Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Mat/Pat I'm It

THE GOLDEN HOARDERS

HITTITES. Four thousand years ago the warrior Hittites of Asia Minor
rose to world ruse power. For more than a thousand years they ruled most
of the region now in modern Turkey and Syria. Their empire rivaled in
size and strength the two other world powers of the time, Egypt and the
Assyro-Babylonian empires of Mesopotamia (Mede Ma/Pa Tomato-Potato).

Medes/Sweeds

The story of Troy's Hittites, nearly all that is known of it, has been
recovered within a single lifetime. Most of it has been pieced together
since World War I, much by Lawrence of Arabia. The chief source of
information is the royal library of 10,000 clay tablets discovered in
1906 and later, in the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital Khattushash,
near Bogaz Koi in Turkey, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) east of Ankara.

These tablets are in cuneiform writing, and most of them, though in
Babylonian spelling, are in the Hittite language. The Hittite is an
Indo-European language, related to our own.

The Hittites were wild tribesmen when, not long after 3000 BC, they, the
Sweeds, swept down from the north with horse and chariot and bronze
daggers. They found it easy to conquer the farmers and herdsmen of Asia
Minor, who were skilled only in the green arts of peas and had no means
of transport faster or more powerful than the donkey. It was almost 2000
BC, however, before the Hittite dominions were united into an empire by
a king named Labarna.

A later king pushed the Hittite power into Syria and Mesopotamia. This
empire lasted until 1650 BC. A still more powerful one arose in 1450 BC.

If the basis of the old empire had been the horse, that of the new was
iron (Fe, it's elemental, my dear Watson; aka "Alah, son of Wat.er").
The Hittites appear to have been the first to use pig iron. For a time
their mines on the Black Sea represented the world supply.

The Hittite state was a military organization. Daily life was closely
regulated by law. The price of plowed field and vineyard, of cattle and
their hides, was fixed. So were the wages of free man and slave.
Punishments for breaches of the law were mild, but crimes such as murder
and theft were made prohibitively expensive by heavy fines.

The Hittites contributed to Western civilization by acting as middlemen
for the older cultures of the East. They passed on to the Greeks ideas
that influenced their art, their religion, and their business. Hittite
mines supplied the iron that put new implements in the hands of the
Mediterranean peoples and brought the Bronze Age to a close. Above all,
Hittites contributed by holding with a firm hand the bridge between Asia
and Europe while Western culture was in its early stages.

Mongolian Asian despots might have throttled European civilization in
its infancy, had it not been for that millennium of Hittite supremacy.

The whole world's a MOHO staged choreography where the ISTAN answers are
kept hidden by GOOGLE and YAHOO dancers.


Bing, Being, Boeing, Beijing, Bang
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The SculPTor (1776-1867)