§ II Hittite Monuments in Cappadocia
A canton of ancient Cappadocia, the Pteria of Herodotus, on the Halys, where the first meeting between Cyrus and Crœsus took place, contains a considerable number of Hittite ruins which have been particularly explored by MM. Perrot and Guillaume, and form a group by themselves in the history of oriental art. The village of Boghaz-Keui, the ancient capital of the Pterians has still, besides its fortifications 3¾ miles in circumference, bas-reliefs carved upon rocks which are called Iasili-Kaïa, “the inscribed stone,” and remains of buildings not completely indistinguishable. The royal palace, almost rased to the level of the ground, is a parallelogram 136 ft. by 185 ft. In the blocks which compose the wall, holes are observed for iron clamps, as in the Achæmenid edifices; as in the latter also, the stones are large but irregular; the upper portion of the wall was of brick-work, as at Nineveh and Persepolis; lastly, the palace of Boghaz-Keui was built on an artificial terrace. In the arrangement of the rooms, details peculiar to princely residences in all oriental countries are to be recognised. The principal door forms an independent structure, to be compared to that of the palace at Khorsabad: it is 58 ft. high; two lions’ heads, original in style, project on each side of the aperture, above monolithic doorposts.
The palace of Euyuk, as well as that of Boghaz-Keui, presents striking features of resemblance to those of Nineveh; its terrace, 812 ft. square, still rises to the height of 39 ft. The corners are turned towards the four cardinal points. The principal doorway is 11 ft. broad,71 and on each side stand two sphinxes, in place of the human-headed bulls. Next to these, all along the façade, was a series of bas-reliefs, the arrangement of which was the same as that upon the façades of Khorsabad and Kouyunjik; only, the sphinx, which is not Assyrian, discloses another foreign influence—that of Egypt. Cappadocian art was able to interpret the Egyptian type, and, on this occasion, did not limit itself to a dull copy. “In Egypt,” observes M. Perrot, “the sphinx, to whatever variety of the type it belongs, is always represented in the reclining posture, never standing as here: instead of being treated as a bas-relief and placed in front of the doorway, it is sculptured in the round and set on both sides of the entrance, perpendicular to the path, towards the axis of which it looks.”72 Besides, in the sphinxes on the banks of the Nile, the extremities of the hair, on each side of the head, fall straight without forming the curls which we see here. At Euyuk, the Egyptian sphinx is treated in the Assyrian style; the place which it occupies on the sides of the doorway, and the position of its paws, turn it into a sort of compromise between Egypt and Assyria, which vied with one another in this land of Cappadocia, in artistic influence as in political preponderance.
This double tendency is also observed at Iasili-Kaïa. Here a rectangular chamber has been found 81 ft. by 37½ ft., hewn in the rock on three sides; the walls are covered with bas-reliefs forming a plinth.
Another smaller chamber and a corridor contain similar sculptures; the height of the figures varies from 4 ft. 6 in. to 2 ft. 3 in. Two processions of figures go round the larger chamber and meet one another: on the right, women dressed in long robes with trains, their hair falling upon their shoulders, wearing a round tiara like the women at Marash; on the left the men, with the conical cap assigned by Herodotus to the Cimmerians, and a short tunic reaching no lower than the knees in front, but longer behind. In each group the figures grow larger in proportion to their nearness to the centre. Many of them are not human beings, but winged genii, satyrs with goats’ feet, dog-headed monsters. Nearly all hold in their hands sceptres, curved staves, two-edged hatchets; some stand upon quadrupeds. Two are seen perched upon a two-headed eagle; another, accompanied by a kid, stands on the shoulders of two porters.
Close to the entrance of this vast hall, a separate relief represents a giant standing on two mountains. This personage holds in his right hand a shrine, and in his left hand has a sort of long staff, the lower end of which is curved like a crosier; he wears a hemispherical skull-cap, and is dressed in a long robe open at the side. The shrine which this deity holds is provided with two Ionic columns supporting the winged disk; beneath the disk is a figure between two bulls seen in full face. At some distance a group of two figures is observed. One of them, of colossal proportions, is found elsewhere standing upon a quadruped. Here, he wears a highly decorated conical tiara, and is armed with a sword and clothed in a short tunic. He stretches out his right hand as if to carry or to seize a child standing before him. The second figure, protected by the deity, who passes his left arm round his neck and holds his hand, is the same as he whom we noticed just before.
The sculptures which decorate the walls of the vestibule in the palace of Euyuk have so great an analogy to those of Iasili-Kaïa that it is impossible not to recognise their common style and origin. We observe among them a woman, seated upon a throne, with her hair flowing down upon her shoulders, decorated with a necklace and bracelets, who reminds us of the Assyrian queen sharing the banquet of Assurbanipal; she raises a goblet to her lips, and holds a flower in her hand.
All these scenes are priestly and religious, and not, as in Assyria, devoted to the glory of the king and to the memory of his warlike exploits. They refer to the worship of the god Mên or of the goddess Mâ or Enio, the Cappadocian name of Anaïtis or Astarte, whose rites Strabo describes as performed in the two towns of Comana.
To this Cappadocian civilisation, again, purely oriental and anterior to Greek influence as it is, the sculpture of tombs observed at Gherdek-Kaïasi, near Boghaz-Keui and Euyuk, must be referred. The principal of these caves hewn in the rock, like those of Phœnicia and Nakhsh-i-Rustam, has a façade adorned with a portico with three low colonnades, the style of which closely resembles the Greek Doric order (fig. 161). At the extremities of this portico are the doors of two chambers intended to contain sarcophagi. Both of them have windows opened in the wall of rock; the sepulchral couches are hewn in the wall like alcoves. There is something in these monuments which partakes of the character both of the Phrygian tombs and of those of Nakhsh-i-Rustam; and perhaps they are not anterior to the destruction of Pteria by Crœsus in B.C. 549.
To sum up: we must conclude, with M. Perrot,73 that the monuments of Boghaz-Keui and Euyuk, witnesses of primitive Cappadocian civilisation, underwent Assyrian influence as well as those of Northern Syria. The palaces look like “a reduced copy of the great royal edifices on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.” The winged figures, the monsters with eagles’ and lions’ heads, are Assyrian, and so are the deities borne on the backs of different quadrupeds, the flowers in the hands of the figures and the winged disk, the symbol of the deity. Various elements of the Cappadocian sculptures seem, upon no less evidence, to have been borrowed from Egypt, Persia, and even from the Greeks of Asia Minor, but this is exceptional. In any case there is nothing original and individual in this Hittite art of Pteria, except the eagle with two heads (fig. 162), which is evidently connected with the most ancient Asiatic worship, and suggests reminiscences of the Sirens; except also the long curved lituus, the robe cut in the form of a chasuble, the peaked tiara, the pointed shoes; details of dress more interesting for the history of costume than for that of art.
The connection of the sculptures of Pteria with those of Hittite Syria is quite clear; there are the same hieroglyphs, the same short tunic, the same long robe, the same shoes, the same peaked tiara, and the same round skull-cap. The female garments are almost identical at Marash and Iasili-Kaïa; the deities have similar attributes; the lion and the bull are the animals which both regions prefer to represent. We must conclude that the same semi-barbarous race, powerless to free itself, whether in art or politics, from the yoke of Egypt and Assyria, inhabited both the slopes of the Taurus; we will now examine how far this Hittite race extended its branches towards the west, and what monuments it left in Asia Minor beyond the Halys.