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Updated: June 22, 2025
On the east, where the well organized and well armed societies of Babylonia and Assyria offered a serious obstacle to nomadic immigrants, the inflow had been pent back beyond frontier mountains. But in the west the tide seems to have flowed too strongly to be resisted by such force as the Hatti empire of Cappadocia could oppose, and to have swept through Asia Minor even to Syria and Mesopotamia.
It needed, therefore, only the appearance of some vigorous and numerous tribe in the province itself, or of some covetous power on its borders, to end such an empire. Both had appeared before Amenhetep's death the Amorites in mid Syria, and a newly consolidated Hatti power on the confines of the north.
Since the withdrawal of the strong hands of the Hatti from the north and the Egyptians from the south, the disorganized half-vacant land had been attracting to itself successive hordes of half-nomadic Semites from the eastern and southern steppes. By 1000 B.C. these had settled down as a number of Aramaean societies each under its princeling. All were great traders.
This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in the widest sense of this vague term. Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same passage of Herodotus.
The empire which pressed back the Egyptians is the last but one which we have to consider before 1000 B.C. It has long been known that the Hittites, variously called Kheta by Egyptians and Heth or Hatti by Semites and by themselves, developed into a power in westernmost Asia at least as early as the fifteenth century; but it was not until their cuneiform archives were discovered in 1907 at Boghazkeui in northern Cappadocia that the imperial nature of their power, the centre from which it was exerted, and the succession of the rulers who wielded it became clear.
But these Mushki had so far adopted Hatti civilization either before or since their great raiding expedition which Tiglath Pileser I of Assyria repelled, that their domination can scarcely have made much difference to the social condition of Asia Minor. Their capital was probably where the Hatti capital had been at Boghazkeui; but how far their lordship radiated from that centre is not known.
But whether this uniformity of civilization implies any general overlord, such as the Mushki king, is very questionable. The past supremacy of the Hatti is enough to account for large community of social features in 1000 B.C. over all Asia Minor and north Syria.
If Phrygia was powerful enough in the ninth century to hold the west Anatolian lands in fee, did it also dominate enough of the eastern peninsula to be ranked the imperial heir of the Cappadocian Hatti? The identity in question is so generally accepted nowadays that it has become a commonplace of historians to speak of the "Mushki-Phrygians." Very possibly they are right.
These men had ventured so far to seize the rich lands at the mouths of the long Anatolian valleys, from which their roving forefathers had been almost entirely debarred by the provincial forces of some inland power, presumably the Hatti Empire of Cappadocia.
Rameses II, in dividing it to his own great disadvantage with the Hatti king by a Treaty whose provisions are known to us from surviving documents of both parties, confessed Egyptian impotence to make good any contested claim; and by the end of the thirteenth century the hand of Pharaoh was withdrawn from Asia, even from that ancient appanage of Egypt, the peninsula of Sinai.
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