died in June, 323 B. C. In the final division of the world among Alexander's successors, Babylonia fell to Seleucus, together with all the territory from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. As Seleucus desired a capital on the Mediterranean, so as to watch more successfully the movements of his rivals, he built Antioch on the Orontes and made it his residence. Babylon was, however, made the capital of the eastern half of the empire, and the king's son, as viceroy, made it his residence.

Soon after 260 B. C. Bactria and Parthia, in the eastern part of the empire of the Seleucidæ, gained their independence. In course of time Parthia absorbed Bactria and became an empire, which lasted till 230 A. D. About 150 B. c. the Parthians conquered Babylonia, which remained with little interruption under their sway till the establishment of the Sassanian kingdom of the Persians in 220 A. D. Babylonia was under the control of this last dynasty until the coming of the Mohammedans in the year 637 A. D. The old culture of the Babylonians, their religion, language, and writing were maintained well down toward the Christian era. Copies of old Sumerian hymns have been found in Babylonia which bear dates as late as 81 B. C., and business documents in Semitic are numerous.1

7. Discoveries Which Illumine the Bible.-Discoveries in Babylonia and Assyria which illumine the Biblical narratives are numerous. The sites of many cities, such as Ur of the Chaldees, Erech, Babylon, Ashur, Nineveh, and Calah, have been excavated. The number of documents which have come to light which in one way or another have a bearing on the Bible is too numerous to mention here. An effort has been made in Part II to translate examples of most of them. Indeed, the greater part of the material in Part II was recovered by excavations in these countries.

To Babylonia and to Egypt mankind owes the working out of the initial problems of civilization, the processes of agriculture, the making of bricks, the working of stone, the manufacture and use of the ordinary implements of life, the development of elementary mathematics and astronomy, etc. These problems were by slow processes independently worked out in each country through long. ages. The higher spiritual concepts which have now become the heritage of man neither Babylonia nor Egypt was fitted to contribute. These came through the agency of other peoples.

1 Those who desire fuller accounts of the history should read L. W. King's History of Sumer and Akkad, London, 1910, and R. W. Rogers' History of Babylonia and Assyria. 2d ed., New York, 1915.

CHAPTER III

THE HITTITES

A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE. HITTITE MONUMENTS: Sendjirli. Boghaz Koi. Other recent excavations. HITTITE DECIPHERMENT: Sayce's early work. Peiser. Jensen. Conder. Sayce's later work. Thompson. Delitzsch. HITTITE HISTORY: First appearance. Hyksos possibly Hittites. The Mitanni. Kingdom of "Hittite City.” Carchemish. Samal and Yadi. Hamath.

1. A Forgotten Empire.-Among the peoples who are said to have been in Palestine in the Patriarchal age are the Hittites (Gen. 23:10; 26: 34, etc.). They are mentioned most often in the list of peoples whom the Israelites drove out of the country when they conquered it: "the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite," and the man is still living who first suspected that anything more than this could be known of them. This man was Prof. Sayce, of Oxford. In the inscriptions of the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties there is frequent mention of a people called Kheta. In the inscriptions of Assyrian kings there is also frequent mention of a people called Kha-at-tu. Slowly, too, during the nineteenth century rock-carvings, often accompanied by inscriptions in a peculiar hieroglyph, were found scattered through northern Syria and Asia Minor. The figures of gods and men on these carvings usually wore caps of a peculiarly pointed type and shoes turned far up at the toe. In 1876 it dawned upon Prof. Sayce that these were all references to the Biblical Hittites. He proceeded to elaborate this view in two articles published in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, Vols. V and VII.

About the same time the Rev. William Wright independently started the same idea, and gave it expression in his book, The Empire of the Hittites, 1884, 2d ed., 1885. At this period it was impossible to discern more than that there had been a widely scattered Hittite civilization, which might have been an empire.

2. Hittite Monuments.-This civilization, it was seen, had left its monuments at Hamath in Syria, at Carchemish on the Euphrates, at various points in ancient Cappadocia, Lycaonia, and Phrygia,

as well as near Smyrna in Asia Minor and on the Lydian mountains to the west of Sardis. In 1891 Prof. W. Max Müller, of Philadelphia, reached the conclusion from a study of the Egyptian inscriptions that the Hittites had come into Syria from the northwest, and that their main strength was in Asia Minor. Among the letters found at El-Amarna in Egypt in 1887-1888 were some from Dushratta, a king of Mitanni. A study of these made it clear that the Mitanni inhabited the region on both sides of the Euphrates north of Carchemish, and that they were of the same stock as the Hittites. Our sources of information indicate that the territory of the Mitanni lay east of the Euphrates, but scattered monuments of the Hittite type are found on the west of that river.

(1) Sendjirli.-From 1888 to 1891 a German expedition excavated at Sendjirli, near the head-waters of the Kara Su in northern Syria, and brought to light most interesting remains of a civilization that was fundamentally Hittite. Inscriptions found here dated in the reigns of Tiglath-pileser IV and Esarhaddon were in Aramaic. By this time there had been an influx of Aramæans, but the art shows that Hittites held the place at an earlier time, and there is reason to believe that one of the kings mentioned here had, about 850 B. C., joined in a Hittite federation.

(2) Boghaz Koi.-Among the monuments known to Prof. Sayce at the beginning of his brilliant studies of the Hittites, were some from Boghaz Koi, in Asia Minor. Different travelers had noted that here must have been a somewhat extensive city, adorned with several large buildings, all of which were ornamented with carvings of the peculiar Hittite type. In 1906 the late Prof. Winckler, of Berlin, excavating here in connection with the authorities of the Turkish Museum at Constantinople, discovered an archive of clay tablets inscribed in Babylonian characters. A group of similar tablets from Cappadocia had been previously purchased by the British Museum. Winckler's discovery was important because he found some of the tablets inscribed in Hittite written in cuneiform characters. Of those written in the Babylonian language, one contained a copy of the great treaty between Hattusil, a Hittite king, and Ramses II of Egypt. There were also tablets containing Sumerian and Semitic equivalents of Hittite words. Owing to the long illness of Winckler which followed these discoveries, an illness that terminated in death, the results of this discovery are only now being given to the world.

In 1907 Winckler and Puchstein, in conjunction with Makridy Bey of the Turkish Museum, made a thorough examination of the remains of walls and buildings at Boghaz Koi. The results have since been published in a handsome volume entitled Boghaskoi, die Bauwerke, Leipzig, 1912; (see Figs. 23 and 25).

(3) Other Recent Excavations.-An American expedition consisting of Drs. Olmstead, Charles, and Wrench, of Cornell University, explored in Asia Minor in 1907-1908. The members of this expedition collated all the known monuments of the Hittites, but so far only their collation of the inscriptions has been published.

The Institute of Archæology of the University of Liverpool has also sent one or more expeditions to explore the Hittite country. In 1910 they excavated to some extent at Sakje-Geuze, not far from Sendjirli, but their results are not yet published.

Since 1911 the trustees of the British Museum have had an excavation in progress at the site of ancient Carchemish on the Euphrates. Here most important Hittite remains have been discovered, though again the details of the work have not been given to the public. The expedition has also made some minor excavations at several points in the neighborhood, and find that Hittite remains are numerous in that region. In addition to these places, Hittite remains have been observed at Yaila, Marash, Giaour-Kalesi, Karaburna, Kizil Dagh, Fraktin, Ivriz, Kara-Bel, Mount Sypilus, Tashji, Asarjik, Bulghar-Maden, Gurun, and Kara Dagh. who will look up these places on a map of modern Turkey will see that Hittite monuments are distributed from near the shores of the Ægean Sea to the Euphrates at Carchemish and to Hamath in Syria. (For addition to this section, see Appendix.)

3. Hittite Decipherment.

One

(1) Sayce's Early Work.-Prof. Sayce, whose insight first grasped the significance of the Hittite monuments, was also the first to attempt the solution of the riddle which the inscriptions present. In 1880 he thought he had found a key to the writing, such as the Rosetta Stone had been to Egyptian, in the so-called "Boss of Tarkondemos"; (see Fig. 26). This "boss" consisted of a round silver plate, in form like half an orange, which must have covered the knob of a staff or dagger. This had been described by Dr. A. D. Mordtmann, in the Journal of the German Oriental Society in 1872. The original was then in the possession of Alexander Jovanoff, a numismatist of Constantinople, who had obtained it at

Smyrna. The "boss" bore in its center a figure of the peculiar Hittite form, flanked on both sides by writing in the Hittite characters, while around the whole was an inscription in the cuneiform writing of Assyria. From this Sayce tentatively determined the values of a number of Hittite signs. The results were, however, attended with considerable uncertainty, since the Assyrian characters were capable of being read in more than one way. Using the key thus obtained, Sayce enlarged his list of supposed sign-values and in 1884 and 1885 published as known the values of thirty-two Hittite signs. In the years that followed Ball and Menant took up the discussion of the Hittite signs, but with no decisive result.

In 1889 Winckler and Abel published in one of the volumes of the Royal Museum at Berlin the first instalment of the text of the El-Amarna letters, in which there were two from Dushratta, King of Mitanni, in the native language of that country, though written in Babylonian characters. In the following year, 1890, Profs. Jensen, Brünnow, and Sayce all published in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie studies of this language, Sayce even venturing a translation of a part of the text. Each of these scholars had worked independently of the others, but none of them seems to have suspected that the language had anything to do with Hittite.

(2) Peiser.-In 1892 Dr. Peiser, then of Breslau University, published his book on the Hittite inscriptions, in which he essayed another method of decipherment. Layard had found four Hittite seals in the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. Peiser inferred that these must be seals of four Hittite kings mentioned in the inscriptions of that time, and proceeded to assign each seal to the name of a known Hittite king, and interpret the signs on the seal by the name of that king as spelled out in the cuneiform characters of the Assyrian inscriptions. Having obtained in this way tentative values for several signs, he proceeded by inference to guess at other signs, and so tentatively read some inscriptions.

(3) Jensen.-Prof. Jensen, of Marburg, wrote in that same year an unfavorable review of Peiser's work. When reading the proofs of his review he added a postscript to say that he believed he had himself discovered the key to Hittite. Two years later, 1894, he published in the Journal of the German Oriental Society his method of solving the problem. Jensen's starting-point was gained from inscriptions from Jerabis, the site of ancient Carchemish,