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Page 1: A great Indo-European civilization - Barnes Reviewbarnesreview.org/pdf/TBR2012-no2-4-12.pdfA great Indo-European civilization ... wish to see it in aProto-Indo-European people,the

This intricate architecture adorns the side of an ornate Hittite tem-ple. Here a guide points to a lion head surrounded by stylized foliageabove a border of swastikas.The Hittites were a tolerant polytheisticnation and boasted of having 1,000 gods—many adopted fromneighboring and subject peoples. The Hittites recognized equalitybetween men and women and gave rights to slaves. No other legalsystem in the world at that time was so humane. At a time whenbrutal treatment of enemy prisoners was customary, the Hittiteswere compassionate and civilized, even by today’s standards. Somebelieve the Hittites were the first people to craft objects in iron.

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A great Indo-European civilizationruled Anatolia (in Asia Minor) for cen-turies, and it spread all the way to north-ern Syria. But this great Aryan civilizationwas virtually forgotten for three millen-nia, until rediscovered in the 1800s. . . .

BY WILLIAM WHITE

During the great migration of the Indo-Euro-pean peoples off of the Central Asian plains,a branch of the Indo-Iranian family shot outinto Anatolia—modern Turkey—and found-

ed an empire that would last a millennium, and whichwould profoundly reflect both theNordo-Germanic cul-ture of which it was a part, and influence the develop-ment of Classical Greek, and thusWestern, civilization.Yet the culture of theHittiteswas buried formillennia inthe mountains of what today is central Turkey.

Even after it was discovered, it has been the subjectof intense debate, with scholars intent on deconstruct-ing the Indo-Europeanmigration hypothesis making it,like the more obscure-to-the-man-in-the-street Hurri-ans, the target of intense criticism and attacks.

Yet the Hittites were certainly an Indo-Europeanpeople, distantly tied to the Indo-Iranian languagegroup, and, thus, the Nordic/Germanic culture, as their

Who Were theHittites?

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Above, a rock relief at Yazlikaya shows Hittite KingTudhaliya IV embraced in the left arm of a god, eitherTeshub or Sarruma. The god holds a smaller figure inhis right hand. The god wears a high, pointed cap whilethe king is hard to make out, due to erosion. Tudhaliyais credited with giving the rock-cut chambers at Yaz-likaya their final shape. On the cover this issue, two Hit-tite statues reveal their physiognomy as Aryan. On thelower right is a small portion of the great Lion Gate thatallowed entrance into the Hittite capital of Hattusa. Seepage 21 for an aerial view of the ruins of Hattusa.

EXPLODING MAINSTREAM MYTHS ABOUT AN ANCIENT ARYAN PEOPLE

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language, religion and culture clearly show. [Hittite isthe oldest Indo-European language for which we haverecords—older even than Sanskrit. Its nearest linguisticrelatives, all comprising the Anatolian subfamily of lan-guages, include Palaic, Lydian, Luwian and Lycian, allextinct now.—Ed.]

Hittite history is divided, roughly, into three peri-ods—the Old Kingdom, the interregnum, or Hurrian oc-cupation, and the “New Empire,” or just “Imperial,”period. The OId Kingdom begins in approximately the18th century B.C., but the Hittites are believed to haveentered AsiaMinor beforehand (whether by sea, via theHellespont, or over the CaucasusMountains is unclear).Two other Indo-European peoples, the Luwians and thepeople of Pala, entered at the same time, and the differ-ences that developed among their languages has causedthe extrapolation that all three must have been in AsiaMinor at least 400 years before their languages areknown in written form. [The Hurrian, Hattic and Urar-taean languages are related to the northeast Caucasianlanguages, according to some scholars.—Ed.]

It is believed the Luwian people entered Asia Minorover the Hellespont from the Balkans. Early Anatolianculture, pre-Hittite Old Kingdom, has produced arti-facts, including copper bull statues, that appear to be

derivative or part of “kurgan culture,” which was theculture of the Aryans on the Eurasian steppes. Tracingthese artifacts has caused some archeologists to believethe Luwians conquered the city of Troy, renaming it Ilos,and initially spread along the west coast of Asia Minorinto the south, either adopting or founding the cultureof Minoan Crete.

Thiswould be in accordancewith theGreekmythicalhistory of Teucer (Teucrus or Teucris, son of King Tela-mon of Salamis Island), but there are issueswith it—par-ticularly the fact that Minoan culture, prior to theMykenaean conquest, does not appear to have been Indo-European. Further, if this was the case, then the Luwiansadopted the cult of theGreatMother Goddess, discussedbelow, which was definitely not Indo-European in form.Arguing somewhat in favor of this interpretation is theknown relationship between the culture of the Etruscansand the cultures of western Asia Minor, and the fact thatone version of the Etruscan migration myth, that givenin Herodotus, claiming descent from the Lydians, is aproto-version of the Germanic migrationmyth known inJordanes, The Swabian Chronicle, Geoffrey of Mon-mouth, Saxo Grammaticus and others (and detailed byViktor Rydberg in his Teutonic Mythology).

Prior to the Hittite Old Kingdom, a dynasty arose at

Hittite chariots were solid wooden machines, drawn bytwo horses and capable of carrying three or more men.There was a driver and a “mounted” fighter, while theother man (or men) was a “runner” who would dismountand provide support on foot at the battlefield. The armor,if any, was light, consisting of scale armor and a helmet atmost. The fighting crewman used sometimes a bow, asseen here, a long spear, javelins and a sword. It is debatedwhether or not Hittite chariots were less maneuverablethan Egyptian ones, but they were heavier and henceslower than the Egyptian ones, which were made of rat-tan. Under Emperor Muwatallis II, c1320-1294 B.C., astruggle for domination of Syria led to one of the greatestbattles of ancient times, at Kadesh on the Orontes, in theearly 13th century B.C. Pharaoh Ramesses later claimedit was a great victory, but most historians believe it was atbest a pyrrhic one for Egypt, while it led to an expansionof the Hittite empire southward. Sixteen years later theEgyptians signed a treaty with their powerful Indo-Euro-pean neighbors--the first peace treaty in recorded history.

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Hattusa or Kattusa (17th century B.C.), and this dynastyis known to the modern world primarily through itscontact with Assyrian merchants, who appear to havedominated the trade of this kingdom—andwhose rightswere asserted and protected by the early Assyrian em-perors. Whether this northern Anatolian kingdom isHittite, though, has been the subject of some debate,and it is generally excluded from the formally recog-nized Hittite kingdoms and empires.

The Hittites, who called themselves the “Neshites”[or Nesili, “pertaining to the city of Nesa”—Ed.] ex-panded fromHattusa and absorbed the culture of a peo-ple that preceded them, the Hattians, or Hatti people,from which the name “Hittite” is derived. They alsocompletely exterminated this people—or at least claimto have done so in their histories. [However, Turkisharcheologist Ekrem Akurgal claims the Hattians werestill the great majority of the population in the Hittiteperiod. The non-Indo-EuropeanHattians appear to havehad longer noses than the Hittites.—Ed.]

The identity of theHatti is unclear, but they appear tohave had some relationship to Sumerian culture—though that identification has been challenged, and theevidence either way is murky because so little is knownof the Hatti people and their unwritten language. One ofthe peoples the Hittites displaced, however, appears tobe the peoples that were known to the Greeks as thePelasgians, and who migrated into the Peloponessusperhaps 22 centuries before Christ. The Pelasgians havebeen identified by somewith the Luwians and their king-dom of Arzawa or Azzawa, though this identity is un-clear as well. [The Pelasgians may be polyphyletic, andsome of themmay well be non-Indo-Europeans.—Ed.]

The Hittites faced several major rivals in AsiaMinor.One was the cult of the Great Mother, which was cen-tered at Crete, andwhich profoundly influenced the de-velopment of Greek, Roman and Semitic cultures. Likethe Hatti, the culture of the Great Mother is obscure,and known to us primarily through its remnants inGreece, and through the influence it had on theworshipof Isis, Ishtar, Asherah and its integrationwith the Indo-European myth of Gaia and the Great Cow. Attemptshave been made to link it to the Indo-EuropeanLuwians, though its serpent worship and the predomi-nance of the female deity make it non-Indo-Europeanin form. (See TBR, September/October 2001.)

Above, a ceramic depiction of a Hittite rider and horsejoined as one entity, an indication of the close rela-tionship Hittite horsemen had with their steeds. Plas-tic art of pre-imperial Hittite culture is scarce; the artof the late Hittite states shows a composite of motifsand influences with input from Syrian, Assyrian andEgyptian sources. This piece dates from c. 1000 B.C.Below, this finely crafted silver rhyton (drinking cup)depicting the front end of a bull is a magnificent pieceof Hittite art from central Anatolia, probably 15th to13th century B.C. From the Schimmel collection at theNew York Metropolitan Museum.

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This cult appears to have been a religion of pre-Myke-naean Minoan Crete, which has been traditionally as-signed as a branch of Semitic Phoenician culture, andthe cult of the Great Mother may have represented anearly subversion of an Aryan people by demonic Semiticgods. This was certainly the case with its derivative, theEtruscans. To the Hittites, the GreatMother was knownas Kubaba, likely a term they adopted from theHurriansduring the interregnum, and it is by this name—Grae-cized and then Latinized into Kybele or “Cybele”—thatshewas known to theWest [althoughmany other femaledeities, of diverse names, have been subsumed into heridentity. For what it is worth, Kubaba is the only queenon the Sumerian king list.—Ed.].

But the first major rivals of the Hittites were theirfellow Indo-Europeans, whom the Hittites conqueredand absorbed into the Old Kingdomof central, southernand southeastern Anatolia by theearly 18th century. They then ex-panded west and vassalized thekingdom of Arzawa—which, manybelieve, gave Asia its name—andconducted relations, some scholarsargue, with the city of Troy, knownto them as “Wilusa,” a form of Ilos.

In the east, the Hittites werecompeting with the Hurrians, and,eventually, the Indo-European king-dom of Mittani. The rise of the Hur-rians seems to have broken the links between thepre-Old-Kingdom Hittites and the Assyrians, and theHurrians appear to have eventually conquered and es-tablished a dynasty in northernMesopotamia—and pos-sibly the south as well—where Indo-European namescome to predominate at several points in different areasduring the secondmillenniumB.C. This early rise of theHurrians likely gave the Hittites the economic freedomfrom their Semitic merchant colonies that they neededto establish their own cultural identity, and so it is ironicthat the force that allowed the growth of the Hittite OldKingdom eventually conquered it and subjected it to for-eign cultural rule.

Like the Hittites, the Hurrians have been the target ofintense efforts by Communist and Soviet pseudo-schol-ars, who have seen them as a weak link in the Indo-Eu-ropean migration theory. The Hurrians appear to be a

people who were conquered and governed by an Ar-menian Indo-European minority, possibly one thatdrove them over the CaucasusMountains and then sub-jugated them. The Hurrian religious form is firmly Indo-Iranian, and likely a close cognate of the Vedas andZend Avesta. But the language of the Hurrian people isalmost an isolate, related only to Urartian, the languageof their successor state, Urartu. However, language iso-lates and the adoption of the languages of the Near andMiddle Eastern masses by the Indo-European invadersare common, and the fact that the language of the Hur-rians is only influenced by the Indo-Iranian branch ofthe Indo-European family is nowhere near as decisiveas Soviet scholars have made it to be. [Some Russianscholarsmaintain that Hurrian andHattic are related tothe Northeast Caucasian language.—Ed.]

TheHurrians overran the Hittites in the 16th century,and subjugated them for severaldecades, until Tudhaliya I [r. 1465-1440] or his son Hattusili II [r. 1440-1425], having overthrown foreigndomination in his sub-kingdom ofKizzuwatna [today, southeasternTurkey], was able to lead a revolu-tion against the Hurrian empire andoverthrow its dominance, unitingthe other vassal kingdoms of theHittites under him, and eventuallycreating the Hittite empire, which

expanded to the Aegean in the west and upperMesopotamia in the south.

An alternative version of this history makes Tud-haliya I of Hurrian descent himself, and one of severalHurrian kings of the fractured Hittite lands, who roseto prominence by uniting the Hurrian kinglets. [BothKizzuwatna and Mitanni have also been described asHurrian, although rival kingdoms.—Ed.]

Regardless of his personal origins, his dynasty wascertainly heavily intermarried with the Aryan Hurrians,and it is this that is the Hittite empire that confrontedthe forces of the Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th cen-tury, and that brought the Apiru—the Hebrews—intowhat became the kingdoms of Judea and Samaria. It isalso this empire that eventually smashed the Indo-Euro-pean kingdomof theMittani—a nationwhose kings haddefinite Indo-Iranian names—and blocked the expan-

The Hittites were veryprogressive in theirtreatment of women,

giving them equal rightsunder the law. Slavesalso had rights.

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sion of the Assyrians to the west for 200 years.The Hittites battled the forces of Egypt in the 13th

and into the 12th century, when an invasion from an un-known source destroyed their empire and fractured itinto component ethnic kingdoms—kingdoms that per-sisted in Anatolia until their conquest by Assyria and/orPersia at various points in the first half of the first mil-lennium before Christ. It is believed by some that theirempire was smashed by the Sea Peoples—the victori-ous Greeks departing fromTroy—but the best evidenceof that is that the later Assyrian conquerors of AsiaMinor describe the defeat of the “Mushki” people—whoare believed to be the Mysians, relatives of the Phry-gians who were later known to the Greeks.

HITTITE LANGUAGE

The Hittite language was discovered to be definitelyIndo-European in the early 20th century, and this iden-tification is themain reason that Soviet and communist

scholars have been unable to deny the Aryan nature ofHittite society. Hittite is largely an absorption of its ge-ographic predecessor, Hattic, and there are eight com-ponent tongues that are believed to have influenced itsdevelopment. The Hittites are the first Indo-Europeanpeoples of the c. 2000 B.C. migration to have developeda written language or hieroglyphics, but they largelyabandoned this in favor of a variant of Akkadiancuneiform.

However, the method by which the Hittites adoptedthe Semitic syllabary is revealing, and useful for linguis-tic analysis of various Semitic languages, such as He-brew. Semitic syllabary is often in the form of con-sonant-vowel, or vowel-consonant, though sometimesthe vowels stand alone—much like in the phonogramsof the Egyptian and Sumerian languages. Thus a namein the Indo-European form of, say, “IOVE,” or Jove,might appear in Semitic transliteration as Ia-ho-va-ah,or “Jehovah”—which is precisely where the Jews and

This gate, the southwest entrance to the upper city of Hattusa, capital city of the Hittite empire, features two matchinglions (one now badly eroded) carved into arching stones. Back in their heyday, 1343-1200 B.C., the complete gate formeda parabola, with towers on each side—a magnificent, daunting sight.

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their forerunners derived the name of the god they callYHWH, or Yahweh (Jehovah).

This has been of particular interest because of thenumber of references to the peoples and places of theTrojan War that appear in Hittite texts. In the archivesof Arnuwandas I appear references to the Ahhiyawasor Ahhiyas, and to an Attarissiyas of Ahhiya who at-tacked a king of the “mountain land of Zippasala”named Madduwattas. These Ahhiyawas founded thecity of Millawandawhich, under the reign of Mursilis II,fought with the Hittites. Even later, Ahhiyawa wasnamed, along with Babylon and Assyria, as a greatpower of the Near East. And a later king of Millawandahas a brother named Tawagalawas, who assists the peo-ple of Lukka land (the Lycians) against raiders.

In these records we find the Achaeans under thename of the Ahhiyawa (from a hypothetical form“Achaiwa”), and the city of Miletus under the name ofMillawanda.While some have argued that the Achaeansshould be Ahhiyawia, and thus could not be the Ah-hiyawa, this is the kind of argument that philologistslove and no human being can rationally understand—to

accept it, one has to create a second people with almostexactly the same name as the Achaeans, almost thesame characteristics, and in almost exactly the sameplace—an irrationality that is discarded by Occam’sRazor. Some have also argued that Tawagalawas is theGreek Eteocles (Etewoclewes).

Similarly, the issue of whether the city of Taruisa inthe land of Uilusiia—Troisha in Wilusa—is Troy, hasbeen debated, but the same problem—the problem ofhypothesizing two identical peoples with identical traitsand similar names in the same place—arises. That theking ofWilusa in the reign ofMuwatallis is Alaksandu—Alexander, or Paris—poses a similar problem. Obvi-ously these ancient Hittite records refer to Troy.

TheHittites also, though, adopted a number of gram-matical conventions from the Hatti people who pre-ceded them, particularly the use of the enclitics assa-and nytha-, which appear in Greece, particularly inplace names, and let us definitely establish the link be-tween the people of Asia Minor and the people of thePeloponessus (a name which itself contains the godname Pel-ops (perhaps “fire-eyed,” the Hatti/Pelasgian

An image often associatedwith the Hittitesis this type of sphinx (left) with the body ofa lion, eagle wings and a human head.Lions were obviously important symbols tothe Hittites—and other cultures of the an-cient Middle East. Lion sculptures arefound at the Hittite sites of Aleppo, Car-chemis and Tel Atchana. Above, a dyinglion with an arrow sticking out of his shoul-der is depicted in this Hittite wall relief.

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The First ExpertOn the Hittites

Bedrich Hrozny, born in1859, was a Czech lin-guist and professor of

Semitic languages at CharlesUniversity in Prague. Hroznystudied the Hittite languageand determined it to be Indo-European in origin, in 1917.While the idea of an Indo-Euro-pean origin for Hittite had beenproposed as early as 1902, it had been ridiculed byestablishment scholars, who supported a Biblical-Hebraic origin for the civilizations of the world, andopposed the idea of “Indo-European” peoples.

Later in his life, Hrozny attempted to prove thatmany “lost languages” were related to the Indo-Eu-ropean language family, including the Linear A andB scripts of Crete and the Dravidian languages.While it was later determined, in 1952, that Linear Bwas an Indo-European language—Greek—writtenin Minoan characters, Linear A remains undeci-phered, and is not believed to be Indo-European inorigin, though proponents of this position exist.

Hrzony was forced to stop his work by a heartattack he suffered in 1944, and later died in 1952,aged 93. After his death, the political movement inacademia opposed to theories of Indo-Europeanorigin grew in strength, receiving significant financ-ing from the Soviet Union, which attacked scientifictheories of comparative language, religion and cul-ture as opposed to its political goal of world union,and which promoted “material culture” and “iso-lated study” as methods of approach to ancient his-tory and prehistory instead.

HadHrozny bowed to the pressure of thosewhowant to see a common origin ofmankind, but do notwish to see it in a Proto-Indo-European people, theHittite language, whose existence was completelyunknown before the 19th century, would still be un-intelligible today.

enclitic “-assa-,” meaning “place of the god,” and theIndo-European nominative “-os”). Some have argued,though, that these Hatti names are actually part of theIndo-European language of the Luwians; and thus thePelasgians and Anatolians who are known to have en-tered the Peloponessus, fleeing the Hittite expansion,were Indo-Europeans as well.

This invading culture engaged in bull-worship, andthus may be linked to the kurgan-derived culture of theLuwians, but also, apparently, embraced theworship ofthe GreatMother, which seemed alien to the laterMyke-naean Greeks. Until the decipherment of Linear A andthe discovery of the archives of the peoples the Hittitesconquered, the identity of these peoplesmay remain anopen question.

HITTITE RELIGION

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the Hittiteswere truly of Indo-European origin, though, lies in theirreligious forms, which are cognate to the story knownin the Nordic-Germanic tradition as the epic cycle of theWinter War, and in the Indo-Iranian cycle as the with-drawal of the “smiths.”

Among Indo-European peoples, there is an ur-myth,or original story of the gods, in which the plants and an-imals of the universe were shaped by a group of divinesmiths. These smiths at some point withdrew from theworld, and their withdrawal brought about the first win-ter. In the Indo-Iranian cycle, they become reconciledto the gods. In the Nordic-Germanic cycle, their with-drawal starts the decline of man into the “death age.”

The smiths in the Indo-Iranian cycle are known asthe ribhus, but in the Nordic Eddas, they are known asthe alfs, or elves. Their leader, Ivaldi, and his sons havea mythical contest with the sons of Sindre—the giantMimir—and are challenged to produce the greatesttreasures for the gods. Loki persuades them to enterinto the contest, and unfairly influences it; because ofhis cheating, the elves demand his head and end up in-juring his lip, sewing his mouth shut to stop his lies.But because of the unfair judgment that is passed upontheir work, the gods known as Volund or Thiassi, hisbrother Egil-Orvandil, and their brother Giuki, with-draw into the Wolfdales, where they forge a terriblesword that is destined to slay the god Frey at Ragnarok.Volund is, in many aspects, a storm god, or a god of the

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winds and the air—and he is one of the aspects of themultifaceted storm gods that were worshiped by theancient Norsemen.

Hittite religion has been attacked as non-Indo-European because, in the late period, it was heavily in-fluenced by the Hurrians, who adopted their religionfrom the Indo-Iranian cycles. Teshub, the storm god ofthe Hittites from the interregnal period onward, is def-initely a borrowing from their eastern neighbors, theHurrians. But there is a cycle of Hittite stories known as“old Hittite myths,” and these involve Telipinu, the “sonof the storm god,” who brings about the first winter bywithdrawing from the world and ceasing his efforts inthe preservation of life and its cycles. This deity, whowas perverted in Semitic cultures into the god of resur-rection, is likely an early cognate of the storm-god fig-ure that became Volund, and hints at an original unitybetween the Indo-European stormgod and the Near Eastern god of res-urrection.

In the Hurrian and post-Hurrianperiod, there is also a theme that de-velops which is cognate with atheme found in semi-mythical north-ern histories. This theme is thebrotherhood of the storm and theSun gods, and their relationships tothe Great Mother and the Sun god-desses. In the mythical history ofSaxo Grammaticus, for instance, one often finds Half-dan and a figure related to the Indo-European fire godAgni paired—much as Belinus, as a storm god, andBrennus are paired in the history of Geoffrey of Mon-mouth. Halfdan and Agni relate in many ways to Thorand Heimdal (though it has been argued that Halfdan isthe son of Thor, rather than Thor himself, as well as theson of Heimdal—Rydberg discusses this dual-father-hood extensively in his Teutonic Mythology, though itis, in this author’s opinion, one of theweaknesses of Ry-dberg’s theory). Halfdan and Agni reflect a legendaryeuhemerization of the dyad of the storm god and theSun god.

There is also a myth from the Hurrian period of theGreat Mother, an adoption of Ishtar, seducing a serpentgod, a child of Kumarbi, the prototype of the GreekCronus, in her garden, and this story may have been a

prototype borrowed by the Hebrews in their story of theseduction of Eve by the serpent. Similarly, there is a rock-god created by Kumarbi to destroy Teshub, the stormgod, which resembles the story of Mokkikalfir in theEddas, and of the giant with the feet of clay in the Bible.

The Hurrian period is most notable, though, for thecharacter of Kumarbi himself, who castrates his fatherand then eats the children of Anu in order to preventtheir usurpation of his throne, and thus inspired the sto-ries of Cronus, Uranus, Rhea and the birth of Zeus.

In the Hittite imperial period, the Hittite religion washeavily influenced by Egypt, and the Sun god came tosupplant the storm god as the central deity of the religion.TheHittite emperor, at this time, adopted the title of “sonof the Sun” and altered his name in Hittite writing to re-flect the Egyptian style of displaying the Sun in the king’sroyal name. Very late Hittite religious writings show an

even heavier syncretization withEgyptian myth.

CONCLUSION

The Hittites were an Indo-Euro-pean people who achieved pre-emi-nence among the Indo-Europeaninvaders of Asia Minor and foundedan empire that spanned almost amil-lennium. Their language and religiontie them firmly into both the con-querors of Iran and India, and into

the Nordic-Germanic stock in which those conquerorsfound their roots.

ThoughCommunist and Soviet scholars attacked theorigins of the Hittites in an effort to dilute and obscurethe Indo-European origin of their society and culture,even a surface analysis of the Hittite culture shows itwas one of the many expressions of the Aryan creativespirit found in the early portion of recorded history. �

At a time in the NearEast when flaying andimpaling enemies was therule, the Hittites werehumane & civilized.

WILLIAM WHITE is the former commander of theAmerican NationalSocialist Workers Party and is currently completing a degree focused onclassical and Near Eastern Studies. He is the author of Before Genesis:The Aryan and the Hebrew in Ancient Egypt, which is being released byTHE BARNES REVIEW, and is working on a commentary on the first ninebooks of Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum.You can write to Bill c/oTBR, POBox 1877,Washington, D.C. 20003. He is under court order notto post on the Internet, so if you upload his material to the Net, pleasemake it clear to everyone that it is not he who is doing so.