January 12, 1894.] 
JEWS AND HITTITES. 
BY FELIX VON LYSCHAN, BERLIN, GERMANY. 
Our modern Jews are generally believed to represent 
a pure and typical branch of the Semitic race, and even 
authors, who are well aware that we find mixed blood 
on the remotest and apparently most isolated islands of 
the Pacific, seem inclined to admit an exception for the 
Jews. It seems of interest, therefore, to study Jewish 
types, not only as to their general impression, but by 
measuring their heads and skulls and comparing them 
with other representatives of Semitic nations. The re- 
sult has been a most striking one. 
As Semitic races, or as others prefer to say, as 
branches of the Semitic race, we generally consider the 
Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hebrews, the South 
Arabian Sabzeans, the Phenicians, the Arameeans, the 
Abyssinians and the Bedouins of northern Arabia and 
of Mesopotamia. Now, the anatomical characteristics 
of these eight people, which all are, or have been, 
speaking typical Semitic languages, are most divergent; 
only the Bedouins, whose language also is remarkable 
for its very archaic character, seem to form a homo- 
geneous unity, with little mixture of strange elements; 
their modern physique is the same as we see it repre- 
sented in the earliest Egyptian monuments, and also 
our earliest skulls of Phenicians seem identical with old 
and modern Bedouin skulls, so that we must consider 
the modern Bedouins as pure descendants of the old 
Semitic race. They have long, narrow heads, dark 
complexion, and a short, small and straight nose, which 
is in every respect the direct counterpart of what we 
are accustomed to call a ‘‘typical Jewish nose.” But of 
our modern Jews nearly 50 per cent are brachycephalic, 
Iz per cent have fair complexion, and not more than 
5 per cent correspond to what we have learned to be 
the real old Semitic type. Still more striking propor- 
tions we find, if we go to northern Syria, the land of 
the old Aramzeans; there nearly all the heads are 
brachycephalic, with indices near to 90; and these same 
brachycephalic elements we find everywhere in western 
Asia; we find them, more or less prominent, even with 
the modern Greeks, Armenians and Turks of Asia 
Minor, and specially the Armenians are most remark- 
able for the nearly complete uniformity of their types, 
for their dark complexion, for their extreme brachy- 
cephalism and for their large and hooked ‘‘ Jewish”’ 
nose. 
Such and other investigations lead us to the convic- 
tion that Syria and Asia Minor were in early times in- 
habited by a homogeneous and extreme brachycephalic 
‘race, of which modern Armenians are the nearly pure 
descendants, and which we find more or less mixed 
with strange elements, in many of the other races that 
now inhabit western Asia. This old brachycephalci 
race, which from its beginning was utterly distinct from 
any Semitic tribe and was in physical view the very 
counterpart of the Semites, can only be identified with 
the Hittites—the same Hittites mentioned as a Syrian 
tribe in the Bible, which had been a strong and for- 
midable enemy to Ramses II., and were finally con- 
quered by Assyrian Kings in long wars and fights, be- 
ginning earlier than the times of Assurnassirpal and 
ending probably only in those of Asarhaddon, as we 
read in the Assyrian annals from the ninth century to 
the seventh century, B. C. 
Recent excavations, made for the Prussian govern- 
ment in Sendjirli, the old Sammal, known in Assyrian 
SCIENCE. 
al 
? texts as a Hittite residence in northern: Syria, have 
i brought to light a large series of old Hittite sculptures; 
“the Armenian character of the men represented on the 
' walls and in the royal palaces of this old town is most 
striking, and we cannot err if we consider the inhabi- 
tants of Sammal as the direct ancestors of the modern 
Armenians, which still inhabit the neighborhood of the 
place, ill-treated in our times by Turks and Kourds and 
without any knowledge of their glorious history in 
ancient and medizeval times. 
Hittite sculptures are often found connected with a 
very curious, heavy and bulky looking sort of hiero- 
glyphic inscriptions, which are not yet finally deci- 
phered, but are now getting more and more familiar to 
us, thanks to the investigations of A. H. Sayce, Peiser 
and Peter Jensen. We have no reason to doubt that 
these hieroglyphs were the only sort of writing known 
to the Hittites in early times. Now it is a curious fact 
that two inscriptions were found, written by native 
Kings, the one in the ninth, the other in the eighth 
century, B. C., both in good old Semitic alphabetical 
characters, resembling closely the famous inscription 
of Mesa, King of Moab, and in a language that might 
be called proto-Aramzean or proto-Hebrew, but which 
is anyhow old Semitic, and can well be compared with 
the language of some parts of the Bible. So the in- 
scriptions I found in Sammial' show that already in the 
ninth century, B.C., Semitic influence was great in 
northern Syria, and we can now easily understand how 
Semitic writing and language soon became dominant 
among people of westernAsia that were originally without 
a drop of Semitic blood; and then we understand also 
why most of our modern Jews have the Armenian type 
and not the Semitic—they are the descendants of an 
“Armenoid” population that had only accepted Semitic 
writing and language in about 1000 B. C. 
This is a similar process to what we know for Asia 
Minor, where millions of the native population were by 
force converted to the Islam, and, having accepted also 
the language of their Turkish conquerors, are now 
generally taken as real Turks, though their blood is 
nearly free from Turkish influence and though they can 
well be considered as the true and pure descendants ot 
the old natives of their country. 
But one thing still remains to explain in the habitus 
of the modern Jews; itis the fact of 11 per cent of 
Jewish individuals with fair complexion and light eyes. 
All the various theories of recent mixture with Ger- 
manic elements would never sufficiently explain this 
curious fact; we are forced to look out for an old origin 
of the fair complexion of more than one-tenth of 
modern Jews, and we find it in the intercourse of the 
old native Syrians with the Amorites, the tall ‘‘sons of 
Enak” of the Bible, who were fair, with blue eyes, as 
old Egyptian painted monuments show us. Weare not 
quite sure as to the real home of these fair Amorites, 
but they were probably a branch of the same fair race 
that once inhabited also the northwest coast of Africa, 
which has left there the megalithic monuments and is 
most certainly to be identified with the Yamchw of the 
old Egyptians, the white ‘‘people of the north” as their 
name explains. The Amorites would then be good 
fair Aryans, not in the linguistical meaning, as ‘‘Indo- 
Europeans,’’ but in the strict sense of physical anthro- 
pology. 
So we see in our modern Jews the descendants of 
three different races, the Hittites, the Aryan Amorites 
and the Semitic nomads, immigrated into Syria only in 
about the times of Abraham. 
1 Ausgrabungen in Sendschirli, Heft I. Berlin, Spemann, 1893. 
