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Civilization before Greece and Rome By H.W.F. Saggs ---------------- Contents: 1. Pushing back the Frontiers 2. City-States and Kingdoms 3. Pyramids and Ziggurats 4. Writing 5. Education 6. Living in Cities 7. Trade 8. Law 9. The Brotherhood of Nations 10. Natural Resources 11. Mathematics and Astronomy 12. Medicine 13. Ancient Religion References Select Bibliography ---------------- Plates (Pictures) - (Between pages 116 and 117) 1. Prehistoric fertility figurine (Ronald Sheridan and The Ancient Art & Architecture Collection) 2. Mosque inside ruined church inside ruined Egyptian temple at Luxor (H. W. F. Saggs) 3. Step Pyramid at Saqqara (H. W. F. Saggs) 4. Transplanting a myrrh tree from Punt to Egypt (Detail from E. Naville, The Temple of Deir el Bahari, part III (898), plate LXXIV; courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society) 5. Houses on stilts in Punt (As fig.4, plate LXIX) 6. The Queen of Punt (As fig.4, plate LXIX) 7. The Phaistos Disc (Courtesy of Peter A Clayton, F.L.A., F.S.A., F.R.N.S.) 8. Delivery of tribute from Nubia (N. M. Davies, The Tomb of Huy, viceroy of Nubia in the reign of Tut'ankhamun (1926), plate XXIII; courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society) 9. From the tomb of Kemsit: delivery of products from the owner's estate (E. Naville, The XI Dynasty Temple at Deir el Bahari, part 3 (1913), plate 2; courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society) 10. Tablet inscribed in Minoan Linear B (Courtesy of Peter A Clayton, F.L.A., F.S.A., F.R.N.S.) 11. Part of a "Predynastic slate palette, showing symbols of captured Egyptian towns (Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo) 12. Egyptian slate palette, c.3ooo BC; King Na'rmer conquers his enemies (Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo) 13. Excavated site of Indus Valley city Lothal, showing evidence of town planning (Courtesy of Professor D. P. Agrawal, India) 14. Showing accuracy of masonry in blocks of the Great Pyramid (H. W. F. Saggs) 15. The art of the goldsmith: gold pendant from Mallia in Crete (c.i65O BC) (British Museum) 16. The stele bearing Hammurabi's law code (Musees Nationaux, Paris) 17. Palm trees in natural habitat (H. W. F. Saggs) 18. Palm trees under cultivation (H. W. F. Saggs) 19. The Great Sphinx of Giza (H. W. F. Saggs) 20. Remains of the ziggurat of Borsippa, possibly the original Tower of Babel (H. W. F. Saggs) 21. Colossi near Luxor (H. W. F. Saggs) 22. The enclosure of Etemenanki and Esagila in Babylon (Reconstruction by E. Unger) 23. Snake symbol on the temple of the Yezidis (miscalled 'Devil Worshippers') in north Iraq (H. W. F. Saggs) 24. Letter to the king in Assyrian cuneiform, eighth century BC (H. W. F. Saggs) 25. Funerary furniture: the chair of Tutankhamun, showing the pharaoh and his queen (Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) ---------------- Maps * Regions of the earliest civilizations and associated peoples end paper * Early south Mesopotamia * Ancient Egypt and regions to the south * Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine Chronological Chart Absolute datings usually depend upon the interpretation of a combination of archaelogical and textual data and radiocarbon determinations, with the assistance in some instances of ancient records of astronomical phenomena. in consequence, authorities differ on exact datings. Chronologies for Egypt and Mesopotamia are disputable by up to a century at the beginning of the third millennium, reducing to about a decade by the late second millennium; there are corresponding doubts on Cretan and Hittite chronology. Dates offered for the beginning of Harappan civilization have a spread of 500 years. The dates adopted here are those of D.P. Agrawal, The Archaelogy of India (Curzon Press, 1982). ---------------- Pushing back the Frontiers 'The grand object of travelling', pronounced Doctor Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, 'is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On those shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.' The good Doctor's geography has stood the test of subsequent discovery better than his history. The beginnings of civilization are indeed linked with the shores of the Mediterranean, since those shores were the bounds of all the peoples who contributed to it; but the peoples he credits with these achievements all came late in the rise from savagery which we call civilization. Samuel Johnson is not to be blamed because he short-circuited history. Almost all the discoveries which have revealed high civilizations before those he named came after his time. A late eighteenth-century work called A View of Universal History from the Creation to the Present Time pessimistically remarks: What remains of [the] annals of [the Babylonians and Assyrians] resembles an inscription upon a tomb; we feel that mighty nations have fallen, but find, at the same time, the impossibility of attaining the knowledge of their history. Yet there was a source to hand which, rightly read, could have given some hints on the earliest stages of civilization. That source is the Bible. Within its earliest chapters are several references to man's very early cultural history. The story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a case in point. Whatever religious interpretation one puts upon it, on the cultural level it is a folk-memory of the beginnings of agriculture. With that stage, mankind no longer dwelt idyllically in parkland, feeding on wild fruits; man had begun toilsome tillage for the cultivation of cereals: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; ... In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread (Genesis 3:17-18) A little later there is mention of the beginning of metallurgy, in the account of Tubal-Cain, 'an instructor of every artificer in brass [properly, bronze] and iron' (Genesis 4:22), whilst the origin of musical instruments is touched upon in the reference to Jubal, who was 'the father of all such as handle the harp' (Genesis 4:21). Genesis 11:2- 3 correctly links the invention of baked bricks with south Iraq ('a plain in the land of Shinar'), and whatever one makes of the story of Noah's Ark in Genesis 6-7, it certainly transmits a memory of advanced shipbuilding at a period long before the Hebrew settlement in Palestine at about 1200 BC. Memory of the beginning of vine-culture is also linked to Noah (Genesis 9:20). But in the eighteenth century the Bible in its earliest parts was thought of simply as religious teaching about God's plan for man: it was to be believed as absolute truth in its own right, not treated as a source for a wider understanding of the development of ancient civilization. Advances in the knowledge of human development outside the religious area had to come by other channels. During the eighteenth century France and Great Britain were competing for control of India. By 1764 the British had finally won. Then came the French Revolution and with it Napoleon. Napoleon began to dream of an oriental empire, and as the first step towards his final goal, India, he saw it necessary to gain control of Egypt. His ambitions went beyond mere military conquest: he intended to win for the glory of France not only new economic resources but also the treasures of oriental history and culture. It was because of this latter objective that, when he sailed to Egypt with his army in May 1798, he took with him 175 men of learning and the arts—astronomers, chemists, minerologists, orientalists, painters and poets. Napoleon's dreams of an oriental empire were shattered when Nelson destroyed his fleet in Aboukir Bay, and in August 1799 he had to withdraw. But the work of Napoleon's savants in Egypt had more lasting consequences than his military adventure; in that brief time they had taken the first steps towards the re-discovery of ancient Egyptian civilization. Ancient Egypt Knowledge of ancient Egypt had never been entirely lost. Greek and Latin authors recorded traditions, ranging from reliable to incredible, about Egyptian history and institutions, and, of course, the Bible mentioned it, particularly in the stories of Joseph and Moses. Travellers had brought back tales of strange buildings and tombs, and of three vast mysterious stone pyramids which stood in the desert at Giza as mute witness to a former great civilization. But no one had a clear picture of what that civilization was like. It was Napoleon's savants who began to rescue Egyptian civilization from oblivion. Of first importance was Baron Dominique-Vivant de Denon, a many-sided aristocrat and former diplomat, whom Napoleon took to Egypt as an artist. Denon, then aged fifty-one, marched with Napoleon's army throughout the length of Egypt, sketching the ruins of the lost Egyptian civilization. On his return to France he brought ancient Egypt with him, in the form of two volumes of his researches with 141 impressive plates,1 and these introduced the monuments of the lost civilization into the consciousness of the educated European public. But ancient Egypt was a literate civilization, and no one can enter into the heritage of a literate civilization until its documents can be read. The French researches had found great quantities of writing everywhere—on temples, tombs, statues, coffins and fragments of papyri; the keen-eyed Denon had recognized that the writing took three different forms, which we now call hieroglyphic (the earliest, with pictorial signs), hieratic (a simplification of this), and demotic (a late cursive script). Amongst the finds of the French expedition was a basalt slab, now known as the Rosetta Stone, inscribed in hieroglyphic and cursive Egyptian and in Greek: we now know that it was a decree by the Egyptian priesthood in honour of King Ptolemy V in 196 BC. The Greek could of course easily be read. The first steps towards solving the cursive Egyptian script were taken by a Swedish scholar as early as 1802. By correctly assuming that it would have the same proper names as the Greek text, he worked out the value of about half the cursive signs and showed that the language was Coptic, the latest form of ancient Egyptian, which still survived as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church in Egypt. In 1814—15 an Englishman, Thomas Young, made another advance. The hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta Stone contained certain groups of signs enclosed in an oval frame, which we now call a cartouche, and Young deduced that these must be royal names. By correctly guessing some of the names, he was able to work out the values of some of the hieroglyphic signs. The final breakthrough was due to a young Frenchman, Jean Francois Champollion, who had a passion for oriental languages. He set himself the ambition of deciphering Egyptian, and to this end learned Coptic and studied every hieroglyphic inscription which became available. He worked to such good effect that in 1822 he was able to send to the Secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions in Paris a letter announcing substantial success, and in 1824 he published a definitive account of his decipherment of the hieroglyphic system. Before he died in 1832, at the age of forty-one, he could make out the sense of most Egyptian historical inscriptions. The interest in Egypt led to a rush to collect relics for European museums. This was hardly yet archaeology, for, with some exceptions such as that of Denon, the earliest work there was little more than plundering for loot. Scientific archaeology began to take over from the middle of the century. Ancient Egyptian history was not totally unknown. A certain Manetho, an Egyptian priest of the third century BC, had left a list in Greek of all the Egyptian kings arranged in thirty dynasties,2 with their lengths of reigns, and this could now be combined with the new information from excavation and the reading of inscriptions. Together they established that Egyptian civilization began at around 3000 BC, and that its manifestation can be divided into three main periods. We now know these as the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, and date them respectively at about 2635-2155 BC, 2060-1700 BC, and 1554-1080 BC.3 Ancient Mesopotamia International political ambitions played their part in the recovery of yet another ancient civilization. Over to the east of Egypt sprawled the ramshackle Turkish empire. This was of particular interest to both England and France, in that it controlled a large part of the land route to India. There, in the region we now know as Iraq, formerly called Mesopotamia, were a number of great mounds, representing the ruins of ancient cities. Two of the biggest of these mounds were traditionally recognized as Babylon and Nineveh, ancient capitals famous both in the Bible and in classical authors. Both sites had for centuries been places of pilgrimage for adventurous European travellers. For example, the witty seventeenth-century gossip writer Aubrey says of Colonel Charles Cavendish, second son of the earl of Devonshire, that he 'was so extremely delighted in travelling, that he went into Greece, all over; and that would not serve his turn but he would go to Babylon, and then his Governour would not adventure to goe any further with him; but to see Babylon he was to march in the Turks armie.' One or two of the travellers had brought home relics which included examples of a curious writing found on these sites and others in southwest Iran, composed of wedge-shaped signs. The East India Company, which until the Indian Mutiny in 1857 looked after all British concerns related to India, had since about 1725 had a British Resident to protect their interests in Mesopotamia, originally based at Basra, later at Baghdad. In 1808 a new British Resident was installed, an extremely able young man named C. J. Rich. Rich upheld British interests with great pomp, but there were other sides to him. In addition to his political and mercantile work, he was interested in archaeology, and this led him to make a visit to Babylon, where he undertook a short period of excavation. He gave his results in two memoirs, published in Europe in 1813 and 1818. This caused quite a stir, which is reflected in a poem by Byron, who wrote of ... some infidels, who don't Because they can't, find out the very spot Of that same Babel, or because they won't (Though Claudius Rich, Esquire, some bricks has got, And written lately two memoirs upon't). Rich also undertook some investigations at the traditional site of Nineveh. He died in Persia at the early age of thirty-five, from cholera caught in bravely nursing victims of an epidemic, when the local prince and his family and all the nobles and higher classes had fled. His collection of antiquities passed to the British Museum. Other travellers followed Rich to Babylon and Nineveh, publishing travel books which, if they did not much advance knowledge, did serve to keep alive within the educated world an interest in Mesopotamian ruins. The big advance came in the 18405. In 1842 the French Government established a consulate at Mosul, the main city in north Iraq, just across the Tigris from Kuyunjik, the site of ancient Nineveh, and appointed to it Paul Emile Botta. Botta was an experienced consular official, with the added qualification, from his Government's point of view, of having a good record of opposing British interests. However, he was also interested in antiquities, and the Asiatic Society of Paris, impressed by the collection made by Rich, promised him full support for any archaeological work he might undertake. He made his first attempts at Kuyunjik, but did not dig deep enough to obtain any useful results. But when in March 1843 he shifted operations to a different site, Khorsabad, some ten miles to the north-northeast, he met immediate success, revealing walls of stone slabs covered with vivid scenes in bas-relief. When news of this reached Paris, the French Government made ample funds available to Botta to continue the work. It was now the turn of England to play a part. A footloose young Englishman, Henry Austen Layard, a newly qualified solicitor on his way overland to Ceylon to practise law there, was bitten by the romance of the Middle East and got no further than western Persia (Iran). After undertaking some unofficial intelligence work for the British Ambassador in Constantinople (Istanbul), he won his backing for a period of excavation in north Mesopotamia (Iraq), where he chose a huge mound called Nimrud, twenty miles south of Mosul. When Layard began his work, the situation was, as he put it, that 'a case [in the British Museum] scarcely three feet square enclosed all that remained, not only of the great city, Nineveh, but of Babylon itself!' He rapidly altered this: his results were spectacular, with the finding of stone slabs bearing a splendid series of reliefs of what we now know was Assyrian warfare, great limestone winged bulls fourteen feet high, and many examples of the wedge-shaped inscriptions on stone. These finds, together with those of Botta, created a sensation in Europe, so that Layard's account of his researches, published in 1849, became an immediate bestseller. The decipherment of the wedge-headed inscriptions set the learned world a challenge. There had been scholars working on it since the late eighteenth century. A Dane, Carsten Niebuhr, who travelled in Arabia and Persia in the 17703, had noticed that at Persepolis in Persia there were inscriptions on stone with three different forms of wedge-headed (or, as it later came to be called, cuneiform) script. Now writing can use one sign for a whole word (as & for 'and'), or one sign for each syllable, or one sign for each significant sound. Obviously, if the language uses whole-word signs, the number of signs it needs may run into thousands, whereas an alphabetic system will certainly not reach fifty different signs; writing by means of syllables will fall somewhere between. Neibuhr observed that one of the forms of writing at Persepolis contained well under fifty different signs, and correctly deduced that it must be alphabetic. A young German scholar, G. F. Grotefend, worked on this script, and by 1802 produced a paper correctly identifying about a third of the characters. The language was the earliest form of Persian. There was no significant advance upon Grotefend's partial decipherment until the 18405, when a breakthrough was effected by another East India Company officer. This was Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, a linguist in the intelligence branch who was serving as a military adviser in Persia. He spent his spare time copying inscriptions, the most important being a very long one, in the three different scripts already mentioned, on a high cliff known as Bisitun not far from Kermanshah, only reached at some risk to life and limb. This much longer inscription gave Rawlinson an advantage over Grotefend, and in 1846 he was able to publish a paper giving a complete decipherment of the Old Persian alphabetic cuneiform. Controversy has rumbled on ever since as to whether the credit should go to Grotefend or Rawlinson, pointlessly, since both were great men. But the two other scripts still remained to be solved. Rawlinson recognized that one of these was obviously used for the language of Babylon, since the same system was found on bricks from that city. We now call that language, which is of the Semitic group and related to Hebrew arid Arabic, Akkadian; Babylonian was one main dialect of it and Assyrian another. Rawlinson took up the challenge. In the long trilingual inscription, his decipherment of the old Persian version gave him the general sense and a number of proper names. Using this, and new inscriptions which Layard made available to him, Rawlinson had taken major steps towards the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform by 1849. Other scholars were also working on the script, and it quickly became possible to make out the sense of long texts and to begin to recover the details of the ancient history of the two main kingdoms of the area in the first and second millennia BC, Babylonia and Assyria. There proved to be a good deal which linked up with the Old Testament, and in the religious climate of the time this heightened public interest in Mesopotamian archaeology. Layard himself gave up archaeology for politics after 1851, but others continued his work; and the biblical implications of Mesopotamian archaeology ensured considerable public interest in England, France, Germany and America. As early as 1852 a major library of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform was found at Nineveh, and when scholars became able to read these documents, and other collections found later, it began to be possible to understand ancient Mesopotamian civilization in depth. It soon became clear that some of the texts were written in a tongue which was not the Semitic language Akkadian. Eventually it was recognized that this was the language which we now call Sumerian. This was an important breakthrough, as Sumerian proved to be the language of the people who first set ancient Mesopotamian civilization under way at the beginning of the third millennium BC. It was not until well into the twentieth century that Sumerian could be read with any depth of understanding, but once that stage was reached it began to be possible to reconstruct the picture of ancient Mesopotamian civilization and society right back to 3000 BC. Meanwhile archaeology had been revealing the prehistoric background against which Sumerian civilization arose. The eventual picture obtained was, with severe simplification, as follows. No civilization can develop until there is an assured food supply. The civilizations of Greece and Rome faced no problem here, since they grew up on the basis of agriculture which had long before reached a high degree of efficiency further East. But in the Near East, we see the earliest civilizations in direct succession to the stage in which man had been learning to control his food supply. The details of early man's achievement of assured food supply still affect us today. Our primary cereal crops—wheat and barley—are the plants domesticated by neolithic man in the Near East. A similar situation holds for the main food animals, with the sheep domesticated in the Near East and the cow in southeast Europe. Northern Mesopotamia was settled from 6000 BC, but southern Mesopotamia not until round about 5000 BC. Physical conditions in the south meant that the earliest settlers there had learnt to control water courses, so that an irrigation economy developed. The large-scale cooperation this called for resulted in the creation, before 3000 BC, of the first cities, mainly along branches of the lower Euphrates. Just before 3000 BC these people invented what was originally a picture writing to assist in keeping records of their economic and administrative operations. This developed over the next few centuries, and by the time we can read the writing the language in use was Sumerian: quite probably it was Sumerian from the beginning. Semitic Akkadian began to be written soon afterwards, as the language of the second population element of southern Mesopotamia. City-states developed, which came to be ruled by hereditary dynasties, so that we call the period from about 2900—2400 BC the Early Dynastic period. Soon after the middle of the third millennium came the first attempts at empire, the earliest major success being that of Sargon of Agade (2371-2316 BC), who subjugated all the city-states of south Mesopotamia and used military force to extend a measure of control as far as Syria and Anatolia. The empire he founded crumbled after about a century, to be followed eventually by a very bureaucratically organized empire, that of the Third Dynasty of Ur; the latter collapsed under the pressure of further Semitic (Amorite) immigration from the desert just before 2000 BC. The early second millennium saw the rise across Mesopotamia and Syria of new petty kingdoms under rulers of Amorite descent, of whom the best known in south Mesopotamia was Hammurabi, who united the country and made his city, Babylon, its permanent capital. Assyria further north also became a powerful state at this time, and by the end of the second millennium had supplanted Babylonia as the main military power in Mesopotamia, although Babylonia always remained the cultural centre. In the early first millennium Assyria created the New Assyrian Empire, which eventually controlled all the Near East from Eygpt to western Iran. Assyria collapsed just before 600 BC, Babylonia succeeding to much of its empire until 539 BC, when the whole fell to the Persian ruler, Cyrus the Great. Two centuries later the whole of the Near and Middle East passed from the Persians to Alexander the Great and so into the mainstream of western origins. Egypt and Mesopotamia were the two major formative elements for all subsequent civilization. But there were other ancient civilizations which, although all to some extent derivative from these two, had significant features of their own and played important roles in the transmission of early civilization to Greece. The first of these to be recovered was that of Crete. Ancient Crete The story of the recovery of this civilization begins with a German merchant, Heinrich Schliemann, who, after making a fortune in the indigo trade, gave up business in his forties and in 1868 set off to Greece and Asia Minor to trace and examine Homeric sites. After correctly identifying Troy just east of the Dardanelles and digging there with successful but highly controversial results, he excavated Mycenae in mainland Greece. In early Greek tradition Mycenae was amongst the most celebrated of cities: in Homer's Iliad, its king, Agamemnon, was the paramount Greek ruler. Schliemann's discoveries justified the fame of Mycenae, for he found a considerable treasure of gold, silver, bronze and ivory, which was evidently from a major civilization long preceding that of classical Greece. Greek literary sources led some scholars to link the origins of the Mycenaean civilization to Crete, a conclusion reinforced when objects obviously related to Mycenaean civilization were found at Knossos in Crete in 1878. Schliemann accordingly visited Knossos in 1886 with a view to the archaeological possibilities. He recognized a palace related to the material from Mycenae, but apart from a small trial excavation pit was disappointed in his aspirations, as he was unable to reach agreement with the owner of the site. The Oxford scholar Arthur Evans (later Sir Arthur) was more fortunate and was able to buy part of the site, where he began excavation in 1899, continuing until 1914 and then from 1920 to 1932. Sir Arthur Evans' results were striking. He revealed a hitherto unknown civilization of the second millennium which was the equal of contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia. It had seagoing ships, splendid two- floored palaces with efficient arrangements for sewage disposal, a vigorous art, thriving trade, bronze foundries and a social structure in which women had unusual freedom, to judge by the way in which they are frequently represented as mixing unveiled and decollete with men, and even taking part in men's sports. Crete also had its own writing system — indeed, four different writing systems, the latest of them, best attested from just before or after 1400 BC, used to represent Greek, an indication of Greek immigration some time earlier. Evans named this civilization Minoan, after the legendary king Minos of Crete, and his discoveries showed Mycenaean civilization to be a late form of the Minoan. The Hittites There was another Near Eastern civilization yet to be revealed. From the eighteenth century onwards there had been spasmodic reports of strange stone monuments in north Syria, inscribed with a picture-writing which was not Egyptian hieroglyphics. Egyptian documents mentioned a major international power in north Syria called Kheta, and the cuneiform inscriptions knew of a land of Hatti linked to Carchemish on the Euphrates in north Syria. Hatti and Kheta were evidently the same name as that behind the 'children of Heth' and 'Hittites" in the Bible. In 1876 the brilliant but sometimes erratic British orientalist Archibald Sayce raised the question: were the unidentified monuments and script of north Syria relics of the Hittites? In 1887 a collection of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform was found at El Amarna in middle Egypt; it proved to be the correspondence of Amenophis III and his son Akhenaten between about 1370 and 1349 BC.5 They were mainly letters from Palestinian and Syrian vassals, written in Akkadian, and some of them mentioned the king of Hatti. But there was also a letter from the king of Hatti himself, sending Akhenaten good wishes on his accession. In addition there were two letters in an unknown language, one of them addressed to the king of a country Arzawa; it was possible to read the name even though the language was unknown, because this writing used the same syllabic signs as Akkadian cuneiform. A Norwegian, Knudtzon, set to work on the unknown language, which was provisionally called Arzawan, and in 1902 was able to conclude that it was of the Indo-European family. Meanwhile, archaeological work had started in north Syria: the British began excavations at Carchemish in 1878, and ten years later Germans started work at another north Syrian site, Zinjirli. But although both sites produced monuments and inscriptions of the expected kind, neither gave evidence of being the centre of a major civilization. Where then was the Hittite capital? Sayce pointed out that monuments and inscriptions similar to those of north Syria had been found over a much wider area, extending well north into Asia Minor and Anatolia. As early as 1834 ruins of an ancient city with such remains had been reported from Boghazkoi, east of Ankara. French archaeologists examined that site in 1862, and Germans twenty years later, but it was not until 1906 that the German Oriental Society began excavations there. They proved very productive. •About 10,000 clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform were found, some of them in Akkadian, easily read, but most of them in the language formerly called Arzawan and still at that time largely unintelligible. The Akkadian tablets established that Boghazkoi was indeed the Hittite capital, and that its ancient name was Hattusha. The unknown language formerly called Arzawan was thus obviously the language of the Hittites. It was gradually deciphered, and in 1915 a Czech scholar, Hrozny, published a grammar showing that Knudtzon had been correct in treating Arzawan, that is, Hittite, as belonging to the Indo- European family: it was in fact closely related to Greek and Latin. During the next two decades scholars penetrated further into the language, so that the texts are now an important source for the culture of the second millennium BC, and we have a considerable knowledge of the history and way of life of the Hittites. The hieroglyphic texts of the Hittites remained a problem much longer. It was not possible to read them to any extent until after the second World War; American, Italian, German, Swiss, Czech, French and British scholars all contributed to major advances in their understanding, and the decipherment was finally clinched by the finding of a text written bilingually in Phoenician and a late form of hieroglyphic Hittite. It proved that there were two main periods in which the Hittite hieroglyphic writing was used. It was employed by later kings of the Hittite empire during the second millennium, and was used again in the states which developed in north Syria after that empire collapsed at about 1200 BC. The language of the hieroglyphic texts, although related

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