Abstract
THE object of the lecture is to show in outline how the memory of the Hittites as an imperial people has been recovered and what their place in world-history was. This recovery dates from the finding in 1834–45 of two prehistoric cities at Boghaz Keui and Uyuk in northwestern Cappadocia. Their sculptures and inscriptions were ultimately recognised by Sayce as belonging to the same family as certain inscriptions and sculptures which had been found at Hamath and elsewhere in Syria after 1870, and also some other monuments observed in Asia Minor at Ibriz and near Smyrna. These Syrian monuments had been already ascribed to a people which, under the name of Kheta or Khatti, played a large part in the Syrian relations of Pharaohs of the XVIIIth 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 Testament. If the latter were responsible for the monuments in question in Syria, then, too, in some sense, they were responsible for the monuments in Asia Minor; and, in any case, it was clear that a very peculiar and important civilisation, 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.
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Recent Hittite Discovery . Nature 84, 318 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084318a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084318a0