Part 6 (1/2)
Jovanoff's death, and in spite of all enquiries no trace of it can be discovered. It may be recovered hereafter in the bazaars of Constantinople or in some private house at St. Petersburg; at present there is no clue whatever to its actual possessor.
The reading of the cuneiform legend offers but little difficulty. It gives us the name and t.i.tle of the king whose figure is engraved within it--'Tarqu-dimme king of the country of Erme.'
The name Tarqu-dimme is evidently the same as that of the Cilician prince Tarkondemos or Tarkon-dimotos, who lived in the time of our Lord.
The name is also met with in other parts of Asia Minor under the forms of Tarkondas and Tarkondimatos; and we may consider it to be of a distinctively Hitt.i.te type. Where the district was over which Tarqu-dimme ruled we can only guess. It may have been the range of mountains called Arima by the cla.s.sical writers, which lay close under the Hitt.i.te monuments of the Bulgar Dagh. In this case Tarkondemos would have been a Cilician king.
The twice-repeated Hitt.i.te version of the cuneiform legend has been the subject of much discussion. The arrangement of the characters, due more to the necessity of filling up the vacant s.p.a.ce on the boss than to the requirements of their natural order, allowed more than one interpretation of them. But there were two facts which furnished the key to their true reading. On the one hand, the inscription is divided into two halves by two characters whose form and position in other Hitt.i.te texts show them to signify 'king' and 'country'; on the other hand, the first two characters are made, as it were, to issue from the mouth of the king, and thus to express his name. We thus obtain the reading: 'Tarku-dimme king of the country of Er-me,' the syllables _tarku_ and _me_ being denoted by the head of a goat and the numeral 'four,' while the ideographs of 'king' and 'country' are represented by the royal tiara worn by G.o.ds and monarchs in the Hitt.i.te sculptures, and by the picture of a mountainous land. In the ideograph of 'country' Mordtmann had already seen a likeness of the shafts of rock which rise out of the Kappadokian plateau.
The bilingual boss accordingly furnishes us with two important ideographs, and the phonetic values of four other characters. Armed with these, we can attack the other texts, and learn something about them. It becomes clear that the inscriptions from Carchemish now in the British Museum are the monuments of a king whose name ends in -me-Tarku, and who records the names of his father and grandfather. To the grandfather belonged an inscription copied by Mr. Boscawen among the ruins of Carchemish, but unfortunately never brought to England, and probably long since destroyed.
On the lion of Merash, moreover, a king similarly records his name along with those of his two immediate ancestors. The same king's name is found at Hamath as that of the father of the sovereign mentioned in the other inscriptions that come from there, and we may perhaps infer that the monuments of Hamath are the memorials of a Komagenian monarch who carried his victorious arms thus far to the south. The time will doubtless come when we shall be able to read these mysterious characters without difficulty, and we shall then know whether or not our inference is correct.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LION OF MERASH.]
Meanwhile we must be content to await the discovery of another bilingual text. The legend on the boss of Tarkondemos is not long enough to carry us far through the mazes of Hitt.i.te decipherment; before much progress can be made it must be supplemented by another inscription of the same kind. But the fact that one bilingual inscription has been found is an earnest that other bilingual inscriptions have existed, and may yet be brought to light. We may live in confident expectation that the mute stones will yet be taught to speak, and that we shall learn how the empire of the Hitt.i.tes was founded and preserved, not from the annals of their enemies, but from their own lips.
It is not probable that the Hitt.i.te system of writing pa.s.sed away without leaving its influence behind it. As the culture and art which the Hitt.i.tes carried to the barbarous nations of Asia Minor became implanted among them and bore abundant fruit, so too we may believe that the knowledge of the Hitt.i.te writing did not perish utterly. There is reason to think that the curious syllabary which continued to be used in Cyprus as late as the age of Alexander the Great was derived from the Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs. It was singularly unfitted to express the sounds of the Greek language, as it was required to do in Cyprus, and it has been shown that it was but a branch of a syllabary once employed throughout a large part of Asia Minor, the very country in which the Hitt.i.tes engraved their own written monuments. It seems likely, therefore, that the Hitt.i.te characters became a syllabary in which each character represented a separate syllable, and survived in this form to a late age.
It is also possible that the names a.s.signed to the letters even of the Phoenician alphabet were influenced by the hieroglyphs of the Hitt.i.tes.
When the Phoenicians borrowed the letters of the Egyptian alphabet they gave them names beginning in their own language with the sound represented by each letter. _A_ was called _aleph_ because the Phoenician word _aleph_ 'an ox' began with that sound, _k_ was _kaph_ 'the hand' because _kaph_ in Phoenician began with _k_. It was but an early application of the same principle which made our forefathers believe that the child would learn his alphabet more quickly if he was taught that '_A_ was an archer who shot at a frog.'
But the names must have been a.s.signed to the letters not only because they commenced with corresponding sounds, but also because of their fancied resemblance to the objects denoted by the names. Now in some instances the resemblance is by no means clear. The earliest forms of the letters called _kaph_ and _yod_, for example, both of which words signify a 'hand,' have little likeness to the human hand. If we turn to the Hitt.i.te hieroglyphs, however, we find among them two representations of the hand, encased in the long Hitt.i.te glove, which are almost identical with the Phoenician letters in shape. It is difficult, therefore, to resist the conviction that the letters _kaph_ and _yod_ received their names from Syrians who were familiar with the appearance of the Hitt.i.te characters. It is the same in the case of _aleph_. Here too the old Phoenician letter does not in any way resemble an ox, but it bears a very close likeness to the head of a bull, which occupies a prominent place in the Hitt.i.te texts. _Aleph_ became the Greek _alpha_ when the Phoenician alphabet was handed on to the Greeks, and in the word _alphabet_ has become part of our own heritage. Like _yod_, which has pa.s.sed through the Greek _iota_ into the English _jot_, it is thus possible that there are still words in daily use among ourselves which can be traced, if not to the Hitt.i.te language, at all events to the Hitt.i.te script.
What the language of the Hitt.i.tes was we have yet to learn. But the proper names preserved on the Egyptian and a.s.syrian monuments show that it did not belong to the Semitic family of speech, and an a.n.a.lysis of the Hitt.i.te inscriptions further makes it evident that it made large use of suffixes. But we must be on our guard against supposing that the language was uniform throughout the district in which the Hitt.i.te population lived. Different tribes doubtless spoke different dialects, and some of these dialects probably differed widely from each other. But they all belonged to the same general type and cla.s.s of language, and may therefore be collectively spoken of as the Hitt.i.te language, just as the various dialects of England are collectively termed English. Indeed, we find the same type of language extending far eastward of Kappadokia, if we may trust the proper names recorded in the a.s.syrian inscriptions.
Names of a distinctively Hitt.i.te cast are met with as far as the frontiers of the ancient kingdom of Ararat, and it may be that the language of Ararat itself, the so-called Vannic, may belong to the same family of speech. As the cuneiform inscriptions in which this language is embodied have now been deciphered, we shall be able to determine the question as soon as the Hitt.i.te texts also render up their secrets.
In the south of Palestine the Hitt.i.tes must have lost their old language and have adopted that of their Semitic neighbours at an early period. In Northern Syria the change was longer in coming about. The last king of Carchemish bears a non-Semitic name, but a Semitic G.o.d was wors.h.i.+pped at Aleppo, and Kadesh on the Orontes remained a Semitic sanctuary. The Hitt.i.te occupation of Hamath seems to have lasted for a short time only.
Its king, who appears on the a.s.syrian monuments as the contemporary of Ahab, has the Semitic name of Irkhulena, 'the moon-G.o.d belongs to us'; and his successors were equally of Semitic origin. It is more doubtful whether Tou or Toi, whose son came to David with an offer of alliance, bears a name which can be explained from the Semitic lexicon.
In the fastnesses of the Taurus, however, the Hitt.i.te dialects were slow in dying. In the days of St. Paul the people of Lystra still spoke 'the speech of Lykaonia,' although the official language of Kappadokia had long since become Aramaic. But the Aramaic was itself supplanted by Greek, and before the downfall of the Roman empire Greek was the common language of all Asia Minor. In its turn Greek has been superseded in these modern times by Turkish.
Languages, however, may change and perish, but the races that have spoken them remain. The characteristics of race, once acquired, are slow to alter. Though the last echoes of Hitt.i.te speech have died away centuries ago, the Hitt.i.te race still inhabits the region from which in ancient days it poured down upon the cities of the south. We may still see in it all the lineaments of the warriors of Karabel or the sculptured princes of Carchemish; even the snow-shoe and fingerless glove are still worn on the cold uplands of Kappadokia.
CHAPTER VIII.
HITt.i.tE TRADE AND INDUSTRY.
The Hitt.i.tes shone as much in the arts of peace as in the arts of war.