neiform records which
make mention of the "Khata" or Hittites. Their name is found also on the
monuments of the kings of Ararat or Armenia who reigned in the ninth and
eighth centuries before our era, and who had borrowed from Nineveh the
cuneiform system of writing. But the Khata of these Vannic or Armenian
texts lived considerably to the north of the Hittites of the Bible and
of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments. The country they inhabited lay
in eastern Asia Minor in the neighbourhood of the modern Malatiyeh.
Here, in fact, was their original home.

Thanks to the Egyptian artists, we are well acquainted with the Hittite
physical type. It was not handsome. The nose was unduly protrusive,
while the chin and the forehead retreated. The cheeks were square with
prominent bones, and the face was beardless. In colour the Hittites were
yellow-skinned with black hair and eyes. They seem to have worn their
hair in three long plaits which fell over the back like the pigtail of a
Chinaman, and they were distinguished by the use of boots with upturned
toes.

We might perhaps imagine that the Egyptian artists have caricatured
their adversaries. But this is not the case. Precisely the same profile
of face, sometimes even exaggerated in its ugliness, is represented on
the Hittite monuments by the native sculptors themselves. It is one of
the surest proofs we possess that these monuments, with their still
undeciphered inscriptions, are of Hittite origin. They belong to the
people whom Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Armenians united in
calling Hittites.

In marked contrast to the Hittites stood the Amorites. They too are
depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. While the
Hittite type of features is Mongoloid, that of the Amorite is European.
His nose is straight and somewhat pointed, his lips and nostrils thin,
his cheek-bones high, his mouth firm and regular, his forehead
expressive of intelligence. He has a fair amount of whisker, ending in a
pointed beard. At Abu-Simbel the skin is painted a pale yellow--the
Egyptian equivalent for white--his eyes blue, and his beard and eyebrows
red. At Medinet Habu, his skin, as Prof. Petrie expresses it, is "rather
pinker than flesh-colour," while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at
Thebes it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown.

The Amorite, it is clear, must be classed with the fair-skinned,
blue-eyed Libyans of the Egyptian monuments, wh