The kings of Kadesh had, however, been at the head of a veritable empire; they were able to summon allies and vassals from Asia Minor, and it is probable that their rule extended to the banks of the Halys in Cappadocia, where Hittite remains have been found.  Military roads connected the Hittite cities of Cappadocia with the rest of Asia Minor, and monuments of Hittite conquest or invasion have been met with as far west as the neighbourhood of Smyrna.  These monuments are all alike distinguished by the same peculiar style of art, and by the same system of pictorial writing.  The writing, unfortunately, has not yet been deciphered, but as the same groups of characters occur wherever an inscription in it is found, we may infer that the language concealed beneath it is everywhere one and the same.

When the Assyrians first became acquainted with the West, the Hittites were the ruling people in Syria.  As, therefore, the Babylonians had included all the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine, whatever might be their origin, under the general name of Amorites, the Assyrians included them under the name of Hittites.  Even the Israelites and Ammonites are called “Hittites” by an Assyrian king.  It is possible that traces of this vague and comprehensive use of the name are to be met with in the Old Testament; indeed, it has been suggested that the Hittites, or “sons of Heth,” from whom Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah, owed their name to this cause.  In the later books of the Hebrew Scriptures the Hittites are described as a northern population, in conformity with the Egyptian and Assyrian accounts.

The Hittites of Hebron, however, may really have been an offshoot of the Hittite nations of the north.  The “king of the Hittites” accompanied the northern barbarians when they invaded Egypt in the reign of Ramses iii., and Hittite bands may similarly have followed the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt several centuries before.  One of these bands may easily have settled on its way at Hebron, which, as we are told, was built seven years before Zoan, the Hyksos capital.  At Karnak, moreover, an Egyptian artist has represented the people of Ashkelon with faces of a Hittite type, while Ezekiel bears witness to the presence of a Hittite element in the founders of Jerusalem.  But the fact that Thothmes iii. in the century before Moses calls the Hittite land of the north “the Greater,” is the best proof we can have that there was a Hittite colony elsewhere, which was well known to the Egyptian scribes.  The “Greater” implies the Less, and the only Lesser Hittite land with which we are acquainted is that of which the Book of Genesis speaks.