EVENING DISCOURSES. 825 



Asia Minor, at Ibriz and near Smyrna. These Syrian monuments had been 

 already ascribed to a people which, under the name of Kheta or Khati, played 

 a large part in the Syrian relations of Pharaohs of the X Vlllth to the XXth 

 Dynasties, and in those of the Assyrian kings ; and this people, it was generally 

 agreed, was identical with the ' children of Heth ' or Hittites of the Old Testa- 

 ment. If the latter were responsible for the monuments in question in Syria, 

 then, too, they were responsible, in some sense, for the monuments in Asia 

 Minor; and, in any case, it was clear that a very peculiar and important civilisa- 

 tion, covering a large area of the Nearer East in the second millennium B.C. and 

 the early part of the first, had been forgotten by history. 



Scholars and explorers made continual efforts during the next quarter of a 

 century to elucidate this civilisation, and succeeded so far as to place its origin 

 in Asia Minor, and to fill up, more or less, by the discovery of many new monu- 

 ments the geographical gaps dividing those first observed. They found that these 

 monuments lay, roughly, along lines of communication leading from North- 

 Western Cappadocia to the south and west, and they established in fact that not 

 only Northern Syria but West Central Asia Minor showed such monuments in 

 almost every part. But fundamental questions — who were the authors of this 

 civilisation ? where precisely was its chief focus ? and who shared its develop- 

 ment? — had still to be left open; and it was not till Boghaz Keui came to be 

 excavated by Winckler and his companions in 1906-07 that they could be 

 answered. 



At the last-named site, known for some years to produce cuneiform tablets 

 partly in Babylonian, partly in an unknown tongue, the excavators explored a large 

 megalithic group of ruins in the lower city and fortifications, and certain other 

 structures in the upper, besides clearing and re-examining the long-known 

 religious rock-reliefs of Iasily Kaya. Besides several mural sculptures, of which 

 the most interesting shows an armed Amazon, the explorers came on a number 

 of cuneiform tablets, chiefly in the ruins of the earlier portion of the lower 

 megalithic building, which was evidently a palace. These tablets proved to be in 

 the main Foreign Office archives of six generations of kings, who ruled over the 

 Hatti of Boghaz Keui in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. They con- 

 clusively prove that the Hatti of Cappadocia were the Khati who fought with 

 Egypt at Kadesh, and made the famous treaty with Rameses the Great. The 

 first important reign was that of Subbiluliuma, contemporary of Amenhotep IV. ; 

 the last was that of Hattusil II., the ' Khetasar ' who made the treaty with 

 Rameses. But we know from Babylonian, Assyrian, and Egyptian records that 

 both before and after these kings, the Hatti were a power in Western Asia, and 

 we have to credit them with a history of at least a thousand years. The tablets 

 show that Subbiluliuma extended Cappadocian power over North Syria and even 

 over great part of Mesopotamia, where the Mitanni had formerly been dominant; 

 and that this wide dominion, extending even to the Babylonian frontier, was 

 preserved by his chief successors, Mursil and Mutallu, and not lost till after 

 the reign of Hattusil II., who treated with both Egypt and Babylon as an 

 squal. Startling as this revelation is, we now see that without the existence of 

 such a Hittite power the wide distribution of the Hittite monuments, civilisation, 

 and physical type would have remained inexplicable ; and we recognise in Boghaz 

 Keui the natural focus from which these radiated over Asia Minor and Syria. 

 But we recognise also that many of these monuments and much of the Hittite 

 civilisation were work of other peoples than the Cappadocian Hatti — peoples 

 who had learned of the latter and in many cases outlasted them. Other phenomena, 

 too, are explained by the revelations at Boghaz Keui, notably the failure of the 

 Aegean power of Crete to effect a lodgment in Asia Minor, and the long 

 continuance of the Hittite name and fame in Syria. Moreover, they account, as 

 nothing else can, for the Oriental influences which acted on the earliest Hellenic 

 civilisation, especially on Ionian art and religion. For not even the early contact 

 between the Muski-Phrygians and Assyria appears to have resulted in sufficient 

 orientalisation in Phrygia and Lydia to explain the Greek phenomena. The real 

 distributing agency of Orientalism was Cappadocia, whose art and religion were 

 of the required type. 



It is evident, then, that a great, if forgotten, part has been played in the 

 relations between East and West by the civilisation which occupied so long the 



