Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 2.djvu/17



THE HITTITES. NORTHERN SYRIA AND CAPPADOCIA.

CHAPTER I. THE HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF THE HITTITES. § 1.—How Oriental Civilization spread Westward by Overland Routes. Phœnicians were not the only people which in remote ages acted as intermediate agents between the East and the West, or, to speak more accurately, between the older civilized races of the Euphrates and the Nile valleys on the one side, and on the other the as yet savage tribes of the islands and the countries bordering on the Ægean. The germs of culture deposited in the sister peninsulas of Greece and Italy, which were to blossom out with so much vigour, far removed from the hot zones where they had first come to maturity, were not wholly due to the ubiquitous light crafts of the Sidonians. The social habits engendered by polished life, with the handicrafts, the processes, and the needs they involved, were likewise propagated by overland routes, wherever their diffusion was not arrested by impassable arid wastes, the ungenial climate of denuded uplands and high mountain ranges covered with snow during part of the year, as towards the east and north. No such obstacles existed to the westward of Mesopotamia, and