1. Egyptian Accounts

Thothmes III. (c. 1500 B.C.?) mentions the Hittites in his annals inscribed at Karnak as paying tribute to him, or at least as sending him presents on his great campaigns which took him as far as Mitanni (see Assyria VI., 2, § 1), and as sending him tribute seven years later. In the Amarna Tablets (q.v.) they appear making their way aggressively down through Syria and Palestine. Thothmes IV., and Amenophis III. and IV. were frequently in conflict with them. Seti I. claimed to have defeated them under their leader Mutal, son of Mulsar and grandson of Saphl, though they had established themselves at Carchemish and at Kadesh on the Orontes. Rameses II. was in serious danger from them while besieging Kadesh, and his exploits in extricating himself there gave rise to the celebrated poem of Pentaur. He made a treaty of alliance with their king Rata-sar (a name which suggests, ungrammatically, "Rittite king" in Assyrian), son of Mutal, married Hata-sar's daughter, and Kadesh became the Hittite frontier. It is probable that the extension of Hittite power to the south was checked at this time not more by the Egyptians than by the people known later as the Philistines (q.v.). The impression given by the Egyptian inscriptions is that of a unified power, in contradistinction to the separate states which appear in Assyrian annals a century later, though this may be due to the uncertain knowledge possessed by the Egyptians and to their assuming ethnic affinity for all the inhabitants of the region in which the Hittites were their chief opponents.

The records of the Assyrians indicate that that power came into contact with the Hittites about 1400 B.c., if, as some suppose, Mitanni was a Hittite state. But long prior to this there appears the phrase "land of the Hittites" in Babylonian as-

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2. Assyrian Notices

B.C.), at which time there appears to Notices. have been a number of Hittite states in northern Ararmea and Syria, Kummu4 (see Assyria, VI., 2, § 1; 3, § 3) being the limit westward of which information is given in this source and this being under Hittite control. In the ninth century the conquests of Asahurnasirpalsubjected Hittite kingdoms in the region named, as did those of Shalmaneser II. Sargon finally overthrew the Hittites and ended their career in the east by capturing Carchemish, the great center of their power in that region. The sum of the notices in Egyptian and Assyrian monuments would lead then to two conclusions. The first is that the Hittites were widely scattered north and northwest of the Syrian desert, their southern boundary being in Palestine at least as far south as Kadesh, their eastern frontier coincident with the western limits of Assyria, and their western limits at least as far west as Kummuh. The second is that they were an element of the preHebraic population of northern Palestine.

With these conclusions the scattered notices in the Old Testament fully agree, except that they carry the Hittites still farther south to Hebron.

Gen. x. 15 (J) connects them with the 3. Biblical Canaanites as of Cushite stock. This Mention. is also the view of E (Ex. xxiii. 28, xxxiii. 2), with which P (Gen. xxiii. 3, 5, etc., xxv. 9, xxvi. 34-35, xxvii. 46, xlix. 29) and the writers closest to him (Ezra ix. 1-2; Ezek. xvi. 3) fully coincide, and also R and D in the Hexateuch (Josh. ix. 1, xi. 3). The passages in Samuel and Kings and their parallels in Chronicles reflect the Hittites either as an absorbed element of the population (I Sam. xxvi. 6; II Sam. xi., xii. 9-10) or as a power to be reckoned with outside Palestine (I Kings x. 29, xi. 1; II Kings vii. 6).