* Halevy asserts that the Khati were Semites, and bases his assertion on materials of the Assyrian period.  Thes Khati, absorbed in Syria by the Semites, with whom they were blended, appear to have been by origin a non-Semitic people.

** A letter from the King of the Khati to the Pharaoh Amenothes IV. is written in cuneiform writing and in a Semitic language.  It has been thought that other documents, drawn up in a non-Semitic language and coming from Mitanni and Arzapi, contain a dialect of the Hittite speech or that language itself.  A “writer of books,” attached to the person of the Hittite King Khatusaru, is named amongst the dead found on the field of battle at Qodshu.

*** It is thus perhaps we must understand the mention of tribute from the Khati in the Annals of Thutmosis III., 1. 26, in the year XXXIII., also in the year XL.  One of the Tel el-Amarna letters refers to presents of this kind, which the King of Khati addresses to Amenothes IV. to celebrate his enthronement, and to ask him to maintain with himself the traditional good relations of their two families.

They had, moreover, commercial relations with Egypt, and furnished it with cattle, chariots, and those splendid Cappadocian horses whose breed was celebrated down to the Greek period.* They were already, indeed, people of consideration; their territory was so extensive that the contemporaries of Thutmosis III. called them the Greater Khati; and the epithet “vile,” which the chancellors of the Pharaohs added to their name, only shows by its virulence the impression which they had produced upon the mind of their adversaries.**

* The horses of the Khati were called abari, strong, vigorous, as also their bulls.  The King of Alasia, while offering to Amenothes III. a profitable speculation, advises him to have nothing to do with the King of the Khati or with the King of Sangar, and thus furnishes proof that the Egyptians held constant commercial relations with the Khati.

** M. de Rouge suggested that Khati “the Little” was the name of the Hittites of Hebron.  The expression, “Khati the Great,” has been compared with that of Khanirabbat, “Khani the Great,” which in the Assyrian texts would seem to designate a part of Cappadocia, in which the province of Miliddi occurs, and the identification of the two has found an ardent defender in W. Max Millier.  Until further light is thrown upon it, the most probable reading of the word is not Khani-rabat, but Khani-galbat.  The name Khani-Galbat is possibly preserved in Julbat, which the Arab geographers applied in the Middle Ages to a province situated in Lesser Armenia.

Their type of face distinguishes them clearly from the nations conterminous with them on the south.  The Egyptian draughtsmen represented them as squat and short in stature, though vigorous, strong-limbed, and with broad and full shoulders in youth, but as inclined frequently to obesity in old age.  The head is long and heavy, the forehead flattened, the chin moderate in size, the nose prominent, the eyebrows and cheeks projecting, the eyes small, oblique, and deep-set, the mouth fleshy, and usually framed in by two deep wrinkles; the flesh colour is a yellowish or reddish white, but clearer than that of the Phoenicians or the Amurru.