The Ancient East | Page 7

on its borders, to end
such an empire. Both had appeared before Amenhetep's death--the
Amorites in mid Syria, and a newly consolidated Hatti power on the
confines of the north. The inevitable crisis was met with no new
measures by his son, the famous Akhenaten, and before the middle of
the fourteenth century the foreign empire of Egypt had crumbled to
nothing but a sphere of influence in southernmost Palestine, having
lasted, for better or worse, something less than two hundred years. It
was revived, indeed, by the kings of the Dynasty succeeding, but had
even less chance of duration than of old. Rameses II, in dividing it to
his own great disadvantage with the Hatti king by a Treaty whose
provisions are known to us from surviving documents of both parties,
confessed Egyptian impotence to make good any contested claim; and
by the end of the thirteenth century the hand of Pharaoh was withdrawn
from Asia, even from that ancient appanage of Egypt, the peninsula of
Sinai. Some subsequent Egyptian kings would make raids into Syria,
but none was able, or very desirous, to establish there a permanent
Empire.
SECTION 3. EMPIRE OF THE HATTI
[Plate 3: HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY
13TH CENTURY B.C.]
The empire which pressed back the Egyptians is the last but one which

we have to consider before 1000 B.C. It has long been known that the
Hittites, variously called Kheta by Egyptians and Heth or Hatti by
Semites and by themselves, developed into a power in westernmost
Asia at least as early as the fifteenth century; but it was not until their
cuneiform archives were discovered in 1907 at Boghazkeui in northern
Cappadocia that the imperial nature of their power, the centre from
which it was exerted, and the succession of the rulers who wielded it
became clear. It will be remembered that a great Hatti raid broke the
imperial sway of the First Babylonian Dynasty about 1800 B.C.
Whence those raiders came we have still to learn. But, since a Hatti
people, well enough organized to invade, conquer and impose its
garrisons, and (much more significant) its own peculiar civilization, on
distant territories, was seated at Boghazkeui (it is best to use this
modern name till better assured of an ancient one) in the fifteenth
century, we may reasonably believe Eastern Asia Minor to have been
the homeland of the Hatti three centuries before. As an imperial power
they enter history with a king whom his own archives name
Subbiluliuma (but Egyptian records, Sapararu), and they vanish
something less than two centuries later. The northern half of Syria,
northern Mesopotamia, and probably almost all Asia Minor were
conquered by the Hatti before 1350 B.C. and rendered tributary; Egypt
was forced out of Asia; the Semitic settlements on the twin rivers and
the tribes in the desert were constrained to deference or defence. A
century and a half later the Hatti had returned into a darkness even
deeper than that from which they emerged. The last king of Boghazkeui,
of whose archives any part has come to light, is one Arnaunta, reigning
in the end of the thirteenth century. He may well have had successors
whose documents may yet be found; but on the other hand, we know
from Assyrian annals, dated only a little later, that a people, possibly
kin to the Hatti and certainly civilized by them, but called by another
name, Mushkaya or Mushki (we shall say more of them presently),
overran most, if not all, the Hatti realm by the middle of the twelfth
century. And since, moreover, the excavated ruins at both Boghazkeui,
the capital of the Hatti, and Carchemish, their chief southern
dependency, show unmistakable signs of destruction and of a
subsequent general reconstruction, which on archaeological grounds
must be dated not much later than Arnaunta's time, it seems probable

that the history of Hatti empire closed with that king. What happened
subsequently to surviving detachments of this once imperial people and
to other communities so near akin by blood or civilization, that the
Assyrians, when speaking generally of western foes or subjects, long
continued to call them Hatti, we shall consider presently.
SECTION 4. EARLY ASSYRIAN EMPIRE
Remains Assyria, which before 1000 B.C. had twice conquered an
empire of the same kind as that credited to the First Babylonian
Dynasty and twice recoiled. The early Assyrian expansions are,
historically, the most noteworthy of the early West Asian Empires
because, unlike the rest, they were preludes to an ultimate territorial
overlordship which would come nearer to anticipating Macedonian and
Roman imperial systems than any others precedent. Assyria, rather than
Babylon or Egypt, heads the list of aspirants to the Mastership of the
World.
There will be so much to say of the third and subsequent expansion of