i 7 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and in whose country Abraham bought a piece of land for his burial- 

 place. The scattered accounts in the Bible simply indicate an ordinary 

 tribe of people, with whom the Israelites had intercourse, but infor- 

 mation derived from the researches made in Egypt and Assyria show 

 that the Hittites, whom the Egyptians called the Kheta, and the As- 

 syrians the Khatti, were a powerful confederacy occupying the country 

 which was the highway between Babylonia or Assyria and Egypt a 

 people actively engaged in commerce, their principal city being a place 

 at which merchants from all parts congregated, and who were at the 

 same time a warlike people, who for a long period kept the Assyrians in 

 check, and who proved the most formidable antagonists the Egyptians 

 ever encountered. They were not only commercial and warlike, but 

 had evidently at a remote period made great advances in civilization 

 and in the fine arts, and early Greek art, as found in the discoveries 

 of Dr. Schliemann at Mycense, and the early art found in Cyprus by 

 General di Cesnola, is supposed to have been largely derived from 

 them. They occupied the whole country of southern Syria, from the 

 Mediterranean to the desert, dwelling chiefly in the fertile valleys of 

 the Orontes, a river rising to the east of Baalbek and flowing into the 

 Mediterranean, and had two principal cities Kadesh, or the holy city, 

 and a great commercial emporium, which was their capital and the 

 center of their power, called Carchemish. They were finally over- 

 thrown by the Assyrians b. c. 718, and had so completely disappeared 

 that they are scarcely even referred to by Greek writers. Great interest 

 was felt to discover the site of their commercial capital, Carchemish, 

 and many conjectures have been made, none of which, however, could 

 be verified. A few years ago Mr. Skene, the British consul at Aleppo, 

 discovered a huge mound of earth, covering a large area, on the west- 

 ern shore of the lower Euphrates, near Dejrabis, a ford of that river 

 on the route still traversed by caravans. This great mound was sur- 

 rounded by ruined walls and broken towers, while the mound itself 

 was but a mass of earth, fragments of masonry and debris. It had 

 frequently been seen by previous travelers, but they identified it with 

 other lost places. Mr. Skene called the attention to it of the late 

 George Smith, the eminent archaeologist, who brought so much to 

 light from the ruins of Nineveh, and Mr. Smith found here the long- 

 lost capital of the Hittites. The present British consul, Mr. Hender- 

 son, has been during the last two years engaged in the exploration of 

 the mound. He has already sent important remains with inscriptions 

 to the British Museum, and an English traveler, Mr. Sackaw, has been 

 recently engaged in investigating it. A few years ago a stone, which 

 had formed part of the wall of a house at Hameth, had an inscription 

 upon it which excited great curiosity, because it was neither Assyrian 

 nor Egyptian, but something between both languages. It may be re- 

 membered that I called attention in one of my former addresses to the 

 discovery of this stone and one or two others containing like charac- 



