accompanied by a tallerfigure wearing a conical hat with horns
attached; he has his arm around his companion in what appears to
be a protective gesture. Again strange‘hieroglyphic’symbols are
carved next to thefigures. Texier is fascinated by hisfinds, and
sketches many of them. But he has no idea what they are.
SOLVING THE MYSTERY
It would be decades before the mystery of the strange city and the
nearby carved rock outcrop was solved. How this was done is in
itself a fascinating story, made up of several different strands. Let’s
consider these strands one by one, and the ways in which they have
been interwoven to produce thefinal solution.
Strand no. 1: Well known from the Bible are people and
individual persons we call‘Hittites’, after the biblical nameHittîm.
Sometimes they are called‘the sons of Heth’–hence the German
name‘Hethiter’for the Hittites. Several biblical Hittites are well
known to us, like the ill-fated Uriah, sent by King David to his
death on the battlefield so that David could have free access to his
beautiful wife Bathsheba. Most of our biblical references imply that
the Hittites were just one of a number of minor tribes living in the
Judaean hill-country of southern Palestine. But there are a few Old
Testament passages that suggest the existence of a‘Hittite nation’of
considerably greater status and power. The most notable of these is
from the Second Book of Kings, where the Aramaeans say to one
another‘Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and the
Egyptian kings to attack us!’(2 Kings 7:6). This episode, dating to
the time of the ninth-century prophet Elisha, speaks not only of
Hittite kings, but gives these kings a status similar to that of the
pharaohs of Egypt.
Strand no. 2: In 1822, the French scholar Jean-Francois
Champollion successfully completed the decipherment of the
Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the language for which it was
used, a success closely associated with the famous Rosetta stone.
It was the starting point for revealing to us the contents of thousands
of Egyptian inscriptions. Some of these inscriptions contain
references to a country called Ht (often vocalised as Kheta). This
REDISCOVERING A LOST WORLD 9