Page 146 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

ASIA MINOR AND THE HITTITES
standards of plate 123 arc the earliest Hittitc works of art. Unfortunately there is a break
__evidence between the period of the tombs of Ala^a Hiiyiik and the empire. The
in our
beginning of the second millennium was a period of disturbance and the Hittites suffered
much from dissensions within the ruling class.

The I-Iittite Empire (circa 1400-1200 b.c.)
In the fourteenth century b.c. a great king, Suppiluliumas, created order in Cappadocia,
defeated Mitanni in north Syria and penetrated, about 1360 b.c., far into Syria and
northern Palestine. Li these regions the Egyptian vassals were inadequately supported by
the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who was absorbed in his religious reforms. A distinctive Hittite
art was created at this time, which lasted until about 1200 b.c., when barbarian hordes
overran Anatolia and the Levant.
The originality of Hittite art is marked and the quality of its best sculpture is high. It
has no antecedents in Anatolia, and if the notion that lions and monsters should guard a
palace entrance was derived from Mesopotamia14 it was developed in an unprecedented
manner. Instead of the bronze statues of Al ‘Ubaid and Mari, and the pottery lions of
Khafaje and Tell Harmal, we find, in Anatolia, large figures cut in stone and forming an
indissoluble part of the architecture. When these guardians are sphinxes instead of lions
(Plate 1 28b) the borrowing of the motif emphasizes the originality of its application;
they wear a head-dress recalling (though differing in detail from) the fashion of Egyptian
women of the Middle Kingdom. Yet the sphinx probably reached Asia Minor by way
of Syria, where the male symbol of Pharaoh’s superhuman strength was converted
into a female monster. The ‘winged disk’ reached Anatolia from the same quarter.
It was originally derived from Egypt, where it symbolized Horus, the sky- and sun-
god who was immanent in Pharaoh and manifest in the form of a falcon. But when it
crowns royal names on Hittite monuments (Plate 130B) it assumes a distinctively Syrian
form, exemplified (like the female sphinx) in Syrian seals of the middle of the second
millennium.15 But such derivations are of minor importance, since Hittite art as a whole
possesses a pronounced individuality. Before we turn to Hittite art we shall describe its
architectural setting.
Architecture

For the foundations and the lower parts of public buildings stone was commonly used,
either in the form of rough blocks or, later, in that of dressed stones. Sometimes the
lowest course of a wall, which rested on a foundation of rough blocks, consisted of finely
worked slabs set on edge (orthostats). The upper portions of the walls were built of sun-
dried bricks strengthened widi wooden beams. This technique, as well as the use of
orthostats, is found in north Syria, at Atchana (Alalakh) in the plain of Antioch, several
centuries earlier (see below, p. 127), and we do not know whether it reached Anatolia,
together with such motifs as the winged disk or the sphinx, and the Hurrian gods which
entered the Hittite pantheon, from Syria, or whether it has its antecedents hi an older
and common architectural tradition.

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