Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/83

Rh at Thebes have placed it on the feet of the Hittite defenders of Kadesh. The boot is really a snow-shoe, admirably adapted for walking over snow, but ill-suited for the inhabitants of a level or cultivated country. The fact that it was still used by the Hittites of Kadesh in the warm fertile valley of the Orontes proves better than any other argument that they must have come from the snow-clad mountains of the north. It is like the shoe of similar shape which the Turks have carried with them in their migrations from the north and introduced amongst the natives of Syria and Egypt. It indicates with unerring certainty the northern origin of the Turkish conqueror. He stands in the same relation to the modern population of Syria that the Hittites stood to the Arameans of Kadesh three thousand years ago.

Equally significant is the long fingerless glove which is one of the most frequent of Hittite hieroglyphs. The thumb alone is detached from the rest of the bag in which the fingers were enclosed. Such a glove is an eloquent witness to the wintry cold of the regions from which its wearers came, and a similar glove is still used during the winter months by the peasants of modern Kappadokia.

We may find another evidence of the northern descent of the Hittite tribes in the hieroglyph which is used in the sense of 'country.' It represents two, or sometimes three, pointed mountains, whose forms, as was remarked some years ago, resemble those of the mountains about Kaisariyeh, the Kappadokian capital.

If we leave Kadesh and proceed northwards, the local names bear more and more the peculiar stamp of a Hittite origin. We leave Semitic names like