Article February 28, 1901 Issue

Recent Discoveries in the Ancient Homes of the Hittites

F. B. Meyer with contributions from Macdonald

Denver Republican

Three thousand years before the birth of Christ a mighty nation ruled with the strong hand in Syria and Mesopotamia. Its influence extended far beyond the borders of the realm, and made itself felt among the outside nations, enduring long after the nation itself had ceased to be. This was the Hittite nation, the mystery and baffling puzzle of archæology. What little is known of the Hittites is derived from the Bible and from Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions. All the erudition of modern scholarship, all the genius and patience that translated the arrow-headed inscriptions and made clear the ancient writings cut into the bricks of Nippur, have failed to throw a single ray of light upon the strange language of the Hittites, or to cull from their enduring records in stone one definite historical fact about this once mighty race.

Endeavor in this direction has recently been stimulated by the finding among the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, by the German scholars and explorers now excavating there, a stone monument of Hittite art and literature, in perfect condition, and inscribed with a long legend in the untranslatable language. The monument was recently found in the ruins of a Babylonian temple to the goddess Nin-Mach. It is forty-nine inches high, twenty-one inches wide, and fourteen inches thick. On one side is a basrelief sculputre of a Hittite deity, excellently preserved. There is no doubt that this is the god of thunder, for he grasps in one hand the triple fork which so often represents lightning in ancient art. But the inscription is not so simple a matter. Clear cut as the characters are, not all the scholars in the world can translate the legend, or even evolve from the characters an alphabetical system. But even to the eye of one who has no acquaintance with ancient languages the inscription is interesting pictorially. One character represents an arm; another a leg and foot; still another the outline bust of a man with his hand raised to his face; and there are squares, angles, and other familiar figures, each one seeming to mean something when considered by itself, but without attainable meaning when regarded in total. Within those simple looking characters lies the secret that an archæologist would give a lifetime of toil to learn.

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