character and origin. About the Hittites we hear a good deal both in the
hieroglyphic and in the cuneiform inscriptions. The Khata of the
Egyptian texts were the most formidable power of Western Asia with whom
the Egyptians of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had to deal.
They were tribes of mountaineers from the ranges of the Taurus who had
descended on the plains of Syria and established themselves there in the
midst of an Aramaic population. Carchemish on the Euphrates became one
of their Syrian capitals, commanding the high-road of commerce and war
from east to west. Thothmes III., the conqueror of Western Asia, boasts
of the gifts he received from "the land of Khata the greater," so
called, it would seem, to distinguish it from another and lesser land of
Khata--that of the Hittites of the south.

The cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, in the closing days of the
eighteenth dynasty, represent the Hittites as advancing steadily
southward and menacing the Syrian possessions of the Pharaoh.
Disaffected Amorites and Canaanites looked to them for help, and
eventually "the land of the Amorites" to the north of Palestine fell
into their possession. When the first Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty
attempted to recover the Egyptian empire in Asia, they found themselves
confronted by the most formidable of antagonists. Against Kadesh and
"the great king of the Hittites" the Egyptian forces were driven in
vain, and after twenty years of warfare Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the
Oppression, was fain to consent to peace. A treaty of alliance,
offensive and defensive, was drawn up between the two rivals, and Egypt
was henceforth compelled to treat with the Hittites on equal terms. The
Khattâ or Khatâ of the Assyrian inscriptions are already a decaying
power. They are broken into a number of separate states or kingdoms, of
which Carchemish is the richest and most important. They are in fact in
retreat towards those mountains of Asia Minor from which they had