370 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
six languages and were in “no way inferior to the Babylonians and 
Egyptians” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Hittite armies conquered 
Babylon. 
In 1685 B. C. a band of people called Hyksos, whose leaders are said 
by Speiser to have come from Turkestan, organized an army in the 
Hittite area and proceeded to conquer Egypt. This expedition took 
the horse to Egypt for the first time. The horse-drawn chariot of 
the Hittites was an early kind of “blitz” warfare. It overwhelmed 
the Egyptians, perhaps with the aid of better bronze for the cleaving 
of skulls. 
At this point in our narrative the record stands as follows: four 
civilizations—Crete, Indus, Mesopotamia, Egypt—overrun by the 
horse-using Indo-European barbarians from the steppes. It was 
indeed fortunate that the seed of civilization was not destroyed by 
these conquests. , 
The Hittite empire fell before the next wave of Indo-Europeans, 
horsemen from the steppes. These were called Phrygians. These 
horsemen entered Asia Minor by way of the Hellespont. Like the 
Greeks at Knossus the Phrygians destroyed so well that it was only 
at a recent date that we knew much about them, and only in a very 
recent day that scholars deciphered the Hittite writings. Fortunately, 
these people wrote on bricks of clay, rather than the perishable and 
ephemeral rubbish on which we write so voluminously. 
This episode of the Hittites can almost be considered the West 
Asian history cycle type, a type that is repeated through several mil- 
lennia. Witness its operation in another group—the Scythians. 
Herodotus described the Scythians (sometimes called a tribe of 
Cimmerians) as being nomads of the steppes north of the Black 
Sea. The Scythians followed their flocks on the open steppes in the 
summer, back to the shelter of the wooded stream banks in winter. 
The men rode horseback with their trousers—a steppe invention— 
tucked into their boots—another steppe invention. The women rode 
in wagons. The details of their life sound strangely like those of the 
present-day Kirghiz of Central Asia. Horse flesh and mare’s milk 
were standard articles of diet. The abode was a tent of felt. 
In the seventh century B. C. there was much movement of peoples 
on the steppes. “The Scythians overran and frightfully ravaged 
wide areas of Central Asia and Eastern Europe” (Bishop). Some 
crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor, which they ravaged, and 
where they stayed for a century. Some went somewhat farther east 
and developed a kingdom in Ecbatana, within the present kingdom of 
Iran. Thus strengthened, refreshed, and multiplied, but still full of 
the barbarism of the plains, the Scythians harried the Assyrian king- 
dom, destroyed Ninevah and other cities, and advanced to the gates 
