This is a successor to Ceram's absorbing Gods. Graves and SchoLars
(1951) and for many of us it provides what is virtually a rewriting
of much of what constituted the required course in Ancient History
in our schooldays. For this is the almost incredible story of how a
wholly new body of knowledge of a people that flourished 2000 years
BC has been built up in the last 75 years,- by excavation, by
research, by reasoning. The Hittites now emerge as an Indo-European
race; their power extended over Asia Minor as far as Syria; they
fought successful wars against Egypt and disintegrated only when
their capital city was destroyed by fire and their younger people
migrated. This began to come to light through a series of chance
discoveries, sparked before its significance was realized in the
search for another goal, Tavium, by an archaelogist named Texier.
Even earlier Sheik Ibrahim (actually a Swiss Orientalist)
discovered in the bazaar at Hamoth on the Orentes, a different type
of hieroglyphic writing. But it was after the further discovery of
extensive, unsuspected ruins on the Euphrates in 1879, that
identification with the Hittites of the Bible was made by Sayce.
Here was the forgotten third great power. Here the records of the
wars, the laws, the civilian organization. A new language emerged-
was identified and ultimately deciphered. Much of the work was
haphazard, but even the amateurish procedures of Winckler,
philologist supreme, whose interest lay in the inscriptions, and
the excavations by Battel with their contribution to further
architectural knowledge, combined to build the now known facts.
Fascinating reading- the gradual revelation of a great segment of
history. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Hittites, an ancient Indo-European people who appeared in
Anatolia at the beginning of the second millennium BC, had become
one of the dominant powers of the Middle East by 1340 BC. Early
kings of the Hittite Old Kingdom had extended Hittite control over
much of northern Syria eventually raiding down the Eurphrates to
Babylon. The struggle with Egypt under Ramses II for control of
Syria led to one of the greatest battles of the ancient world at
Kadesh in 1299 BC. The fall of the Hittite Empire in 1193 BC was
sudden - perhaps because of large scale migration - and historical
records were scarce. But then the discovery of Hittite cuneiform
tablets at their ancient capital of Hattusa (now Bogazko,Turkey) in
the 1940's yielded fascinating information about the people, their
political organization, social structure, economy and religion.
General
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