Page:PhilipK.Hitti-SyriaAShortHistory.djvu/49

Rh and receding forehead and chin, was common to the aboriginal Hittites and the Hurrians. It still prevails in eastern Anatolia and among the Armenians and some Jews, and is sometimes erroneously considered Semitic. Hittites destroyed Aleppo about 1600 B.C., and plundered Babylon a few years later, but retired into Anatolia. Their main Syrian drive occurred in the fourteenth century, when Shubbiluliuma subdued and incorporated many Hyksos and Hurrians into his state. He succeeded in expelling the Egyptians, weakened by theological disputes, from their Syrian holdings, and established a stronghold at Carchemish on the Euphrates from which the Hittites dominated northern Syria. When the Hittite empire was overthrown around 1200 B.C. by invaders from the Aegean, petty native states arose in northern Syria, only to fall one by one to the expanding power of Assyria.

Mesopotamian cultural influence in Syria—whether material, like the plough and the wheel, or intellectual, like the measurement of time and of weights—had always surpassed Egyptian. Military incursions, however, from the east had been limited to occasional raids by such Babylonians as Sargon I and Naram-Sin. An Assyrian conquest in 1094 B.C. by Tiglath-pileser I proved to be premature, but Ashur-nasir-pal and his son Shalmaneser II in the ninth century did more permanent damage, which was consummated between 743 and 722 by Tiglath-pileser III and his son Shalmaneser V. Their successors Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashur-bani-pal brought all Syria and Egypt into the Assyrian empire, which itself soon fell before the Chaldaeans (Neo-Babylonians).

As heirs of the Assyrians, the Chaldaeans claimed sway over Syria, but the Phoenician cities were restive. They on the whole preferred Egyptian suzerainty to Mesopotamian. Between 587 and 572 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar subdued these cities, extinguishing the last breath of Phoenician national life, though the Canaanite people kept their individuality Rh