The Hittites were intruders from the north.  The Egyptian monuments have shown us what they were like.  Their skin was yellow, their eyes and hair were black, their faces were beardless.  Square and prominent cheeks, a protrusive nose, with retreating chin and forehead and lozenge-shaped eyes, gave them a Mongoloid appearance.  They were not handsome to look upon, but the accuracy of their portraiture by the artists of Egypt is confirmed by their own monuments.  The heads represented on the Egyptian monuments are repeated, feature by feature, in the Hittite sculptures.  Ugly as they were, they were not the caricatures of an enemy, but the truthful portraits of a people whose physical characteristics are still found, according to Sir Charles Wilson, in the modern population of Cappadocia.

The Hittites wore their hair in three plaits, which fell over the back like the pigtail of a Chinaman.  They dressed in short tunics over which a long robe was worn, which in walking left one leg bare.  Their feet were shod with boots with turned-up ends, a sure indication of their northern origin.  Such boots, in fact, are snow-shoes, admirably adapted to the inhabitants of the mountain-ranges of Asia Minor, but wholly unsuited for the hot plains of Syria.  When, therefore, on the walls of the Ramesseum we find the Theban artists depicting the defenders of Kadesh on the Orontes with them, we may conclude that the latter had come from the colder north just as certainly as we may conclude, from the use of similar shoes among the Turks, that they also have come from a northern home.  In the Hittite system of hieroglyphic writing, the boot with upturned end occupies a prominent place.

When the Tel el-Amarna tablets were written (B.C. 1400), the Hittites were advancing on the Egyptian province of Syria.  Tunip, or Tennib, near Aleppo, had fallen, and both Amorites and Canaanites were intriguing with the invader.  The highlands of Cappadocia and the ranges of the Taurus seem to have been the cradle of the Hittite race.  Here they first came into contact with Babylonian culture, which they adopted and modified, and from hence they poured down upon the Aramaean cities of the south.  Carche-mish, now Jerablus, which commanded the chief ford across the Euphrates, fell into their hands, and for many centuries remained one of their capitals.  But it was not until the stormy period which signalised the overthrow of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, that the Hittites succeeded in establishing themselves as far south as Kadesh on the Orontes.  The long war, however, waged with them by Ramses ii. prevented them from advancing farther; when peace was made at last between them and the Egyptians, both sides had been exhausted by the struggle, and the southern limit of Hittite power had been fixed.