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Exploration and research are now making us acquainted with Hittite works of art and with inscriptions in the Hittite character and language; while, as already stated, we have Egyptian portraits of their soldiers on the Temple wall at Ibsamboul.

Burckhardt the traveller was perhaps the first to discover and describe a Hittite inscription. He gives an account of a stone which he saw in a wall in the city of Hamath, which was covered with hieroglyphs differing from those of Egypt. The discovery was without result at the time; but when the stone had been seen again, with four others, in 1870, by the American visitor, Mr J. A. Johnson, interest began to be aroused. Similar stones have been found at Carchemish, at Aleppo, and in various parts of Asia Minor. Some have been removed to the Museum at Constantinople, some are in the British Museum, and some inscriptions remain on rock faces irremovable. A very good collection of illustrative plates will be found appended to Dr Wm. Wright’s “Empire of the Hittites.” The Hittite hieroglyphs cannot yet be deciphered, although Dr A. H. Sayce and Major Conder may be said to have made a promising beginning. The inquiry has been aided a little by a short inscription in Hittite and Cuneiform characters, engraved on a convex silver plate, which looked like the knob of a staff or dagger, and is known as the boss of Tarkondêmos. We shall probably have to wait for the discovery of some longer bi-lingual inscription before much progress can be made. Meanwhile Major Conder finds much reason to think that the affinities of the Hittites and their language were Mongolian. The inscriptions of course are quite a mystery to the Asiatic folk in whose districts they are found, and they attribute magical virtues to some of them. The particular stone figured above was very efficacious in cases of lumbago: a man had only to lean his back against it and he was effectually cured.