Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/25

of Kappadokia into northern Syria, and there developed a powerful and wide-reaching empire. From their capital at Carchemish, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, their armies went forth to contend on equal terms with the soldiers of the Egyptian Sesostris, or to carry the name and dominion of the Hittite to the very shores of the Aegean Sea. The rock-cut figures in the pass of Karabel, near Smyrna, in which Herodotos saw the trophies of Sesostris, were really memorials of Hittite conquest, and the hieroglyphics that accompanied them were those of Carchemish and not of Thebes. The image on the cliff of Sipylos, which the Greeks of the age of Homer had fabled to be that of the weeping Niobê, now turns out to be the likeness of the great goddess of Carchemish, and the cartouches engraved by the side of it, partly in Hittite and partly in Egyptian characters, show that it was carved in the time of Ramses-Sesostris himself. We can now understand how it was that, when the Hittites warred with the Egyptian Pharaoh in the 14th century B.C., they were able to summon to their aid, among their other subject allies, Dardanians and Mysians and Maeonians, while a century later the place of the Dardanians was taken by the Tekkri or Teukrians. The empire, and therewith the art and culture, of the Hittites already extended as far as the Hellespont.

Now Hittite art was a modification of archaic Babylonian art. It was, in fact, that peculiar form of early art which has long been known to have characterized Asia Minor. And along with this art came the worship of the great Babylonian goddess in the special form it assumed at Carchemish, as well as the institution of armed priestesses—the Amazons, as the Greeks called them—who served the goddess with shield and lance. The goddess was represented in a curious and peculiar fashion, which we first find on the cylinders of primaeval Chaldea. She was nude, full-faced, with the arms laid upon the breasts, and the pelvis marked by a triangle, as well as by a round knob