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Seven years ago I wrote: ‘to claim the Pelopids as “Hittites” is really to appeal too much to the imagination as an aid to the writing of history.’ But it is dangerous to be too unimaginative.
The name of Oinomaos' treacherous charioteer, whom Pelops afterwards cast into the Myrtoan sea, and to whom as the ταράξιππος Pelops thereafter made offering at his grave and cenotaph, was Myrtilos. The same word, in the form Myrsilos, was not uncommon as a personal name in Asia Minor. Herodotus mentions it as a name for Kandaules; and the tyrant of Mytilene is well known.
The recent discoveries of Dr. Winckler at Boghaz Kyöi have revealed to us an archive of cuneiform tablets, consisting of letters, despatches, and royal decrees of the well-known Hittite kings of the fourteenth century B.C. whose names have hitherto been known to us, on the authority of their Egyptian transcriptions, as ‘Seplel’ or ‘Saparuru,’ ‘Maurasar,’ ‘Mautenro,’ and ‘Khetasar.’
1 Oldest Civilization of Greece, p. 123.
2 Paus. vi. 20.
3 Hdt. i 7.
4 Alc. fr. 4b; Strabo, xiii. 617.
5 Mitt. der deutschen Orient-Gesllschaft, No. 35 (Dec. 1907).
6 The identity with the name of the Lesbian tyrant was pointed out by Winckler, , Or. Litt. Ztg. Dec. 1906Google Scholar.
7 Pape-Benseler, 947.
8 The tale of the warlike Amazons on the Thermodon may well be a very ancient legend which reached Greece from the Euxine; cf. the beardless Khatti warriors (the Hittites are always represented by the Egyptians as shaven) and their effeminate priests. Smyrna, Magnesia, Thyatira, and Ephesus, were said to have been built by the Amazons. Other traditions, such as the legend of Memnon, son of Aurora, sent by Teutamos, King of Assyria, with two hundred chariots to help Priam his vassal (Diod. ii. 22), have often been quoted, and probably rightly, as referring to the Hittites. The Amazons also came to Troy, under Penthesileia, and it is not impossible that the Amazonian invasion of Attica to avenge the carrying-off of Hippolyta by Theseus really indicates some faraway memory of an invasion of the Greek mainland by the Hittites.
9 Prof.Bury, (History of Greece, p. 54Google Scholar), ignoring the legends, makes Pelops a ‘native god,’ whose ‘worship had taken deep root at Pisa on the banks of the river Alpheus.’ He was afterwards ‘degraded to the rank of a hero.’ But why should not the legends have some truth in them?
10 De Cara's general theory (in gli Hctei e gli loro Migrazioni) remains as impossible as ever: it is not to be believed that Italia is ‘Hat-alia,’ the ‘Land of the Hittites,’ who came there from Asia. But that a Hittite conqueror reached Greece is possible and even probable.
11 Winckler, loc. cit. p. 18.
12 Actual contact seems to be shown at the fortress of Giaur Kalessi in Phrygia, which the expedition of Cornell University is said to have discovered to be Mycenaean, in plan (The Nation, 17 Oct. 1907Google Scholar). On the rocks on which Giaur Kalessi stands are two famous Hittite figures, probably representing a king following a warrior god (Teshub?). The king wears the Egyptian uraeus and therefore is probably not Mursil, but one of the successors of Khattusil, either Dûdhâlia or Arnuanta, in whose time (1250–1200 B.C.) relations with Egypt were good, and imitations of Egyptian court ways and dress may well have been introduced by Egyptian queens (Rameses II. married Khattusil's daughter, and no doubt Egyptian princesses were often married to Hittite kings). There is no trace on these Giaur Kalessi figures of the later affectation of Assyrian dress (see the illustration in Perrot-Chipiez, iv. Fig. 352). The date of 1250–1200 B.C. for these sculptures would agree very well with a ‘Mycenaean’ plan of the fortress, by which is presumably meant a Northern (Achaian?) rather than a ‘Minoan’ Cretan type of building.
13 Winckler, loc. cit. p. 51.
14 The passage reads ‘ilâni Mîtra-aššîl ilâni Urûna (var. Arûna)-aŝŝîl, ilu Indar (var. Indara), ilâni Našattîâna,’ ‘(gods) Mitra, (gods) Urûna, (god) Indara, (gods) Našattîâ.’ The termination -aššîl is probably the Mitannian nominative suffix plural (?), and -na must be a dual form; Našattîâna = Sk. Nāsatyau (Açvinau). Why Mitra and Varuna are plural, their names being determined by the sign ‘gods’ instead of ‘god’ as in Indra's case, may perhaps be explained by Vedic scholars. It will be noticed that the gods follow in their natural order, Varuna with Mitra, but that apparently the combination Mitra-Varuna is not indicated, the two being quite separate, while the Açvins are brothers, as always. I might with diffidence suggest that the combination of Mitra and Varuna was already known, and that this is indicated by the plural determinative in the case of each. [The conventional Semitic Babylonian value of the determinative ideogram of deity (AN 
plur. AN. AN. 
AN. MEŠ 
or AN. ME. 
we are uncertain which form is used in this case, as Prof. Winckler has not yet published the cuneiform original), viz. ilu, pl. ilâni, is given by Winckler, but it is not to be supposed that a Mitannian reader would have read it as ilu or ilâni: if in this case he pronounced it at all, he would give it its value in his own language, and this is unknown to us.]
15 Sitzber. der kgl. preuss. Akad. 1907. The fact that the forms of the names are Indian and Vedic rather than Iranian (e.g. the Iranian form of the Vedic Nāsatya-name is given by Hillebrandt, , Vedische Mythologie, iii. 380Google Scholar2, as Nāṅhaithya) is very important. The division between Indians and Iranians had apparently not yet taken place in the fourteenth century B.C.
16 That is, assuming that the non-Aryan languages, Lycian and Carian, are typical tongues of the Anatolian-Aegean section of the Mediterranean. Kretschmer, (Einleitung, pp. 373, 377Google Scholar) has sufficiently shown that neither Lycian nor Carian was Indo-European. Therefore they are no more related to Iranian than they were to Greek (Prof.Ridgeway, , Early Age of Greece, i. p. 211Google Scholar, seems to have misapprehended Kretschmer on this point). And the religion of Anatolia was hardly Aryan in general character; those of its gods who are evidently of Aryan origin were foreign importations, Mitra from the Indo-Iranian East, Papas or Bagaios from the Phrygian-Thracian North-west.
17 Cf. Meyer, loc. cit. p. 17. Prof. Meyer has pointed out that the Mitannian royal names Sauššatar, Artatama, etc., are Aryan.
18 Their royal names, Shubbiluliuma, Aranda, Mursil, and the rest, seem typically kleinasiatisch (non-Aryan) in form.
19 None of the gods represented in the sanctuary of Khatti at Yassili Kayà, near Boghaz Kyöi, can be identified with the Aryan deities we have named. In the Vedas the sacred animal of Indra is the bull, and he rides upon horses. In later Indian iconography Indra, spangled with stars to represent the heavens, rides upon an elephant, which in the Rig-Veda is yet unknown as his animal. Some of the gods at Yassili Kayà stand upon animals, and this type of representation was characteristic of Anatolian religious iconography to the last. At Saktchegözü, south of the Taurus, Prof. Garstang has recently discovered, in the rains of the Hittite palace there, a relief showing a god riding upon a stag. These representations are certainly closely analogous to the Indian concatenation of animals with deities, the Nandi bull with Siva, the elephant with Indra, and so on. They may not impossibly in Anatolia be of Iranian origin, but no Aryan deity can be identified at Yassili Kayà, where we see only the Great Mother, with probably her son Attis, and various forms of the elder male deity, Teshub, whom the Egyptians called Sutekh. It is, nevertheless, possible that the worship of Mithras (Mitra), and perhaps also that of Mên, the moon-god, reached Anatolia from the east at this time. Mên seems more probably of Iranian than of European (Phrygo-Thracian) origin. Mâô the Iranian moon-god, who goes with Mitra, was represented on the coins of the Indo-Scythic king Kanishka by the same type as was Mên on Anatolian coins (Gardner, P., Coins of the Greek and Scythian Kings of Bactria, Pl. XXVI. 9Google Scholar), namely with the moon behind his shoulders, just as on the coins of Huvishka he has the sun behind him (P. Gardner, loc. cit. Pl. XXVI. 4). [This, by the way, seems to render doubtful Prof. SirRamsay's, William idea (Cities of St. Paul, p. 286Google Scholar), that the supposed moon behind the shoulders of Mên is not a moon at all, but a development of wings as represented in archaic art. If it is not the moon in the case of Mên and Mâô, it is at least curious that Mitra, the sun-god and counterpart of Mâô the moon-god, has on the Bactrian coins an undoubted sun in the same position as the ‘wings’ of Mên and Mâô.]