Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 2.djvu/291

 General Characteristics of Hittite Civilization. 273 Alyattes and Croesus ; the names of the dynasties thus preserved are important, nevertheless, as reminiscences of their remote past. One curious point should be noted, namely, that if any reliance is to be placed on the chronology of Herodotus, the duration of five hundred years, or thereabouts, assigned to the dynasty of the Heraclidae, would carry us back to the end of the thirteenth cen- tury B.C. Now, the evidence yielded by Assyrian monuments proves that about this time the power of the Hittites was at its highest, and extended to the border of the ^gean.^ In the preceding period, the Hittites of Cappadocia had engaged in all the wars against Egypt, so that leisure was denied them to spread towards the peninsula. In the meanwhile Thracian tribes had stolen a march on them, and, under the name of Phrygians, free men, had taken firm footing of the country between the Halys and about the head springs of the Sangarius and Hermus. The downfall of the Hittites may be dated from the day when this living barrier inter- posed in central Anatolia. Like the Assyrians, their action had been one of conquest ; they had traversed vast provinces, but with- out settling in them. The Phrygians compelled them to recross the Halys, and renounce expeditions in the far west ; nevertheless, they remained the intermediaries of a brisk commerce carried on by means of caravans, whose pathway between Mesopotamia and Asia Minor led across their territory. They retained, moreover, the moral advantage of having been the first (in that part of the world) to possess an art and a system of writing, together with public rites in keeping with " the majesty divine " of their great local deities. It was not for long, however, for they had to give way before the Carians, Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, whose experience and knowledge were enlarged by intercourse with Punic traders and Greek colonists settled on the coasts. Hence towards the eighth century B.C., civilization changed hands, and migrated from the eastern to the western bank of the Halys. Henceforward we only hear of the Hittites as vassals of the Assyrians. It is probable that to avoid being transplanted, or put to death as Pisiris had been by Sargon (717 B.C.), the kings of Cappadocia acknowledged the suzerainty of Assyria, Media, and Persia in turn. They were attacked by Croesus, as the vassals of the latter power, towards the fifth century B.C. ; and although the foolish invasion was swiftly arrested by the Eastern monarch, it VOL. n. ""^
 * Sayce, The Monuments^ p. 273.