32 The Fundamentals. been published to redeem this people completely from their half-mythical plight, and give them a firm place in sober history greater than imagination had ever fancied for them under the stimulus of any hint contained in the Bible. There has been brought to light a Hittite empire*15’ in Asia Minor, with central power and vassal dependencies round about and with treaty rights on equal terms with the greatest nations of antiquity, thus making the Hittite power a third great power with Babylonia and Egypt, as was, indeed, fore shadowed in the great treaty of the Hittites with Rameses II., inscribed on the projecting wing of the south wall of the Temple of Amon at Karnak(16), though Rameses tried so hard to obscure the fact. The ruins at the village of Boghatz-Koi are shown also to mark the location of the Hittite capital<17), and the unknown language on the cuneiform tablets recovered there to be the Hittite tongue*18’, while the cuneiform method of writing, as already upon the Amarna tablets(19), so still more clearly here, is seen to have been the diplomatic script, and in good measure the Babylonian to have been the diplomatic lan guage of the Orient in that age(20). And the large admixture of Babylonian words and forms in these Hittite inscriptions opens the way for the real decipherment of the Hittite lan guage^1*, and imagination can scarcely promise too much to our hopes for the light which such a decipherment will throw upon the historical and cultural background of the Bible. Only one important point remains to be cleared up, the relation between the Hittite language of these cuneiform tab lets and the language of the Hittite hieroglyphic inscrip tion^2’. That these were identical is probable; that the hiero glyphic inscriptions represent an older form of the language, a kind of “Hieratic,” is possible; that it was essentially dif ferent from the language of these tablets is improbable. There has been the Hittite vindication; the complete illumination of Hittite history is not likely to be long delayed.
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