Part 2 (2/2)
They still held possession of Carchemish, however, and the decadence of the first a.s.syrian empire gave them an unexpected respite. But the revolution which placed Tiglath-pileser III. on the throne of a.s.syria, in B. C. 725, brought with it the final doom of Hitt.i.te supremacy.
a.s.syria entered upon a new career of conquest, and under its new rulers established an empire which extended over the whole of Western Asia. In B. C. 717 Carchemish finally fell before the armies of Sargon, and its last king Pisiris became the captive of the a.s.syrian king. Its trade and wealth pa.s.sed into a.s.syrian hands, it was colonised by a.s.syrians and placed under an a.s.syrian satrap. The great Hitt.i.te stronghold on the Euphrates, which had been for so many centuries the visible sign of their power and southern conquests, became once more the possession of a Semitic people. The long struggle that had been carried on between the Hitt.i.tes and the Semites was at an end; the Semite had triumphed, and the Hitt.i.te was driven back into the mountains from whence he had come.
But he did not yield without a struggle. The year following the capture of Carchemish saw Sargon confronted by a great league of the northern peoples, Meshech, Tubal, Melitene and others, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the king of Ararat. The league, however, was shattered in a decisive battle, the king of Ararat committed suicide, and in less than three years Komagene was annexed to the a.s.syrian empire. The Semite of Nineveh was supreme in the Eastern world.
Ararat was the name given by the a.s.syrians to the district in the immediate neighbourhood of Lake Van, as well as to the country to the south of it. It was not until post-Biblical days that the name was extended to the north, so that the modern Mount Ararat obtained a t.i.tle which originally belonged to the Kurdish range in the south. But Ararat was not the native name of the country. This was Biainas or Bianas, a name which still survives in that of Lake Van. Numerous inscriptions are scattered over the country, written in cuneiform characters borrowed from Nineveh in the time of a.s.sur-natsir-pal or his son Shalmaneser, but in a language which bears no resemblance to that of a.s.syria. They record the building of temples and palaces, the offerings made to the G.o.ds, and the campaigns of the Vannic kings. Among the latter mention is made of campaigns against the Khate or Hitt.i.tes.
The first of these campaigns was conducted by a king called Menuas, who reigned in the ninth century before our era. He overran the land of Alzi, and then found himself in the land of the Hitt.i.tes. Here he plundered the cities of Surisilis and Tarkhi-gamas, belonging to the Hitt.i.te prince Sada-halis, and captured a number of soldiers, whom he dedicated to the service of his G.o.d Khaldis. On another occasion he marched as far as the city of Malatiyeh, and after pa.s.sing through the country of the Hitt.i.tes, caused an inscription commemorating his conquests to be engraved on the cliffs of Palu. Palu is situated on the northern bank of the Euphrates, about midway between Malatiyeh and Van, and as it lies to the east of the ancient district of Alzi, we can form some idea of the exact geographical position to which the Hitt.i.tes of Menuas must be a.s.signed. His son and successor, Argistis I, again made war upon them, and we gather from one of his inscriptions that the city of Malatiyeh was itself included among their fortresses. The 'land of the Hitt.i.tes,' according to the statements of the Vannic kings, stretched along the banks of the Euphrates from Palu on the east as far as Malatiyeh on the west.
The Hitt.i.tes of the a.s.syrian monuments lived to the south-west of this region, spreading through Komagene to Carchemish and Aleppo. The Egyptian records bring them yet further south to Kadesh on the Orontes, while the Old Testament carries the name into the extreme south of Palestine. It is evident, therefore, that we must see in the Hitt.i.te tribes fragments of a race whose original seat was in the ranges of the Taurus, but who had pushed their way into the warm plains and valleys of Syria and Palestine. They belonged originally to Asia Minor, not to Syria, and it was conquest only which gave them a right to the name of Syrians. 'Hitt.i.te' was their true t.i.tle, and whether the tribes to which it belonged lived in Judah or on the Orontes, at Carchemish or in the neighbourhood of Palu, this was the t.i.tle under which they were known.
We must regard it as a national name, which clung to them in all their conquests and migrations, and marked them out as a peculiar people, distinct from the other races of the Eastern world. It is now time to see what their own monuments have to tell us regarding them, and the influence they exercised upon the history of mankind.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A SLAB FOUND AT MERASH.]
CHAPTER III.
THE HITt.i.tE MONUMENTS.
It was a warm and sunny September morning when I left the little town of Nymphi near Smyrna with a strong escort of Turkish soldiers, and made my way to the Pa.s.s of Karabel. The Pa.s.s of Karabel is a narrow defile, shut in on either side by lofty cliffs, through which ran the ancient road from Ephesos in the south to Sardes and Smyrna in the north. The Greek historian Herodotos tells us that the Egyptian conqueror Sesostris had left memorials of himself in this place. 'Two images cut by him in the rock' were to be seen beside the roads which led 'from Ephesos to Phokaea and from Sardes to Smyrna. On either side a man is carved, a little over three feet in height, who holds a spear in the right hand and a bow in the left. The rest of his accoutrement is similar, for it is Egyptian and Ethiopian, and from one shoulder to the other, right across the breast, Egyptian hieroglyphics have been cut which declare: ”I have won this land with my shoulders.”'
These two images were the object of my journey. One of them had been discovered by Renouard in 1839, and shortly afterwards sketched by Texier; the other had been found by Dr. Beddoe in 1856. But visitors to the Pa.s.s in which they were engraved were few and far between; the cliffs on either side were the favourite haunt of brigands, and thirty soldiers were not deemed too many to protect my safety. My work of exploration had to be carried on under the shelter of their guns, for more than twenty bandits were lurking under the brushwood above.
The sculpture sketched by Texier had subsequently been photographed by Mr. Svoboda. It represents a warrior whose height is rather more than life-size, and who stands in profile with the right foot planted in front of him, in the att.i.tude of one who is marching. In his right hand he holds a spear, behind his left shoulder is slung a bow, and the head is crowned with a high peaked cap. He is clad in a tunic which reaches to the knees, and his feet are shod with boots with turned-up ends. The whole figure is cut in deep relief in an artificial niche, and between the spear and the face are three lines of hieroglyphic characters. The figure faces south, and is carved on the face of the eastern cliff of Karabel.
It had long been recognised that the hieroglyphics were not those of Egypt, and Professor Perrot had also drawn attention to the striking resemblance between the style of art represented by this sculpture and that represented by certain rock-sculptures in Kappadokia, as well as by the sculptured image of a warrior discovered by himself at a place called Ghiaur-kalessi, 'the castle of the infidel,' in Phrygia, which is practically identical in form and character with the sculptured warrior of Karabel.
What was the origin of this art, or who were the people it commemorated, was a matter of uncertainty. A few weeks, however, before my visit to the Pa.s.s of Karabel, I announced[6] that I had come to the conclusion that the art was. .h.i.tt.i.te, and that the hieroglyphics accompanying the figure at Karabel would turn out, when carefully examined, to be Hitt.i.te also. The primary purpose of my visit to the pa.s.s was to verify this conclusion.
[6] In the _Academy_ of Aug. 16th, 1879.
Let us now see how I had arrived at it. The story is a long one, and in order to understand it, it is necessary to transport ourselves from the Pa.s.s of Karabel in Western Asia Minor to Hamah, the site of the ancient Hamath, in the far east. It was here that the first discovery was made which has led by slow degrees to the reconstruction of the Hitt.i.te empire, and a recognition of the important part once played by the Hitt.i.tes in the history of the civilised world.
As far back as the beginning of the present century (in 1812) the great Oriental traveller Burckhardt had noticed a block of black basalt covered with strange-looking hieroglyphics built into the corner of a house in one of the bazaars of Hamah[7]. But the discovery was forgotten, and the European residents in Hamah, like the travellers who visited the city, were convinced that 'no antiquities' were to be found there. Nearly sixty years later, however, when the American Palestine Exploration Society was first beginning its work, the American consul, Mr. Johnson, and an American missionary, Mr. Jessup, accidentally lighted again upon this stone, and further learned that three other stones of similar character, and inscribed with similar hieroglyphics, existed elsewhere in Hamah. One of them, of very great length, was believed to be endowed with healing properties. Rheumatic patients, Mohammedans and Christians alike, were in the habit of stretching themselves upon it, in the firm belief that their pains would be absorbed into the stone. The other inscribed stones were also regarded with veneration, which naturally increased when it was known that they were being sought after by the Franks; and the two Americans found it impossible to see them all, much less to take copies of the inscriptions they bore. They had to be content with the miserable attempts at reproducing them made by a native painter, one of which was afterwards published in America. The publication served to awaken the interest of scholars in the newly discovered inscriptions, and efforts were made by Sir Richard Burton and others to obtain correct impressions of them. All was in vain, however, and it is probable that the fanaticism or greed of the people of Hamah would have successfully resisted all attempts to procure trustworthy copies of the texts, had not a lucky accident brought Dr. William Wright to the spot. It is to his energy and devotion that the preservation of these precious relics of Hitt.i.te literature may be said to be due. 'On the 10th of November, 1872,' he tells us, he 'set out from Damascus, intent on securing the Hamah inscriptions. The Sublime Porte, seized by a periodic fit of reforming zeal, had appointed an honest man, Subhi Pasha, to be governor of Syria.
Subhi Pasha brought a conscience to his work, and, not content with redressing wrongs that succeeded in forcing their way into his presence, resolved to visit every district of his province, in order that he might check the spoiler and discover the wants of the people. He invited me to accompany him on a tour to Hamah, and I gladly accepted the invitation.'
Along with Mr. Green, the English Consul, accordingly, Dr. Wright joined the party of the Pasha; and, fearing that the same fate might befall the Hamath stones as had befallen the Moabite Stone, which had been broken into pieces to save it from the Europeans, persuaded him to buy them, and send them as a present to the Museum at Constantinople. When the news became known in Hamah, there were murmurings long and deep against the Pasha, and it became necessary, not only to appeal to the cupidity and fear of the owners of the stones, but also to place them under the protection of a guard of soldiers the night before the work of removing them was to commence.
[7] _Travels in Syria_, p. 146.
The night was an anxious one to Dr. Wright; but when day dawned, the stones were still safe, and the labour of their removal was at once begun. It 'was effected by an army of shouting men, who kept the city in an uproar during the whole day. Two of them had to be taken out of the walls of inhabited houses, and one of them was so large that it took fifty men and four oxen a whole day to drag it a mile. The other stones were split in two, and the inscribed parts were carried on the backs of camels to the' court of the governor's palace. Here they could be cleaned and copied at leisure and in safety.
But the work of cleaning them from the acc.u.mulated dirt of ages occupied the greater part of two days. Then came the task of making casts of the inscriptions, with the help of gypsum which some natives had been bribed to bring from the neighbourhood. At length, however, the work was completed, and Dr. Wright had the satisfaction of sending home to England two sets of casts of these ancient and mysterious texts, one for the British Museum, the other for the Palestine Exploration Fund, while the originals themselves were safely deposited in the Museum of Constantinople. It was now time to inquire what the inscriptions meant, and who could have been the authors of them.
Dr. Wright at once suggested that they were the work of the Hitt.i.tes, and that they were memorials of Hitt.i.te writing. But his suggestion was buried in the pages of a periodical better known to theologians than to Orientalists, and the world agreed to call the writing by the name of Hamathite. It specially attracted the notice of Dr. Hayes Ward of New York, who discovered that the inscriptions were written in _boustrophedon_ fas.h.i.+on, that is to say, that the lines turned alternately from right to left and from left to right, like oxen when plowing a field, the first line beginning on the right and the line following on the left. The lines read, in fact, from the direction towards which the characters look.
Dr. Hayes Ward also made another discovery. In the ruins of the great palace of Nineveh Sir A. H. Layard had discovered numerous clay impressions of seals once attached to doc.u.ments of papyrus or parchment.
The papyrus and parchment have long since perished, but the seals remain, with the holes through which the strings pa.s.sed that attached them to the original deeds. Some of the seals are a.s.syrian, some Phoenician, others again are Egyptian, but there are a few which have upon them strange characters such as had never been met with before. It was these characters which Dr. Hayes Ward perceived to be the same as those found upon the stones of Hamah, and it was accordingly supposed that the seals were of Hamathite origin.
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