ON THE EMPIRE OF THE HITTITES. 67 
be unreasonable to suppose that the settlement of Hebron was not 
intended so much to form a powerful garrison as probably a colonisation 
on the part of a body of men who had acquired some little property, 
and who regarded Hebron as an important centre to occupy, with a view 
to making it a station to which the trade of the south and from the 
regions around could be directed. There is another matter on which I 
should also like to speak, because I have travelled through most of that 
country myself, from the south of Antioch, to the highest ranges of mountains 
about Marash, and along the banks of the Euphrates as far as Dier, and 
T can fully endorse what Dr. Wright has stated with regard to the rich 
field which there awaits the explorer. The district literally bristles with 
mounds, which only require the spade to restore monuments of the 
greatest importance. There is something very remarkable about the 
character of these mounds. ‘The slightest inspection of them from an 
elevated position shows that they are not of natural formation. It is clear 
that they are not only the work of man, but that they were evidently 
marked out by him for various purposes,—some as sites for forts, some 
for small cities, and some for large cities, while they are so arranged that 
no one mound is out of sight of another; so that it is perfectly possible, 
—indeed, I tried it myself on my return journey from the Euphrates,—to 
keep up, by means of these mounds, a chain of communication from Aleppo 
to the Euphrates, and from Aleppo to the Orontes, valley whereby, in the 
event of anattack being made or an invasion threatened along the Orontes 
valley, it would be possible to signal the news of the enemy’s advance by 
means of beacon fires, or in some such way, with great rapidity over a 
district some two hundred miles in extent. J mentioned this toa gentleman 
who was travelling in that country at the same time,—I allude to Colonel, 
then Captain, Chermside,—and he said he had noticed the same thing on 
the plain of Adana. ‘‘As soon,” he said, “as you get into the plain 
of Adana you find the same range of mounds, and this algo is the case 
on other plains more in the heart of Asia Minor.” Sir Charles 
Wilson noticed the fact, that wherever inscriptions in the peculiar 
Hittite character were found, there were, in the same neighbourhood, 
silver mines; the whole of the Taurus and the Ante-Taurus were full of old 
and disused silver mines, and it wasa singular fact that whenever an inscrip- 
tion was found on the rocks it was in the neighbourhood of a silver mine. 
If we turn to the tribute lists of Egypt and Assyria we find_that the 
chief objects of the tributes offered by those people were of silver, 
and as a still more striking example of this, we see that the treaty 
with the king was engraved on a silver plate. Another fact which will 
lead me to a more important matter is this, namely, that in the posts 
known as the Cilician Gates, inscriptions were found showing that bodies 
of traders belonging to these people were in the habit of passing through. 
If you will look at the map of Asia Minor, and take Carchemish as the 
starting-point, you will see a series of stations where explorers have 
found remains, either of monuments or inscriptions on the rocks, in the 
