Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/77

Rh of Karabel, the sculptor must have seen the visible symbols of Hittite power. They showed that the Hittite had won and kept the pass by force of arms. They are emblems of conquest, not creations of native art.

But it was inevitable that conquest should bring with it a civilising influence. The Hittites could not carry with them the art and culture they had acquired in the East without influencing the barbarous populations over whom they claimed to rule. The vassal chieftains of Lydia and the Troad could not lead their forces into Syria, or assist in the invasion of Egypt, without learning something of that ancient civilisation with which they had come in contact. The Hittites, in fact, must be regarded as the first teachers of the rude populations of the West. They brought to them a culture the first elements of which had been inspired by Babylonia; they brought also a system of writing out of which, in all probability, the natives of Asia Minor afterwards developed a writing of their own.

It is possible, therefore, that some of the Hittite monuments of Asia Minor are the work, not of the Hittites themselves, but of the native populations whom they had civilised and instructed. It may be that this is the case at Ibreez, where the faces of the god and his worshipper have Jewish features very unlike those found on monuments of purely Hittite origin. But apart from such instances, where the monument is due to Hittite influence rather than to Hittite artists, it is certain that most of the Hittite memorials of Asia Minor are the productions of the Hittites themselves. This is proved by the hieroglyphs which are attached to them, as well as by the uniform type of feature and