was clearly an important country. The pharaoh Ramesses II claimed
victory over it (wrongly!) in the famous battle of Qadesh on the
Orontes river in western Syria, and an earlier pharaoh Tuthmosis III
had dealings with it during his campaigns in northern Syria.
Strand no. 3: In the 1830s, a cliff-face inscription in three
languages, Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite (the so-called
Behistun/Bisitun monument, located in western Iran), provided
the Orientalist Henry Rawlinson with the key to the decipherment
of the most important ancient Near Eastern languages, including
the (subsequently deciphered) Assyrian language. Passages
from the Assyrian inscriptions, in particular those dating from
the late second millennium through the early centuries of thefirst
millennium BC, contain references to a land called Hatti, which
seemed to be connected particularly with territories in northern
Syria west of the Euphrates river.
Strand no. 4: Fifty years later, in 1887, a cache of clay tablets,
now 382 in number, was discovered in Egypt, at a place called
el-Amarna, on the site of the ancient city of Akhetaten. The city
was newly built in the mid-fourteenth century as the royal capital of
the pharaoh Akhenaten. Three hundred andfifty of these tablets
record correspondence between the pharaoh and his subject-rulers
and foreign peers. A number of the tablets, like the Assyrian records,
refer to a land of Hatti, and in one case to a king of Hatti.
Strand no. 5: In the early years of the nineteenth century, an
eccentric Swiss merchant called Johann Ludwig Burkhardt
travelled widely in the Near East, dressed in oriental garb and
calling himself Sheik Ibrahim. During a visit he made to the Syrian
cityHama,hecameuponablockof stone built into a house in the
bazaar. Strange symbols on the stone were interpreted by him as a
form of writing, a bit like hieroglyphic symbols, though quite
different from those of Egypt. He wrote about hisfind in his book
Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, published in 1822.
Fifty years later, another three similarly inscribed stones were
found in buildings in the bazaar at Hama, and yet another stone
with similar inscription was found built into the wall of a mosque
in Aleppo. The following year (1872), an Irish missionary called
William Wright received permission from the local Turkish pasha
10 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA