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134
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ JULY, 1922
which they had in the later inscriptions as the values attached to the cuneiform signs by the Assyro-Babylonians are different from those which they had in the Sumerian script.
Like the Caucasus to-day, Asia Minor in those early times was the honte and meeting-place of a very large number of unrelated languages. In the tablets of Boghaz Keui Dr. Forrer finds no less than eight different languages represented, to which I have been able to add a ninth. One of these languages is what he calls Proto-Hittite, which was the real language of the country and is as unlike the official "language of the scribes" as Chinese is unlike Latin. There was, in fact, no relationship between them except in the matter of borrowed words, and it therefore becomes a question whether the official language, which we have hitherto termed Hittite, has any real right to the name. Since it was used, however, at Boghaz Keui, which bore the name of Kattusas "the Hittite" or "Silver lily," the word khattu signifying "silver," I think we are justified in retaining the old term and distinguishing the earlier language of the country as Proto-Hittite.
Another language which has been brought to light is that of the Kharri or Murri-the pronunciation of the name is still doubtful-who were emigrants from Mitanni or Northern Mesopotamia. One of the texts in the Kharrian language is a long epic in no less than fourteen tablets, by a certain poet Kesse, about the Babylonian hero Gilgames. The people of Mitanni -that is, "the land of Midas," afterwards famous in Phrygian legend-originally came from the Caucasus and preceded the Semitic Assyrians in the possession of Assur. The earliest High-Priests of Assur known to us bear Mitannian names, and the attributes assigned by the Assyrians to their god Assur were many of them of Mitannian origin, while the chief goddess of Assyria continued to be invoked by her Mitannian name of Sala, "the Lady."
The Mitannian Kharri were at one time employed as mercenaries by the Hittite Kings, but their place was afterwards supplied by the Khabiri, whose name is translated "Execu tioners." The Khabiri, once erroneously identified with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, formed the chief part of the royal body-guard; 600 of them, we are told, protected one part of the city and 600 the other part of it. I believe I have evidence showing that they were the original of the Greek Kabeiri, who consequently had nothing to do with the Phoenicians or a Phoenician word. The Khabiri were an old institution in Babylonia; Rim-Agum, the Arioch of Genesis and contemporary of Khammurabi, mentions them as among the mercenary troops who formed his body-guard. The Khabiri of the Tel-cl-Amarna tablets were the picked soldiers of the Hittite King.
The Hittite King was deified. His supreme title was "the Sun-god," not "the son of the Sun-god" as in Egypt, and he was regarded as the manifestation of the Sun-god here on earth. The belief survived into the later religions of Asia Minor; at Pessinus, for instance, as Sir W. M. Ramsay has shown, the High Priest of Athys was himself Athys and was accordingly addressed under that name. Whether religious worship was paid to the deified king during his lifetime we do not yet know: it was at any rate paid to him after his death in many cases. Most of the older Hittite Kings who reigned before the foundation of the Empire and when Boghaz Keui had not as yet become the capital, were included among the gods; one of the most popular gods indeed was Telibinus who reigned 2000 B.C., and a special cult was paid to Khasa-milis "the Swordsman," another king of the same period, in whom I see the Kabirite Kasmilos of Greek mythology.
Eastern Asia Minor had been at an early date the object of attack on the part of the Babylonian Kings, who were attracted to it by its metal-mines. Already, in the time of the 3rd dynasty of Ur, that is to say, B.C. 2400, a flourishing Babylonian colony was established
