682 THE ANCIENT HITTITES. 



unknown. Consideration must therefore be ^^iven in eaeli case as to 

 whether the name Hittites denotes the individual Chatti people or the 

 entire race. 



In the regions where the Eg3'ptians and Ass^'rians were at war with 

 the Hittites there has been discovered during the last decade a com- 

 plete series of remarkable monuments, with and without inscriptions, 

 which doubtless bear witness to a pecular and independent civilization 

 alongside of the P^gyptian and Babylonian culture. The places of the 

 finds, and particularly the agreement between subjects pictured and 

 traditional evidence, lead to the assumption that we have here to do 

 with monuments of the Hittite peoples. Similar monuments have 

 been found scattered through the whole of Asia Minor, as far as 

 Smyrna on the coast of the ^-Egean Sea, more numerous in the east, less 

 frequent in 'the west. Keeping the above in mind, added to informa- 

 tion derived from the Assyrian inscriptions, we must consider AsiaMinor 

 as the home of the " Hittites" and of their civilivation, from which 

 country they advanced in successive movements southward and south- 

 hence thej immigrated into Asia Minor, whether 

 from the Avest, which indeed is very probal)le, can not yet be positivel}^ 

 determined. 



The historical development of the Hittite race, its rise and disap- 

 pearance, has been described in a former paper," and will therefore 

 here be but merely briefly repeated, with some additional information. 

 The beginning of Hittite civilization on the soil of Asia Minor dates 

 back to the third millenium before Christ, when S3a-ia and Meso])o- 

 tamia were under Babvlonian rule. We assimie an advance of Hittite 

 peoples toward Syria and Mesopotamia about 20('0 b. c, in the 

 course of which they wrested these countries from BabNdonian domi- 

 nation, for at the period when our documents begin to speak — that is, 

 in the Tell el-Amarna letters,'' in the fifteenth century b. c. — we find 

 that peoples of the Hittite race had for a long time been in possession 

 of these regions. 



The first stratum of the Hittites wdiich through the above-mentioned 

 letters enters our horizon is the jNlitani people,'' but whether they 

 were really the first of the Hittites to advance as far as Syria, or, what 

 is more probable, whether they were preceded ])y others, none of our 

 documents answers with certaint\\ But the kingdom of the Mitani, 

 under their king, Tushratta, meets us at once as a gi'cat power ecpial 

 to Babylonia and Egypt, comprising Melitene and the territories to 

 the southeast of it, then northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia, 

 with Nineveh, which was later the capital of Ass,yria. Still, the powder 

 of this kingdom is evidently strongly on the wane. It nnist formerly, 



«Der alte Orient, vol. i, part 1, 2d ed., pp. 18-28. 

 ''Der alte Orient, vol. i, part 2, 2d ed., p. 3 ff. 

 <'Der alte Orient, vol. i, part 2, 2d ed., p. 14 ff. 



