Indian Antiquary Vol 51

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 131

JONE, 1922]
NEW LIGHT FROM WESTERN ASIA
123
further conclusion being that as there was no contemporaneous history, there could have been little or no history at all. The Tel-el-Amarna tablets showed, on the contrary, that already in the pre-Mosaic age there was almost as much diplomatic and literary correspondence going on from one end of the civilised world to the other, as in our own day; that schools must have been plentiful, and knowledge of writing widespread. They completed what the discoveries of Schliemann had begun; as the excavations at Troy and Mykenæ had restored our confidence in the traditional history of the ancient Orient, so the tablets restored our confidence in its literary character.
It was not long before another shock was given to the complacent scepticism of the older school of historians. Professor Erman had stated in a lecture at Berlin that the age of archaeological discovery in Egypt was over, and that henceforward the Egyptologist must devote himself to the philological analysis of his texts. Hardly had he made the pronouncement, when de Morgan revealed to the world, not only the pre-historic age of Egypt, but the earliest historical dynasties as well. So far from belonging to the domain of mythology, as had been confidently assumed, they turned out to be as fully historical as the dynas. ties of a Ramses or a Psammetichus, and the Egypt they governed was an Egypt which had already enjoyed a long preceding period of culture and civilisation. Menes, the founder of the united monarchy, was suddenly transformed from a creature of fable into a historical personage whose palace we can reconstruct with its ornate furniture, its vases of glass or obsidian brought from distant Melos, its gold-work and jewellery, and its hierarchy of officials.
Then came Sir Arthur Evans' discovery of ancient Krete. One morning he came into my rooms at Oxford with copies of some Kretan gems on which he had found what seemed to him the indubitable symbols of a picture-writing. They reminded me of a sealing-wax impression I had taken many years before at Athens of a Kretan seal which I had seen in the possession of Professor Rhousopoulos. When we examined it we found that the characters upon it were those of the same unknown script which Sir Arthur Evans had just detected.
Sir Arthur started for Krete as soon afterwards as he could ; there he came across clear evidences of an early civilisation which made him determine to excavate in the island whenever political circumstances would allow him to do so; the result was the excavation of the palace of Knossos, as well as the Italian excavations at Ploestos and Agia Triada and of other explorers elsewhere, which have restored to us the early history of the Ægean and brought to light a civilisation and an art which in many respects was a precursor of that of classical Greece. In fact it is not too much to say that we now know that what we call the classical art of Greece was but a Renaissance; the seeds of the older culture, which had been overwhelmed by the northern barbarians, had been lying under the soil, ready to burst into life whenever outward conditions favoured them.
Meanwhile, a forgotten people, who had much to do with shaping the history of the Nearer East and with carrying the culture of Babylonia to Greek lands, had sprung again into existence. These were the people known to the Babylonians and Egyptians, as well as to the Old Testament, under the name of the Hittites. It was in 1879 that I first endeavoured to establish the fact of a Hittite empire, the capital of which was at Boghaz Keui in Cappadocia, and to show that the curious hieroglyphic texts that had been found in Syria and Asia Minor, were the work of a Hittite people. In a letter to the Academy I declared, to what was then an unbelieving world, that the hieroglyphics attached to the figure carved on the rocks Bar Smyrna, in which Herodotus had seen the Egyptian conqueror Sesostris, were not Egyptian as was supposed, but would prove on examination to be Hittite, and similar to