DAWN ON THE MOUNTAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 14

DAWN ON THE MOUNTAIN

NARROW PASS, BLACK MOUNTAIN: The Discovery of the Hittite Empire, by C. W. Ceram; Victor Gollancz, with Sedgwick and Jackson, English price 25/-. F we count archaeology as a science and not (like history?) as one of the humanities, there can be no lack of imagination in science. For what else have you when the only wisps of evidence for your history of a nation are the odds and ends of the refuse-dump or the fragments left from fire and sword; or when your task could have been lightened by scraps of carved inscriptions if only you could have read them? For the latter you have to enter upon the "black art of deciphering texts," in which "nothing can be deciphered out of nothing," and where nothing, neither script nor hieroglyphics, contains a clue. And if for the former you have the "wearisome routine lines of modern archaeology," at least there is the hopeful if remote possibility of finding something really exciting. It was a prize to find at Narrow Pass, less than 100 miles from Ankara, a clay tablet with the Hittite version of a treaty with Egypt, the counterpart of hieroglyphics cut in the rock wall at Abu Simbul, where the new Aswan lake will submerge them if Colonel Nasser has his way. It was another prize to unearth within a few yards of one another on Black Mountain a readily readable Phoenician inscription and its counterpart in Hittite hieroglyphics, the "bilingual" searched for for seventy years. But it was imaginative insight accompanying deep scholarship that found the key to the hieroglyphics. All this, which could have been tedious, is mace alive and vivid in Ceram’s story. He is not himself an archaeologist, "only" a writer, an onlooker, but one who allowed very little of the game to escape him. As an onlooker we can allow him to take sides, as he does unashamedly barracking for the Hittites against the Egyptians in the one great Battle of Kadesh, 1296 BC: His enthusiastic narrative runs ahead, as did Mawatallis’s new battle-chariots, and a few conclusions: seem to escape consolidation. Perhaps it does not matter so much who won. (Major Burne argued cogently that it was Rameses.) Ceram is as much at ease with politics as with war, with poetry as with detailed scholarship, as the Hittites loom into history, stand, out clearly for five hundred years, and abruptly and unaccount-

ably disappear.

Gilbert

Archey