, sometime
shortly before or after 2000 B.C. About 1800 B.C. a Hittite raid
resulted in the overthrow of the last king of the Hammurabi family at
Babylon. The Hyksos invasion of Egypt took place after 1788 B.C.

CHAPTER XII.

RISE OF THE HITTITES, MITANNIANS, KASSITES, HYKSOS, AND ASSYRIANS

The War God of Mountaineers--Antiquity of Hittite
Civilization--Prehistoric Movements of "Broad Heads"--Evidence of
Babylon and Egypt--Hittites and Mongolians--Biblical References to
Hittites in Canaan--Jacob's Mother and her Daughters-in-law--Great
Father and Great Mother Cults--History in Mythology--The Kingdom of
Mitanni--Its Aryan Aristocracy--The Hyksos Problem--The Horse in
Warfare--Hittites and Mitannians--Kassites and Mitannians--Hyksos
Empire in Asia--Kassites overthrow Sealand Dynasty--Egyptian
Campaigns in Syria--Assyria in the Making--Ethnics of
Genesis--Nimrod as Merodach--Early Conquerors of Assyria--Mitannian
Overlords--Tell-el-Amarna Letters--Fall of Mitanni--Rise of Hittite
and Assyrian Empires--Egypt in Eclipse--Assyrian and Babylonian
Rivalries.

When the Hammurabi Dynasty, like the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt, is
found to be suffering languid decline, the gaps in the dulled
historical records are filled with the echoes of the thunder god,
whose hammer beating resounds among the northern mountains. As this
deity comes each year in Western Asia when vegetation has withered and
after fruits have dropped from trees, bringing tempests and black
rainclouds to issue in a new season of growth and fresh activity, so
he descended from the hills in the second millennium before the
Christian era as the battle lord of invaders and the stormy herald of
a new age which was to dawn upon the ancient world.

He was the war god of the Hittites as well as of the northern
Amorites, the Mitannians, and the Kassites; and he led the Aryans from
the Iranian steppes towards the verdurous valley of the Punjab. His
worshippers engraved his image with grateful hands on the beetling
cliffs of Cappadocian chasms in Asia Minor, where his sway was
steadfast and pre-eminent for long centuries. In one locality he
appears mounted on a bull wearing a fringed and belted tunic with
short sleeves, a conical helmet, and upturned shoes, while he grasps
in one hand the lightning symbol, and in the other a triangular bow
resting on his right shoulder. In another locality he is the bringer
of grapes and barley sheaves