act of bravery performed by the Egyptian monarch before the walls of Kadesh; but the poet has transformed him into a hero capable of superhuman deeds, and has thus produced an epic poem which reminds us of the Greek Iliad. Its details, however, afford a welcome insight into the history of the time, and show to what a height of power the Hitt.i.te empire had advanced. Its king could summon to his aid va.s.sal-allies not only from Syria, but from the distant regions of Asia Minor as well. The merchants of Carchemish, the islanders of Arvad, acknowledged his supremacy along with the Dardanians of the Troad and the Maeonians of Lydia. The Hitt.i.te empire was already a reality, extending from the banks of the Euphrates to the sh.o.r.es of the aegean, and including both the cultured Semites of Syria and the rude barbarians of the Greek seas.

It was in the fifth year of the reign of Ramses (B. C. 1383) that the event occurred which was celebrated by the Egyptian Homer. The Egyptian armies had advanced to the Orontes and the neighbourhood of Kadesh.

There two Beduin spies were captured, who averred that the Hitt.i.te king was far away in the north with his forces, encamped at Aleppo. But the intelligence was false. The Hitt.i.tes and their allies, mult.i.tudinous as the sand on the sea-sh.o.r.e, were really lying in ambush hard by. In their train were the soldiers of Naharina, of the Dardanians and of Mysia, along with numberless other peoples who now owned the Hitt.i.te sway. The Hitt.i.te monarch 'had left no people on his road without bringing them with him. Their number was endless; nothing like it had ever been before. They covered mountains and valleys like gra.s.shoppers for their number. He had not left silver or gold with his people; he had taken away all their goods and possessions to give it to the people who accompanied him to the war.'

The whole host was concealed in ambush on the north-west side of Kadesh.

Suddenly they arose and fell upon the terrified Egyptians by the waters of the Lake of the Amorites, the modern Lake of Homs. The chariots and horses charged 'the legion of Ra-Hormakhis,' and 'foot and horse gave way before them.' The news was carried to the Pharaoh. 'He arose like his father Month, he grasped his weapons, and put on his armour like Baal.' His steed 'Victory in Thebes' bore him in his chariot into the midst of the foe. Then he looked behind him, and behold he was alone.

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