THE SECRET OF THE HITTITES

by C. W. Ceram ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 1955

This is a successor to Ceram's absorbing Gods. Graves and SchoLars (1951) and for many of us it provides what is virtually a rewriting of much of what constituted the required course in Ancient History in our schooldays. For this is the almost incredible story of how a wholly new body of knowledge of a people that flourished 2000 years BC has been built up in the last 75 years,- by excavation, by research, by reasoning. The Hittites now emerge as an Indo-European race; their power extended over Asia Minor as far as Syria; they fought successful wars against Egypt and disintegrated only when their capital city was destroyed by fire and their younger people migrated. This began to come to light through a series of chance discoveries, sparked before its significance was realized in the search for another goal, Tavium, by an archaelogist named Texier. Even earlier Sheik Ibrahim (actually a Swiss Orientalist) discovered in the bazaar at Hamoth on the Orentes, a different type of hieroglyphic writing. But it was after the further discovery of extensive, unsuspected ruins on the Euphrates in 1879, that identification with the Hittites of the Bible was made by Sayce. Here was the forgotten third great power. Here the records of the wars, the laws, the civilian organization. A new language emerged- was identified and ultimately deciphered. Much of the work was haphazard, but even the amateurish procedures of Winckler, philologist supreme, whose interest lay in the inscriptions, and the excavations by Battel with their contribution to further architectural knowledge, combined to build the now known facts. Fascinating reading- the gradual revelation of a great segment of history.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1955

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1955

Categories: NONFICTION