Note 45.1 — Chapter III · The Morphology of the Compared Religions.

It is still more important for us to know the stage reached by the Hittite religion in this early period; for in the latter half of the second millennium the influence of the Hittite culture had more chance of touching the earliest Greek societies than had that of the remote Mesopotamia or of the inaccessible Canaanites. In the last thirty years the explorers of Asia Minor, notably Sir William Ramsay and Dr. Hogarth, have done inestimable service to the comparative study of the Mediterranean area by the discovery and interpretation of the monuments of Hittite art: and the greatest of them all, the rock-cut reliefs of Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, has given material to Dr. Frazer for constructing an elaborate theory of Hittite sacrifice in his ‘Attis, Adonis, Osiris.’ But, before dealing with the Hittite monuments, the student should note the literary evidence which is offered by the treaty inscribed on a silver tablet (circ. 1290 B.C.) found in Egypt, which was ratified between Ramses II. and the Hittite King Chattusar;45.1 the witnesses to the treaty are the thousand gods and goddesses of the Hittite land and the thousand gods and goddesses of Egypt. We are certainly here not dealing with mere vague pluralities of spirits, such as may be found in an animistic system of Shamanism; the thousand is only a vague numeral for the plurality of divinities in the Hittite and Egyptian polytheism; the difference of sex would alone suffice to prove that the Hittite had developed the cult of personal deities, and the document expressly quotes the great heaven-god of the Hittites, called by the Egyptian name Sutekh, and regarded as compeer of the Egyptian Ra. Other personal Hittite deities are alluded to in the document, and among them appears to be mentioned a certain “Antheret of the land of Kheta.”45.2 Possibly a witness of still earlier date speaks in the Tel-Amarna letters, the earliest diplomatic correspondence in the world; one of these, written in cuneiform to Amenhotep III., in the fifteenth century B.C., is from Tushratta, the King of the Mitani people.45.3 Tushratta sends his daughter in marriage to Pharaoh, and prays that “Shamash and Ishtar may go before her,” and that Amon may “make her correspond to my brother’s wish.” He even dispatches a statue of Ishtar of Nineveh, that “she may exercise her beneficent power in the land of Egypt”; for she had revealed her desire by an oracle—“to Egypt to the land that I love will I go.”