Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/118

116 and appearance of his fellow-countrymen, and the striking agreement that exists between his representation of them and that which we find on the Egyptian monuments proves how faithfully he must have worked. The elements, in short, of Babylonian art are present in the art of the Hittite, but the treatment and selection are his own.

It is in his selection and combination of these elements that he exhibits most clearly his originality. Monsters, half human, half bestial, were known to the Babylonians, but it was left to the Hittite to invent a double-headed eagle, or to plant a human head on a column of lions. The so-called rope-pattern occurs once or twice on Babylonian gems, but it became a distinguishing characteristic of Hittite art, like the employment of the heads only of animals instead of their entire forms.

So, again, the heraldic arrangement of animals face to face, or more rarely back to back, had its first home in Chaldæa, but it was the Hittites who raised it into a principle of art. We may perhaps trace their doing so to their love of animal forms.

The influence of Babylonian culture may have made itself first felt in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna represent the Hittite tribes as descending southward into the Syrian plains. It may on the other hand go back to a much earlier epoch. We have no materials at present for deciding the question. One fact, however, is clear; there was a time when the Hittites were profoundly affected by Babylonian civilisation, religion and art. Before this could have been the case they must have been already settled in Syria.

It is more easy to fix the period when the Hittite