of the Mediterranean, the Hittites were to such an extent the ruling race there that they gave their name to the whole district.  Like “Palestine,” or “Canaan,” the term “land of the Hittites” came to denote among the Assyrians, not only Northern Syria and the Lebanon, but Southern Syria as well.  Even Ahab of Israel and Baasha the Ammonite are included by Shalmaneser ii. among its kings.

This extended use of the name among the Assyrians is illustrated by the existence of a Hittite tribe at Hebron in the extreme south of Palestine.  Various attempts have been made to get rid of the latter by unbelieving critics, but the statements of Genesis are corroborated by Ezekiel’s account of the foundation of Jerusalem.  They are, moreover, in full harmony with the monumental records.  As we have seen, Thothmes iii. implies that already in his day there was a second and smaller land of the Hittites, and the great Babylonian work on astronomy contains references to the Hittites which appear to go back to early days.

Assyrian and Babylonian texts are not the only cuneiform records which make mention of the “Khata” or Hittites.  Their name is found also on the monuments of the kings of Ararat or Armenia who reigned in the ninth and eighth centuries before our era, and who had borrowed from Nineveh the cuneiform system of writing.  But the Khata of these Vannic or Armenian texts lived considerably to the north of the Hittites of the Bible and of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments.  The country they inhabited lay in eastern Asia Minor in the neighbourhood of the modern Malatiyeh.  Here, in fact, was their original home.

Thanks to the Egyptian artists, we are well acquainted with the Hittite physical type.  It was not handsome.  The nose was unduly protrusive, while the chin and the forehead retreated.  The cheeks were square with prominent bones, and the face was beardless.  In colour the Hittites were yellow-skinned with black hair and eyes.  They seem to have worn their hair in three long plaits which fell over the back like the pigtail of a Chinaman, and they were distinguished by the use of boots with upturned toes.

We might perhaps imagine that the Egyptian artists have caricatured their adversaries.  But this is not the case.  Precisely the same profile of face, sometimes even exaggerated in its ugliness, is represented on the Hittite monuments by the native sculptors themselves.  It is one of the surest proofs we possess that these monuments, with their still undeciphered inscriptions, are of Hittite origin.  They belong to the people whom Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Armenians united in calling Hittites.