Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/7



discovery of the important place once occupied by the Hittites has been termed 'the romance of ancient history.' Nothing can be more interesting than the resurrection of a forgotten people, more especially when that people is so intimately connected with Old Testament story, and with the fortunes of the Chosen Race. How the resurrection has been accomplished, by putting together the fragmentary evidence of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, of strange-looking monuments in Asia Minor, and of still undeciphered hieroglyphics, will be described in the following pages. It is marvellous to think that only ten years ago 'the romance' could not have been written, and that the part played by the Hittite nations in the history of the world was still unsuspected. Yet now we have become, as it were, familiar with the friends of Abraham and the race to which Uriah belonged.

Already a large and increasing literature has been devoted to them. The foundation stone, which was laid by my paper 'On the Monuments of the Hittites' in 1880, has been crowned with a stately edifice in Dr. Wright's Empire of the Hittites, of which the second edition appeared in 1886, and in the fourth volume of the magnificent work of Prof. Perrot and