Part 4 (1/2)
The interest of Boghaz Keui centres in the sculptures which have been carved with so much care on the rocky walls of the mountains. Here advantage has been taken of two narrow recesses, the sides and floors of which have been artificially shaped and levelled. The first and largest recess may be described as of rectangular shape. Along either side of it, as along the dado of a room, run two long lines of figures in relief, which eventually meet at the end opposite the entrance. On the left-hand side we see a line of men, almost all clad alike in the short tunic, peaked tiara, and boots with upturned ends that characterise Hitt.i.te art. At times, however, they are interrupted by other figures in the long Syrian robe, who may perhaps be intended for women. Among them are two dwarf-like creatures upholding the crescent disk of the moon, and after a while the procession becomes that of a number of deities, each with his name written in Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs at his side. After turning the corner of the recess, the procession consists of three G.o.ds, two of whom stand on mountain-peaks, while the foremost (with a goat beside him) is supported on the heads of two adoring priests.
Facing him is the foremost figure of the other procession, which starts from the eastern side of the recess, and finally meets the first on its northern wall. This figure is that of the great Asiatic G.o.ddess, who wears on her head the mural crown and stands upon a panther, while beside her, as beside the G.o.d she is greeting, is the portraiture of a goat. Behind her a youthful G.o.d, with the double-headed battle-axe in his hand, stands upon a panther, and behind him again are two priestesses with mural crowns, whose feet rest upon the heads and wings of a double-headed eagle. This eagle, whose form is but a reproduction of that sculptured at Eyuk, closes the series of designs represented on the northern wall. The eastern wall is occupied with a long line, first of G.o.ddesses and then of priestesses. Where the line breaks off at last we come upon a solitary piece of sculpture. This is the image of an eunuch-priest, who stands on a mountain and holds in one hand a curved augural wand, in the other a strange symbol representing a priest with embroidered robes, who stands upon a shoe with upturned ends, and supports a winged solar disk, the two extremities of which rest upon baseless columns.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SCULPTURES AT BOGHAZ KEUI.]
The entrance to the second recess is guarded on either side by two winged monsters, with human bodies and the heads of dogs. It leads into an artificially excavated pa.s.sage of rectangular shape, on the rocky walls of which detached groups of figures and emblems are engraved. On the western wall is a row of twelve priests or soldiers, each of whom bears a scythe upon his shoulder; facing them on the eastern wall are two reliefs of strange character. One of them depicts the youthful G.o.d, whose name perhaps was Attys, embracing with his left arm the eunuch-priest, above whose head is engraved the strange symbol that has been already described. The other represents a G.o.d's head crowned with the peaked tiara, and supported on a double-headed lion, which again stands on the hinder feet of two other lions, whose heads rest on a column or stem. All these sculptures were once covered with stucco, and thus preserved from the action of the weather.
It is evident that in these two mountain recesses we have a sanctuary, the forms and symbols of whose deities were sculptured on its walls of living rock. It was a sanctuary too holy to be confined within the walls of the city, and the supreme deities to whom it was dedicated were a G.o.d and a G.o.ddess, served by a mult.i.tude of male and female priests. In fact, as Prof. Perrot remarks, Boghaz Keui must have been a sacred city like Komana, whose citizens were consecrated to the chief divinities adored by the Hitt.i.tes, and were governed by a high-priest. It was as much a 'Kadesh' or 'Hierapolis,' as much a 'holy city,' as Carchemish itself.
It is not its sculptures only which prove to us that it was a city of the Hitt.i.tes. The figures of the deities have attached to them, as at Eyuk, the same hieroglyphs as those which meet us in the inscriptions of Hamath and Aleppo, of Carchemish and Merash, and within its walls, southward of the ruins of its palace, Prof. Perrot discovered a long text of nine or ten lines cut out of the rock, and though worn and disfigured by time and weather, still showing the forms of many Hitt.i.te characters. So far as can be judged from a photograph of it he has published, the forms are the same as those which are found on the Hitt.i.te monuments of Syria.
Tedious as all these details may seem to be, it has been necessary to give them, since they tell us what was the appearance and construction of a Hitt.i.te city, a Hitt.i.te palace, and the interior of a Hitt.i.te temple. The discoveries recently made in the Hitt.i.te districts south of the Taurus, show us that here too the palaces and temples were like those of Eyuk and Boghaz Keui. Here too we find the same dados sculptured with the same figures dressed in the same costume; here too we meet with the same lions, and the same winged deities standing on the backs of animals. A photograph of a piece of sculpture on a block of basalt at Carchemish, taken by Dr. Gwyther, might have been taken at Boghaz Keui. The art, the forms, and the symbolism are all the same.
The high-road from Boghaz Keui to Merash must have pa.s.sed through the defile of Ghurun, where Sir Charles Wilson discovered Hitt.i.te inscriptions carved upon the cliff. But there may have been a second road which led through Kaisariyeh, the modern capital of Kappadokia, southward to Bor or Tyana, where Prof. Ramsay found a Hitt.i.te text, and from thence to the silver mines of the Bulgar Dagh. The bas-reliefs of Ibreez are not far distant from the famous Cilician gates which led the traveller from the great central plateau of Asia Minor to Tarsus and the sea.
It would seem that the silver mines of the Bulgar Dagh were first worked by Hitt.i.te miners. Silver had a special attraction for the Hitt.i.te race.
The material on which the Hitt.i.te version of the treaty between the Hitt.i.te king of Kadesh and the Egyptian Pharaoh was written was a tablet of that metal. That such tablets were in frequent use, results from the fact that nearly all the Hitt.i.te inscriptions known to us are not incised, but cut in relief upon the stone. It is therefore obvious that the Hitt.i.tes must have first inscribed their hieroglyphs upon metal, rather than upon wood or stone or clay; it is only in the case of metal that it is less laborious to hammer or cast in relief than to cut the metal with a graving tool, and nothing can prove more clearly how long accustomed the Hitt.i.te scribes must have been to doing so, than their imitation of this work in relief when they came to write upon stone. It is possible that most of the silver of which they made use came from the Bulgar Dagh. The Hitt.i.te inscription found near the old mines of these mountains by Mr. Davis, proves that they had once occupied the locality.
It is even possible that their settlement for a time in Lydia was also connected with their pa.s.sion for 'the bright metal.' At all events the Gumush Dagh, or 'Silver Mountains,' lie to the south of the Pa.s.s of Karabel, and traces of old workings can still be detected in them.
However this may be, the Hitt.i.te monuments of Asia Minor confirm in a striking way the evidence of the Egyptian inscriptions. They show us that the Hitt.i.tes worked for silver in the mountains which looked down upon the Cilician plain, from whence the influence of their art and writing extended into the plain itself. They further show that the central point of Hitt.i.te power was a square on either side of the Taurus range, which included Carchemish and Komagene in the south, the district eastwards of the Halys on the north, and the country of which Malatiyeh was the capital in the east. The Hitt.i.te tribes, in fact, were mountaineers from the plateau of Kappadokia who had spread themselves out in all directions. A time came when, under the leaders.h.i.+p of powerful princes, they marched along the two high-roads of Asia Minor and established their supremacy over the coast-tribes of the far west.
The age to which this military empire belongs is indicated by the Egyptian character of the so-called image of Niobe on the cliff of Sipylos, as well as by the sphinxes which guarded the entrance to the palace of Eyuk. It goes back to the days when the rulers of Kadesh could summon to their aid the va.s.sal-chieftains of the aegean coast. The monuments the Hitt.i.tes have left behind them in Asia Minor thus bear the same testimony as the records of Egypt. The people to whom Uriah, and it may be Bath-sheba, belonged, not only had contended on equal terms with one of the greatest of Egyptian kings; they had carried their arms through the whole length of Asia Minor, they had set up satraps in the cities of Lydia, and had brought the civilisation of the East to the barbarous tribes of the distant West.
CHAPTER V.
THE HITt.i.tE CITIES AND RACE.
Of the history of the 'White Syrians' or Hitt.i.tes who lived in the land of Pteria, near the Halys, we know nothing at present beyond what we can gather from the ruins of their stronghold at Boghaz Keui and their palace at Eyuk. The same is the case with the Hitt.i.te tribes of Malatiyeh and Komagene. When the inscription which adorns the body of a stone lion found at Merash can be deciphered, it will doubtless cast light on the early history of the city; at present we do not know even its ancient name. It is not until we leave the mountainous region originally occupied by the Hitt.i.te race, and descend into the valleys of Syria, that the annals of their neighbours begin to tell us something about their fortunes and achievements. The history of their two southern capitals, Carchemish and Kadesh, broken and imperfect though it may be, is not an utter blank.
The site of Carchemish had long been looked for in vain. At one time it was identified with the Kirkesion or Circesium of cla.s.sical geography, built at the confluence of the Khabour and the Euphrates. But the a.s.syrian name of Kirkesion was Sirki, and its position did not agree with that a.s.signed to 'Gargamis' or Carchemish in the a.s.syrian texts.
Professor Maspero subsequently placed the latter at Membij, the ancient Mabog or Hierapolis, on the strength of the evidence furnished by cla.s.sical authors and the Egyptian monuments; but the ruins of Membij contain nothing earlier than the Greek period, and their position on a rocky plateau at a distance from the Euphrates, is inconsistent with the fact known to us from the a.s.syrian inscriptions, that Carchemish commanded the fords over the Euphrates.
To Mr. Skene, for many years the English consul at Aleppo, is due the credit of first discovering the true site of the old Hitt.i.te capital. On the western bank of the Euphrates, midway between Birejik and the mouth of the Sajur, rises an artificial mound of earth, under which ruins and sculptured blocks of stone had been found from time to time. It was known as Jerabls, or Kalaat Jerabls, 'the fortress of Jerabls,'
sometimes wrongly written Jerabis; and in the name of Jerabls Mr. Skene had no difficulty in recognising an Arab corruption of Hierapolis. In the Roman age the name of Hierapolis or 'Holy City' had been transferred to its neighbour Membij, which inherited the traditions and religious fame of the older Carchemish; but when the triumph of Christianity in Syria brought with it the fall of the great temple of Membij, the name disappeared from the later city, and was remembered only in connection with the ruins of the ancient Carchemish.
Two years after Mr. Skene's discovery, Mr. George Smith visited Carchemish on his last ill-fated journey from which he never returned, and recognised at once that Mr. Skene's identification was right. The position of Jerabls suited the requirements of the a.s.syrian texts, it lay on the high-road which formerly led from east to west, and among its ruins was an inscription in Hitt.i.te characters. Not long afterwards there were brought to the British Museum the bronze bands which once adorned the gates of an a.s.syrian temple, and on one of these is a picture in relief of Carchemish as it looked in the days of Jehu of Israel. The Euphrates is represented as running past its walls, thus conclusively showing that Jerabls, and not Membij, must be the site on which it stood.
The site was bought by Mr. Henderson, Mr. Skene's successor at Aleppo, and the money was invested by the former owner in the purchase of a cow.
The mighty were fallen indeed, when the Hitt.i.te capital which had resisted the armies of Egypt and a.s.syria was judged to be worth no more than the price of a beast of the field. In 1878 Mr. Henderson was employed by the Trustees of the British Museum in excavating on the spot; but no sufficient supervision was exercised over the workmen, and though a few remains of Hitt.i.te sculpture and writing found their way to London, much was left to be burned into lime by the natives or employed in the construction of a mill.
The ancient city was defended on two sides by the Euphrates, and was exposed only on the north and west. Here, however, an artificial ca.n.a.l had been cut, on either side of which was a fortified wall. The mound which had first attracted Mr. Skene's attention marks the site of the royal palace, where the excavators found the remains of a dado like that of Eyuk, the face of the stones having been sculptured into the likeness of G.o.ds and men. The men were shod with boots with upturned ends, that unfailing characteristic of Hitt.i.te art.
Carchemish enjoyed a long history. When first we hear of it in the Egyptian records it was already in Hitt.i.te hands. Thothmes III. fought beneath its walls, and his bravest warriors plunged into the Euphrates in their eagerness to capture the foe. Tiglath-pileser I. had seen its walls from the opposite sh.o.r.e of the Euphrates, but had not ventured to approach them. a.s.sur-natsir-pal and his son Shalmaneser had received tribute from its king, and when it finally surrendered to the armies of Sargon it was made the seat of an a.s.syrian satrap. The trade which had flowed through it continued to pour wealth into the hands of its merchants, and the 'maneh of Carchemish' remained a standard of value.
When Egypt made her final struggle for supremacy in Asia, it was under the walls of Carchemish that the decisive struggle was fought. The battle of Carchemish in B.C. 604 drove Necho out of Syria and Palestine, and placed the destinies of the chosen people in the hands of the Babylonian king. It is possible that the ruin of Carchemish dates from the battle. However that may be, long before the beginning of the Christian era it had been supplanted by Mabog or Membij, and the great sanctuary which had made it a 'holy city' was transferred to its rival and successor.
Like Carchemish, Kadesh on the Orontes, the most southern capital the Hitt.i.tes possessed, was also a 'holy city.' Pictures of it have been preserved on the monuments of Ramses II. We gather from them that it stood on the sh.o.r.e of the Lake of Horns, still called the 'Lake of Kadesh,' at the point where the Orontes flowed out of the lake. The river was conducted round the city in a double channel, across which a wide bridge was thrown, the s.p.a.ce between the two channels being apparently occupied by a wall.