284 SOME LAWS OF PHONETIC CHANGE 
descended upon China; to the country of Saghalien they retired ; and 
their presence farther east in Japan is marked by the straits of 
Sangar. Sangura again or Sagura was the name of a river in the 
country of the Khita or Hittites, according to the Assyrian inscrip- 
tions, and its ethnical character is apparent in its use as the proper 
name of one of the greatest Hittite monarchs, Sangara of Carchemish. 
Several native references to the Indian Sangala, as well as that of 
Isidorus Characenus, make it plain that its population was not 
Aryan, but Turanian or Indo-Scythic. In the third century, A.D., 
these Indo-Seyths were expelled or subdued, and at that point the 
migration northwards through Tartary to Southern Siberia must 
have commenced. It is natural to suppose, in the want of definite 
information, that the Kathaei or Khitan reached the Punjaub from 
the west by skirting the northern boundary of the Persian empire, 
arriving in their Indian home at or before the fourth century, B.C., 
when Alexander found them there. The Persian chronicles class 
among the northern peoples of Touran the Khatai, and link them 
with Shankul, Prince of Hindustan, another Sagala or Sangala. 
The original cause of their movement eastward was the capture of 
the Hittite capital Carchemish on the Euphrates by Sargon, King of 
Assyria, in 717 B.C., and the consequent dispersion of a brave and 
restless people unwilling to live under a foreign yoke. Many tribes, 
as has been shown by Professor Sayce, Dr. Hyde Clarke, and others, 
found their-way into Asia Minor, where Hittite dynasties reigned 
down into the days of Rome’s supremacy. Others, long ages before, 
when the Kheti invaded the land of the ancient Pharaohs, leaving 
their Syrian domain, planted colonies in northern Africa, and even 
penetrated into Europe. But the great bulk of the Hittite population 
took refuge in the Caucasus, and from thence by dint of pressure, 
internal and external, forced its eastward way along the route that 
has been traced in retrograde order, from the Caucasus to the 
Punjaub, from the Punjaub to the Yenisei, from the Yenisei to the 
Songari, and thence to Corea, Japan, the Kurile Islands, Kamtchatka, 
and, finally, as far as the Old World is concerned, to the Aleutian 
chain. They carried with them their practice of mound building, 
their peculiar hieroglyphic character, and their own geographical 
and tribal nomenclature. The mounds begin with the Tells of 
Syria, are followed on the west by the Lydian and other similar 
tombs of Asia Minor, on the east by the tumuli of the Caucasus, 
