name till better assured of an ancient one) in the fifteenth century, we
may reasonably believe Eastern Asia Minor to have been the homeland of
the Hatti three centuries before. As an imperial power they enter
history with a king whom his own archives name Subbiluliuma (but
Egyptian records, Sapararu), and they vanish something less than two
centuries later. The northern half of Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and
probably almost all Asia Minor were conquered by the Hatti before 1350
B.C. and rendered tributary; Egypt was forced out of Asia; the Semitic
settlements on the twin rivers and the tribes in the desert were
constrained to deference or defence. A century and a half later the
Hatti had returned into a darkness even deeper than that from which they
emerged. The last king of Boghazkeui, of whose archives any part has
come to light, is one Arnaunta, reigning in the end of the thirteenth
century. He may well have had successors whose documents may yet be
found; but on the other hand, we know from Assyrian annals, dated only a
little later, that a people, possibly kin to the Hatti and certainly
civilized by them, but called by another name, Mushkaya or Mushki (we
shall say more of them presently), overran most, if not all, the Hatti
realm by the middle of the twelfth century. And since, moreover, the
excavated ruins at both Boghazkeui, the capital of the Hatti, and
Carchemish, their chief southern dependency, show unmistakable signs of
destruction and of a subsequent general reconstruction, which on
archaeological grounds must be dated not much later than Arnaunta's
time, it seems probable that the history of Hatti empire closed with
that king. What happened subsequently to surviving detachments of this
once imperial people and to other communities so near akin by blood or
civilization, that the Assyrians, when speaking generally of western
foes or subjects, long continued to call them Hatti, we shall consider
presently.