Civilization Before Greece and Rome

354 Pages·2021·1.56 MB·English

Civilization before Greece and Rome
By
H.W.F. Saggs

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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

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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)

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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).

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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