THE ANCIENT HITTITES. 



689 



u.s have been found either on or near the surface, or may still be seen 

 on the roeky walls of Asia Minor. Special mention should l)e made 

 of two finds in the ruins of Babylon — a stone bowl and a stone image of 

 the Hittite storm god — the latter on the occasion of the present exca- 

 vations of the German Orient Society — as also of one in the ruins of 

 Nineveh, because they were found at such a distance from the settle- 

 ments of the Hittites, and must have come there through contact either 

 in war or in peace. At Nineveh there came to light eight small pieces 

 of clav on which seals were impressed with Hittite characters, serving 

 to verif3^some dociunents or other objects to which they were attached 

 by means of cords. 



The sites of the finds of the monuments extend over entire Asia 

 Minor as far as Smyrna and over North iiyv'm and Armenia, but are 

 most abundant around th(^ Bay of Iskenderun, in Cappadocia, Cilicia, 

 and North Syria. Although the number of the products of civiliza- 

 tion from all these places 

 can not be termed incon- 

 sidera])le, and is, more- 

 over, increasing with 

 each 3'ear, the circum- 

 stances mentioned aboAc, 

 that they were all discov- 

 ered casually on tlie sur- 

 face of the earth and that 

 the accompanying in- 

 scriptions are still unin- 

 telligible, makes it, as 

 3'et, impossible to assign 

 the monuments — w i t h 

 the exception of the Ar- 

 menian finds — to the single peoples which meet us in history, to fix 

 them in time or to construe a history of the development of Hittite civi- 

 lization and art. It would also he unwise to represent the undeniably 

 existing points of contact with tiie Egyptian and Assyrian art monu- 

 ments as loans on the part of the Hittites. A description of the Hittite 

 civilization must for a long time ])o limited to the presentation of facts. 



The writing of the Hittites" (see tig. 1) is pictorial script. It 

 shows human and animal In^ads: also whole animals, such as hares and 

 birds; then hands, feet, and claws, besides a large number of images 

 of objects, of which only a few, such as the sword, are as 3'et intelli- 

 gible. While on the pi'obahl}' older inscriptions these pictures are 

 executed in detail, the more recent ones <'xhihit a transformation of 



Fig. 1.— Stono inscription in l)!i.srelief. Found at Hamatli, Syria. 



«To obviate misunderstandings, it may be explicitly pointed out that in the fol- 

 lowing, if the contrary is not expressly stated, the entire grotip of jicoples, not the 

 single population, is meant. 



