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100 January Reviews of Books The Hittites. By A. E. Cowley, D.Litt. (The Schweich Lectures for 1918. London : published for the British Academy, 1920.) In the publication of the Schweich Lectures for 1918 Bodley's librarian gives the learned world a very adequate monograph on that remarkable ancient people, the Khatti of Anatolia and northern Syria, the rivals of Kamesside Egypt for the hegemony of western Asia, the sculptors of the remarkable monuments of Boghaz Keui and the hieroglyphs of Car- chemish, and no doubt the ' Hittites ' of the Bible. Now that we know that Hittites and Mitannians had penetrated into southern Palestine before 1400 B.C., and lived there cheek by jowl with the Canaanite natives, there need be no doubt as to this identification. The excavations of the British Museum at Carchemish, directed by Mr. D. G. Hogarth and now being carried on by Mr. Woolley, have lately again turned our attention to the monuments of the children of Heth, and the publication by Professor Hrozny, of Vienna university, of his remarkable studies of their language as revealed to us through a cuneiform medium in the tablets of Boghaz Keui presents us with an insistent problem in the question of their nationality. Dr. Cowley delivered his lectures before Dr. Hrozny had published the second series of his studies, in which he has carried still further his interpretation of cuneiform Hittite. And so perhaps Dr. Cowley was not able to do full justice to Dr. Hrozny's work ; a note in the preface admits that the professor has since produced new arguments in favour of his views. I myself shall not be accused of any partiality if I frankly confess to being very much impressed by the Austrian professor's results. I have always hitherto thought that the Hittites must be of non-Aryan blood and language, but whether akin to the allophylic inhabitants of the Caucasus on the one hand or to the Minoans on the other it would be hard to say. Their physiognomy, as we see it faithfully represented on the Egyptian monuments, was not like that of the Minoans. Yet the curious parallels between Hittites and Etruscans and the Italian rather than Greek traits in the Minoans pointed to an Italian connexion for both. And now Dr. Hrozny tells us that the Hittites not only spoke an Aryan language, but one that looks more like Latin than anything else ; he says they said kuitkuit for quidquid, for example. Now Dr. Hrozny is well known as a most capable and learned cuneiform scholar. His transliteration of the language of the Boghaz Keui tablets is open to no criticism or doubt whatever. And if the language he reads is Indo-