Narrow Pass, Black Mountain - The Discovery of the Hittite Empire

Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1956

This is the story of the re-discovery of the Hittite Empire - an Empire which vanished 3000 years ago and was unknown even to the Greeks and Romans; and of a people mentioned in the Bible, but regarded as merely legendary. We learn that there actually was an Empire, a Hittite State which was wiped out - leaving scarcely a trace - in a great national migration which took place around the year 1200 BC. How it was re-discovered is one of the most exciting stories of archaeology. In 1834, a French traveller in Inner Anatolia (modern Turkiye), came across the ruins of an important town, but he knew nothing of the people who had built and inhabited it. The first report of a remarkable hieroglyphic script was made by Sheik Ibrahim, the great Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. On the west coast of Turkiye rock carvings were found of a kind so far unknown in any part of the Near East. The world of scholarship, which hundreds of years previously had managed to project admirable pictures of the cultures of Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, was faced with a mystery. Then an English archaeologist, A.H. Satce, made a tour of Asia Minor at the beginning of the 1870s and with this visit we see the beginning of a new science: that of Hittology...