to prise out these stones (with strong protests from the local people
who attributed magical healing powers to them) and ship them to
Constantinople for closer study. It became clear that the symbols
on the stones were like those found by Texier at Yazılıkaya and
were part of the same ancient script. This script was now found in a
number of other places as well–not only in Syria but also in the
Anatolian peninsula, almost as far west as Anatolia’s Aegean coast.
RIGHT FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS
Now let us pull all these strands together. In a landmark lecture
delivered in London in 1880 to the Society for Biblical
Archaeology, a scholarly man of the cloth, the Rev. Archibald
Henry Sayce, presented a bold and apparently new proposition:
the Hittites of the Bible were the people of a vast empire which
extended through Anatolia and a large part of Syria. This
conclusion he based very largely on the widespread distribution
of the‘hieroglyphic script’throughout these regions –ascript
which Sayce believed was the written language of the Hittites
themselves–though no-one had the slightest idea then of what
the inscriptions said. (Actually, William Wright had already
published this conclusion a couple of years earlier in an obscure
article, but it was Sayce who got the credit for it.)
Sayce’s lecture might well be regarded as the very beginning of
the rediscovery of a lost world. How on earth did it get lost in the
first place, when we consider its size (Sayce was certainly right in
his claim about the empire’s vastness) and the fact that the great
contemporary powers of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon werenever
lost to human knowledge? That’s a matter to which we shall return.
But at this point, let’s make some important corrections to Sayce’s
conclusions:
(a) the‘Hittites’nevercalled themselves Hittites;
(b) the‘hieroglyphic script’wasnotwritten in the Hittite language;
(c) the administrative centre of the empire was not in Syria
(Carchemish on the Euphrates was a favoured location) but in
north-central Anatolia;REDISCOVERING A LOST WORLD 11