Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/95

Rh his shoulder; facing them on the eastern wall are two reliefs of strange character. One of them depicts the youthful god, whose name perhaps was Attys, embracing with his left arm the eunuch-priest, above whose head is engraved the strange symbol that has been already described. The other represents a god's head crowned with the peaked tiara, and supported on a double-headed lion, which again stands on the hinder feet of two other lions, whose heads rest on a column or stem. All these sculptures were once covered with stucco, and thus preserved from the action of the weather.

It is evident that in these two mountain recesses we have a sanctuary, the forms and symbols of whose deities were sculptured on its walls of living rock. It was a sanctuary too holy to be confined within the walls of the city, and the supreme deities to whom it was dedicated were a god and a goddess, served by a multitude of male and female priests. In fact, as Prof. Perrot remarks, Boghaz Keui must have been a sacred city like Komana, whose citizens were consecrated to the chief divinities adored by the Hittites, and were governed by a high-priest. It was as much a 'Kadesh' or 'Hierapolis,' as much a 'holy city,' as Carchemish itself.

It is not its sculptures only which prove to us that it was a city of the Hittites. The figures of the deities have attached to them, as at Eyuk, the same hieroglyphs as those which meet us in the inscriptions of Hamath and Aleppo, of Carchemish and Merash, and within its walls, southward of the ruins of its palace, Prof. Perrot discovered a long text of nine or ten lines cut out of the rock, and though worn and disfigured by time and weather, still showing the forms of many