Part 5 (2/2)
CHAPTER VII.
THE INSCRIPTIONS.
How can the history of a lost people be recovered, it may be asked, except through the help of the records they have left behind them? How can we come to know anything about the Hitt.i.tes until their few and fragmentary inscriptions are deciphered? The answer to this question will have been furnished by the preceding pages. Though the Hitt.i.te inscriptions are still undeciphered, though the number of them is still very small, there are other materials for reconstructing the history of the race, and these materials have now found their interpreter. The sculptured monuments the Hitt.i.tes have left behind them, the seals they engraved, the cities they inhabited, the memorials of them preserved in the Old Testament, in the cuneiform tablets of a.s.syria, and in the papyri of Egypt, have all served to build up afresh the fabric of a mighty empire which once exercised so profound an influence on the destinies of the civilised world.
But the Hitt.i.te inscriptions have not been altogether useless. They have helped to connect together the scattered monuments of Hitt.i.te dominion, and to prove that the peculiar art they display was of Hitt.i.te origin.
It was the Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs which accompany the figure of the warrior in the Pa.s.s of Karabel, and of the sitting G.o.ddess on Mount Sipylos, that proved these sculptures to be of Hitt.i.te origin. It has similarly been inscriptions containing Hitt.i.te characters which have enabled us to trace the march of the Hitt.i.te armies along the high-roads of Asia Minor, and to feel sure that Hitt.i.te princes once reigned in the city of Hamath.
The Hitt.i.te texts are distinguished by two characteristics. With hardly an exception, the hieroglyphs that compose them are carved in relief instead of being incised, and the lines read alternately from right to left and from left to right. The direction in which the characters look determines the direction in which they should be read. This alternate or _boustrophedon_ mode of writing also characterises early Greek inscriptions, and since it was not adopted by either Phoenicians, Egyptians, or a.s.syrians, the question arises whether the Greeks did not learn to write in such a fas.h.i.+on from neighbours who made use of the Hitt.i.te script.
Another characteristic of Hitt.i.te writing is the frequent employment of the heads of animals and men. It is very rarely that the whole body of an animal is drawn; the head alone was considered sufficient. This peculiarity would of itself mark off the Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs from those of Egypt.
But a very short inspection of the characters is enough to show that the Hitt.i.tes could not have borrowed them from the Egyptians. The two forms of writing are utterly and entirely distinct. Two of the most common Hitt.i.te characters represent the snow-boot and the fingerless glove, which, as we have seen, indicate the northern ancestry of the Hitt.i.te tribes, while the ideograph which denotes a 'country' is a picture of the mountain peaks of the Kappadokian plateau. It would therefore seem that the system of writing was invented in Kappadokia, and not in the southern regions of Syria or Canaan.
We may gather, however, that the invention took place after the contact of the Hitt.i.tes with Egypt, and their consequent acquaintance with the Egyptian form of script. Similar occurrences have happened in modern times. A Cheroki Indian in North America, who had seen the books of the white man, was led thereby to devise an elaborate mode of writing for his own countrymen, and the curious syllabary invented for the Vei negroes by one of their tribe originated in the same manner. So, too, we may imagine that the sight of the hieroglyphs of Egypt, and the knowledge that thoughts could be conveyed by them, suggested to some Hitt.i.te genius the idea of inventing a similar means of intercommunication for his own people.
At any rate, it is pretty clear that the Hitt.i.te characters are used like the Egyptian, sometimes as ideographs to express ideas, sometimes phonetically to represent syllables and sounds, sometimes as determinatives to denote the cla.s.s to which the word belongs to which they are attached. It is probable, moreover, that a word or sound was often expressed by multiplying the characters which expressed the whole or part of it, just as was the case in Egyptian writing in the age of Ramses II. At the same time the number of separate characters used by the Hitt.i.tes was far less than that employed by the Egyptian scribes. At present not 200 are known to exist, though almost every fresh inscription adds to the list.
The oldest writing material of the Hitt.i.tes were their plates of metal, on the surface of which the characters were hammered out from behind.
The Hitt.i.te copy of the treaty with Ramses II. was engraved in this manner on a plate of silver, its centre being occupied with a representation of the G.o.d Sutekh embracing the Hitt.i.te king, and a short line of hieroglyphs running round him. This central ornamentation, surrounded with a circular band of figures, was in accordance with the usual style of Hitt.i.te art. The Egyptian monuments show us what the silver plate was like. It was of rectangular shape, with a ring at the top by which it could be suspended from the wall. If ever the tomb of Ur-Maa Noferu-Ra, the Hitt.i.te wife of Ramses, is discovered, it is possible that a Hitt.i.te copy of the famous treaty may be found among its contents.
At all events, it is clear that already at this period the Hitt.i.tes were a literary people. The Egyptian records make mention of a certain Khilip-sira, whose name is compounded with that of Khilip or Aleppo, and describe him as 'a writer of books of the vile Kheta.' Like the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Hitt.i.te monarch was accompanied to battle by his scribes.
If Kirjath-sepher or 'Book-town,' in the neighbourhood of Hebron, was of Hitt.i.te origin, the Hitt.i.tes would have possessed libraries like the a.s.syrians, which may yet be dug up. Kirjath-sepher was also called Debir, 'the sanctuary,' and we may therefore conclude that the library was stored in its chief temple, as were the libraries of Babylonia.
There was another Debir or Dapur further north, in the vicinity of Kadesh on the Orontes, which is mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions; and since this was in the land of the Amorites, while Kirjath-sepher is also described as an Amorite town, it is possible that here too the relics of an ancient library may yet be found. We must not forget that in the days of Deborah, 'out of Zebulon,' northward of Megiddo, came 'they that handle the pen of the writer' (Judg. v. 14).
The inscriptions recently discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt have shown that in the century before the Exodus the common medium of literary intercourse in Western Asia was the language and cuneiform script of Babylonia. It was subsequently to this that the Hitt.i.tes forced their way southward, bringing with them their own peculiar system of hieroglyphic writing. But the cuneiform characters still continued to be used in the Hitt.i.te region of the world. Cuneiform tablets have been purchased at Kaisariyeh which come from some old library of Kappadokia, the site of which is still unknown, and Dr. Humann has lately discovered a long cuneiform inscription among the Hitt.i.te sculptures of Sinjirli in the ancient Komagene. If the Hitt.i.te texts are ever deciphered, it will probably be through the help of the cuneiform script.
A beginning has already been made. Within a month after my Paper had been read before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, which announced the discovery of a Hitt.i.te empire and the connection of the curious art of Asia Minor with that of Carchemish, I had fallen across a bilingual inscription in Hitt.i.te and cuneiform characters. This was on the silver boss of King Tarkondemos, the only key yet found to the interpretation of the Hitt.i.te texts.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BILINGUAL BOSS OF TARKONDEMOS.]
The story of the boss is a strange one. It was purchased many years ago at Smyrna by M. Alexander Jovanoff, a well-known numismatist of Constantinople, who showed it to the Oriental scholar Dr. A. D.
Mordtmann. Dr. Mordtmann made a copy of it, and found it to be a round silver plate, probably the head of a dagger or dirk, round the rim of which ran a cuneiform inscription. Within, occupying the central field, was the figure of a warrior in a new and unknown style of art. He stood erect, holding a spear in the right hand, and pressing the left against his breast. He was clothed in a tunic, over which a fringed cloak was thrown; a close-fitting cap was on the head, and boots with upturned ends on the feet, the upper part of the legs being bare, while a dirk was fastened in the belt. On either side of the figure was a series of 'symbols,' the series on each side being the same, except that on the right side the upper 'symbols' were smaller, and the lower 'symbols'
larger than the corresponding ones on the left side.
In an article published some years later on the cuneiform inscriptions of Van, Dr. Mordtmann referred to the boss, and it was his description of the figure in the centre of it which arrested my attention. I saw at once that the figure must be in the style of art I had just determined to be Hitt.i.te, and I guessed that the 'symbols' which accompanied it would turn out to be Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs. Dr. Mordtmann stated that he had given a copy of the boss in 1862 in the 'Numismatic Journal which appears in Hanover.' After a long and troublesome search I found that the publication meant by him was not a Journal at all, and had appeared at Leipzig, not at Hanover, in 1863, not in 1862. The copy of the boss contained in it showed that I was right in believing Dr. Mordtmann's 'symbols' to be Hitt.i.te characters.
It now became necessary to know how far the copy was correct, and to ascertain whether the original were still in existence. A reply soon came from the British Museum. The boss had once been offered to the Museum for sale, but rejected, as nothing like it had ever been seen before, and it was therefore suspected of being a forgery. Before its rejection, however, an electrotype had been taken of it, an impression of which was now sent to me.
Shortly afterwards came another communication from M. Francois Lenormant, one of the most learned and brilliant Oriental scholars of the present century. He had seen the original at Constantinople some twenty years previously, and had there made a cast of it, which he forwarded to me. The cast and the electrotype agreed exactly together.
There could accordingly be no doubt that we had before us, if not the original itself, a perfect facsimile of it. The importance of this fact soon became manifest, for the original boss disappeared after M.
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