Various
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885
THE HITTITES 26
BY ISAAC TAYLOR
The reconstruction, from newly exhumed monuments, of the history of the East, has been the great work of the present century. The startling revelations arising from the decipherment of the Egyptian records were followed by results, still more surprising, afforded by the buried cities of Assyria and Babylonia, and by glimpses into the prehistoric life of Greece obtained from the excavations of Dr. Schliemann on the sites of Troy and Mycenæ. If any one will take the trouble to look into such a book as Rollin’s “Ancient History,” and compare it with Duncker’s “History of Antiquity,” or with the useful series of little volumes published by the Christian Knowledge Society under the title of “Ancient History from the Monuments,” it will be possible to estimate the completeness of the reconstruction of our knowledge. Thus the legendary story of Sesostris, as recorded by Herodotus, has given place to the authentic history of the reigns of the conquering monarchs of the New Empire, Thothmes III., Seti I., and Rameses II., while the Greek romance of Sardanapalus is replaced by the contemporary annals of Assurbanipal; and, more wonderful than all, we discover that Semiramis herself was no mortal Queen of Babylon, but the celestial Queen of the Heavenly Host, the planet Venus, the morning star as she journeys from her eastern realm, the evening star as she passes onward to the west in search of her lost spouse the sun, and to be identified with the Babylonian goddess Istar, the Ashtaroth of the Bible, whose rationalized myth was handed down by Ctesias as sober history.
To these marvellous reconstructions another of hardly less interest and importance must now be added. The most notable archæological achievement of the last ten years has been the recovery and installation of the Hittite Empire as one of the earliest and most powerful of the great Oriental monarchies. Dr. Wright, in the opportune volume whose title stands at the head of this notice, has established a claim to have rescued from probable destruction some of the most important Hittite inscriptions; to have been the first to suggest the Hittite origin of the inscribed stones from Hamath whose discovery in 1872 excited so much speculation; and has now added to our obligations by placing before the world in a convenient form nearly the whole of the available materials bearing on the question of Hittite history and civilization.
Our readers will probably remember a signed article on the Hittites, from the pen of Dr. Wright, which appeared in this Review in 1882. This article has been expanded by its author into a goodly volume, and has been enriched with considerable additions of new and valuable material which bring it well up to the present standard of knowledge. Among these additions are facsimiles of the principal Hittite inscriptions, most of which have already appeared in the transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, and are now revised by Mr. Rylands; while Sir C. Wilson and Captain Conder have contributed a useful map indicating the sites where Hittite monuments have been found; and Professor Sayce adds a valuable appendix containing the results of his latest researches as to the decipherment of the Hittite script.
Till within the last twenty years all men had been used to think of the Hittites as an obscure Canaanitish tribe, of much the same importance as the Hivites or the Perizzites, with whom it was the custom to class them. It is true that if read between the lines, as we are now able to read it, the Biblical narrative indicated that while other Canaanitish tribes were of small power and importance, and were soon exterminated or absorbed into the Hebrew nationality, the Hittites stood on altogether another footing. The Hittites are the first and the last of these tribes to appear on the scene. As early as the time of Abraham we find them lords of the soil at Hebron; and in the time of Solomon, and even of Elisha, they are a mighty people, inhabiting a region to the north of Palestine, and distinguished by the possession of numerous war chariots, then the chief sign of military power. Though we are now able to perceive that this is the true signification of the references to them in the old Testament, yet it was from the newly recovered monuments of Egypt and Assyria that the facts were actually gleaned, and it was shown that for more than a thousand years the Hittite power was comparable to that of Assyria and Egypt.
It is only by slow degrees that this result has been established. The first light came from Abusimbel, in Nubia, midway between the first and second cataracts of the Nile, where Rameses II., the most magnificent of the Egyptian kings, at a time when the Hebrews were still toiling in Egyptian bondage, caused a vast precipice of rock to be carved into a stupendous temple-cave, to whose walls he committed the annals of his reign and the records of his distant campaigns. On one of the walls of this temple is pictured a splendid battle scene, occupying a space of 57 feet by 24, and containing upwards of 1100 figures. This represents, as we learn from the hieroglyphic explanation, the great battle of Kadesh, fought with the “vile people of the Kheta” – a battle which also forms the theme of the poem of Pentaur, the oldest epic in the world, still extant in a papyrus now preserved in the British Museum. In spite of the grandiloquent boasts of these records, we gather that the battle was indecisive; that Rameses had to retire from the siege of Kadesh, narrowly escaping with his life; the campaign being ended by the conclusion of a treaty on equal terms with the King of the Kheta – a treaty which was followed a year later, by the espousal by Rameses of a daughter of the hostile king.
About twenty years ago it was suggested by De Rougé that this powerful nation of the Kheta might probably be identified with the Khittim, or Hittites, of the Old Testament; and this conclusion, though never accepted by some eminent Egyptologists, such as Chabas and Ebers, gradually won its way into favor, and has been recently confirmed by Captain Conder’s identification of the site of Kadesh, where the battle depicted on the wall at Abusimbel was fought. From other inscriptions we learn that for five hundred years the Kheta resisted with varying success the attacks of the terrible conquerors of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, their power remaining to the last substantially unshaken. The story is now taken up by the Assyrian records, which prove that from the time of Sargon of Accad – who must be assigned to the nineteenth century B.C., if not to a much earlier period – down to the reigns of Tiglath Pileser I. (B.C., 1130), and for four hundred years afterwards, till the reigns of Assur-nazir-pal and Shalmanezer II., the Khatti of Hamath and Carchemish were the most formidable opponents of the rising power of Assyria, their resistance being only brought to a close by the defeat of their King Pisiris, and the capture of Carchemish, their capital, in 717 B.C., by Sargon II., the king who also destroyed the monarchy of Israel by the capture of Samaria.
It seemed strange that no monuments should have been discovered belonging to a people powerful enough to withstand for twelve centuries the assaults of Egypt and Assyria. At last, in 1872, certain inscriptions from Hamath on the Orontes, in a hieroglyphic picture-writing of a hitherto unknown character, were published in Burton and Drake’s “Unexplored Syria.” Dr. Wright, in 1874, published an article in “The British and Foreign Evangelical Review,” suggesting that these monuments were in reality records of the Hittite race. This conjecture, though much ridiculed at the time, has gradually fought its way to universal acceptance, mainly owing to the skilful advocacy of Professor Sayce, who, in ignorance of Dr. Wright’s suggestion, arrived independently at the same conclusion, and shortly afterwards identified a monument at Karabel, near Ephesus, described by Herodotus as a figure of Sesostris, as the effigy of a Hittite king. Subsequent discoveries of Hittite monuments in other parts of Asia Minor, taken in conjunction with the Biblical notices, and the Egyptian and Assyrian records, prove that at some remote period a great Hittite empire must have extended from Hebron to the Black Sea, and from the Euphrates to the Ægean; while it is now generally admitted that, to some extent, the art, the science, and the religion of prehistoric Greece must have been derived ultimately from Babylon, having been transmitted, first to the Hittite city of Carchemish, and thence to Lydia, through the Hittite realm in Asia Minor. It is now believed by many scholars of repute that the Ephesian Artemis must be identified with the great Hittite goddess Atargatis, and ultimately with the Babylonian Istar; that the Niobe of Homer, whose effigy may still be seen on Mount Sipylus, near Smyrna, was an image of Atargatis, whose armed priestesses gave rise to the Greek legend of the Amazons, a nation of female warriors; that the Euboic silver standard was based upon the mina of Carchemish; and that in all probability the characters found on Trojan whorls by Schliemann, as well as certain anomalous letters in the Lycian alphabet, and even the mysterious Cypriote syllabary itself were simply cursive forms descended from the Hittite hieroglyphs used in the inscriptions on the pseudo-Niobe and the pseudo-Sesostris in Lydia, and pictured on the stones obtained by Dr. Wright from Hamath, and by Mr. George Smith from Carchemish.
The arguments by which scholars have been led to these conclusions, together with the existing materials on which future researches must be based, have been collected by Dr. Wright in a handy volume, which we have great pleasure in heartily commending to all students of Biblical archæology as a substantial contribution to our knowledge.
When the Turks permit the mounds at Kadesh and Carchemish, which conceal the ruined palaces and temples of the Hittite capitals, to be systematically explored, and when the Hittite writing shall be completely deciphered, we may anticipate a revelation of the earliest history of the world not inferior, possibly, in interest and importance, to those astonishing discoveries which have made known to this generation the buried secrets of Babylon, Nineveh, and Troy. —British Quarterly Review.
AUTOMATIC WRITING, OR THE RATIONALE OF PLANCHETTE
BY FREDERICK W. H. MYERS
Among all the changes which are taking place in our conceptions of various parts of the universe, there is none more profound, or at first sight more disquieting, than the change which, at the touch of Science, is stealing over our conception of ourselves. For each of us seems to be no longer a sovereign state but a federal union; the kingdom of our mind is insensibly dissolving into a republic. Instead of the ens rationale of the schoolmen, protected from irreverent treatment by its metaphysical abstraction; instead of Descartes’ impalpable soul, seated bravely in its pineal gland, and ruling from that tiny fortress body and brain alike, we have physiologist and psychologist uniting in pulling us to pieces, – in analyzing into their sensory elements our loftiest ideas, – in tracing the diseases of memory, volition, intelligence, which gradually distort us past recognition, – in showing how one may become in a moment a different person altogether, by passing through a fit of somnambulism, or receiving a smart blow on the head. Our past self, with its stores of registered experience, continually revived in memory, seems to be held to resemble a too self-conscious phonograph, which should enjoy an agreeable sense of mental effort as its handle turned, and should preface its inevitable repetitions by some triumphant allusion to its own acumen. Our present self, this inward medley of sensations and desires, is likened to that mass of creeping things which is termed an “animal colony,” – a myriad rudimentary consciousnesses, which acquire a sort of corporate unity because one end of the amalgam has to go first and find the way.
Or one may say that the old view started from the sane mind as the normal, permanent, definite entity from which insanity was the unaccountable aberration; while in the new view it is rather sanity which needs to be accounted for; since the moral and physical being of each of us is built up from incoördination and incoherence, and the microcosm of man is but a micro-chaos held in some semblance of order by a lax and swaying hand, the wild team which a Phaeton is driving, and which must needs soon plunge into the sea. Theories like this are naturally distasteful to those who care for the dignity of man. And such readers may perhaps turn aside in impatience when I say that much of this paper will be occupied by some reasons for my belief that this analysis of human consciousness must be carried further still; that we must face the idea of concurrent streams of being, flowing alongside but unmingled within us, and with either of which our active consciousness may, under appropriate circumstances, be identified. Many people have heard, for instance, of Dr. Azam’s patient, Félida X., who passes at irregular intervals from one apparent personality into another, memory and character changing suddenly as she enters her first or her second state of being. Such cases as hers I believe to be but extreme examples of an alternation which is capable of being evoked in all of us, and which in some slight measure is going on in us every day. Our cerebral focus (to use a metaphor) often shifts slightly, and is capable of shifting far. Or let me compare my active consciousness to a steam-tug, and the ideas and memories which I summon into the field of attention to the barges which the tug tows after it. Then the concurrent streams of my being are like Arve and Rhone, contiguous but hardly mingling their blue and yellow waves. I tug my barges down the Rhone, my consciousness is a blue consciousness, but the tail barge swings into the Arve and back again, and brings traces of the potential yellow consciousness back into the blue. In Félida’s case tug and barges and all swerve suddenly from one stream into the other; the blue consciousness becomes the yellow in a moment and altogether. Transitions may be varied in a hundred ways, and it may happen that the life-streams mix together, and that there is a memory of all.
Moreover, there seems no reason to assume that our active consciousness is necessarily altogether superior to the consciousnesses which are at present secondary, or potential only. We may rather hold that super-conscious may be quite as legitimate a term as sub-conscious, and instead of regarding our consciousness (as is commonly done) as a threshold in our being, above which ideas and sensations must rise if we wish to cognize them, we may prefer to regard it as a segment of our being, into which ideas and sensations may enter either from below or from above; say a thermometric tube, marking ordinary temperatures, but so arranged that water may not only rise into it, by expansion, from the bottom, but also fall into it, by condensation, from the top.
Strange and extravagant as this doctrine may seem, I shall hope to show some ground for it in the present paper. I shall hope, at least, to show not only that our unconscious may interact with our conscious mental action in a more definite and tangible manner than is usually supposed, but also that this unconscious mental action may actually manifest the existence of a capital and cardinal faculty of which the conscious mind of the same persons at the same time is wholly devoid.
For the sake of brevity I shall select one alone out of many forms of unconscious action which may, if rightly scrutinized, afford a glimpse into the recesses of our being.27
I shall take automatic writing; and I shall try, by a few examples from among the many which lie before me, to show the operation, first, of unconscious cerebral action of the already recognized kind, but much more complex and definite than is commonly supposed to be discernible in waking persons; and, secondly, of telepathic action, – of the transference, that is to say, of thoughts or ideas from the conscious or unconscious mind of one person to the conscious or unconscious mind of another person, from whence they emerge in the shape of automatically written words or sentences.
I shall be able to cover a corner only of a vast and unexplored field. I venture to think that the phenomena of automatic writing will before long claim the best attention of the physiological psychologist. They have been long neglected, and I can only conjecture that this neglect is due to the eagerness with which certain spiritualists have claimed such writings as the work of Shakespeare, Byron, and other improbable persons. The message given has too often fallen below the known grammatical level of those eminent authors, and the laugh thus raised has drowned the far more instructive question as to whence in reality the automatic rubbish came. Yet surely to decline to investigate “planchette” because “the trail of Katie King is over it all,” is very much as though one refused to analyse the meteorite at Ephesus because the town-clerk cried loudly that it was “an image which fell down from Jupiter.”
Automatic writing in its simplest form is merely a variety of the tricks of unconscious action to which, in excited moments, we are all of us prone. The surplus nervous energy escapes along some habitual channel – movements of the hand, for instance, are continued or initiated; and among such hand-movements – drumming of tunes, piano-playing, drawing, and the like —writing naturally holds a prominent place. There is incipient graphic automatism when the nervous student scribbles Greek words on the margin of the paper on which he is striving to produce a copy of iambics. If the paper be suddenly withdrawn he will have no notion what he has written. And more, the words written will sometimes be imaginary words, which have needed some faint unconscious choice in order to preserve a look of real words in their arrangement of letters. A complete graphic automatism is seen in various morbid states. A man attacked by a slight epileptiform seizure while in the act of writing will sometimes continue to write a few sentences unconsciously, which, although probably nonsensical, will often be correct in spelling and grammar. Again, in the case of certain cerebral troubles, the patient will write the wrong word – say, “table” for “chair;” – or at least some meaningless sequence of letters, in which, however, each letter is properly formed. In each of these cases, therefore, there is graphic automatism. And they incidentally show that to write words in a sudden state of unconsciousness, or to write words against one’s will, is not necessarily a proof that any intelligence is at work besides one’s own.
Still further; in spontaneous somnambulism, the patient will often write long letters or essays. Sometimes these are incoherent, like a dream; sometimes they are on the level of his waking productions; sometimes they even seem to rise above it. They may contain at any rate ingenious manipulations of data known to his waking brain, as where a baffling mathematical problem is solved during sleep.
From the natural or spontaneous cases of graphic automatism let us pass on to the induced or experimental cases. I will give first a singular transitional instance, where there is no voluntary muscular action, but yet a previous exercise of expectant attention is necessary to secure the result.
My friend Mr. A., who is much interested in mental problems, has practised introspection with assiduity and care. He finds that if he fixes his attention on some given word, and then allows his hand to rest laxly in the writing attitude, his hand presently writes the word without any conscious volition of his own; the sensation being as though the hand were moved by some power other than himself. This happens whether his eyes are open or shut, so that the gaze is not necessary to fix the attention. If he wills not to write, he can remove his hand and avert the action. But if he chooses a movement simpler than writing, for instance, if he holds out his open hand and strongly imagines that it will close, a kind of spasm ensues, and the hand closes, even though he exert all his voluntary force to keep it open.
It is manifest how analogous these actions are to much which in bygone times has been classed as possession. Mr. A. has the very sensation of being possessed, – moved from within by some agency which overrules his volition, and yet we can hardly doubt that it is merely his unconscious influencing his conscious life. The act of attention, so to say, has stamped the idea of the projected movement so strongly on his brain that the movement works itself out automatically, in spite of subsequent efforts to prevent it. The best parallel will be the case of a promise made during the hypnotic trance, which the subject is irresistibly impelled to fulfil on waking.28 From this curious transitional case we pass on to cases where no idea of the words written has passed through the writer’s consciousness. It is not easy to make quite sure that this is the case, and the modus operandi needs some consideration.
First we have to find an automatic writer. Perhaps one person in a hundred possesses this tendency; that is, if he sits for half an hour on a dozen evenings, amid quiet surroundings and in an expectant frame of mind, with his hand on pencil or planchette, he will begin to write words which he has not consciously thought of. But if he sees the words as he writes them he will unavoidably guess at what is coming, and spoil the spontaneous flow. Some persons can avoid this by reading a book while they write, and so keeping eyes and thoughts away from the message.29 Another plan is to use a planchette; which is no occult instrument, but simply a thin piece of board supported on two castors, and on a third leg consisting of a pencil which just touches the paper. A planchette has two advantages over the ordinary pencil; namely, that a slighter impulse will start it, and that it is easier to write (or rather scrawl) without seeing or feeling what you are writing. These precautions, of course, are for the operator’s own satisfaction; they are no proof to other people that he is not writing the words intentionally. That can only be proved to others if he writes facts demonstrably unknown to his conscious self; as in the telepathic cases to which we shall come further on. But as yet I am only giving fresh examples of a kind of mental action which physiology already recognizes: examples, moreover, which any reader who will take the requisite trouble can probably reproduce, either in his own person or in the person of some trusted friend.
I lately requested a lady whom I knew to be a careful observer, but who was quite unfamiliar with this subject, to try whether she could write with a pencil or planchette, and report to me the result. Her experience may stand as typical.
“I have tried the planchette,” she writes, “and I get writing, certainly not done by my hand consciously; but it is nonsense, such as Mebew. I tried holding a pencil, and all I got was mm or rererere, then for hours together I got this: Celen, Celen. Whether the first letter was C or L I could never make out. Then I got I Celen. I was disgusted, and took a book and read while I held the pencil. Then I got Helen. Now note this fact: I never make H like that (like I and C juxtaposed); I make it thus: (like a printed H). I then saw that the thing I read as I Celen was Helen, my name. For days I had only Celen, and never for one moment expected it meant what it did.”
Now this case suggests several curious analogies. First, there is an analogy with those cases of double consciousness where the patient in the “second state” has to learn to write anew. He learns more rapidly than he learnt as a child, because the necessary adjustments do already exist in his brain, although he cannot use them in the normal manner. So here, too, the hidden other self was learning to write, but learnt more rapidly than a child learns, inasmuch as the process was now but the transference of an organized memory from one stream of the inner being to another. But, secondly, we must observe (and now I am referring to many other cases besides the case cited) that the hidden self does not learn to write just as a child learns, but rather by passing through the stages first of atactic, then of amnemonic agraphy. That is to say, first, the pencil scrawls vaguely, like the patient who cannot form a single letter; then it writes the wrong letters or the wrong words, like the patient who writes blunderingly, or chooses the letters JICMNOS for James Simmonds, JASPENOS for James Pascoe, &c.; ultimately it writes correctly, though very likely (as here, and in a case of Dr. Macnish’s) the handwriting of the secondary self30 (if I may suggest a needed term) is different from the handwriting of the primary.
Once more: the constant repetition of the same word (which I have seen to continue with automatic writers even for months) is more characteristic of aphasia than of agraphy. And we may just remark in passing that vocal automatism presents the same analysis with morbid aphasia which graphic automatism presents with morbid agraphy. When the enthusiasts in Irving’s church first yelled vaguely, then shouted some meaningless words many hundred times, and then gave a “trance-address,” their secondary self (I may suggest) was attaining articulate speech through just the stages through which an aphasic patient will sometimes pass.31 The parallel is at least a curious one; and if the theory which traces the automatic speech of aphasic patients to the right (or less-used) cerebral hemisphere be confirmed, a singular light might be thrown on the locus of the second self.
But I must pass on to one more case of automatic writing, a case which I select as marking the furthest limit to which, so far as I am at present aware, pure unconscious cerebration in the waking state can go. Mr. A., whom I have already mentioned, is not usually able to get any automatic writing except (as described above) of a word on which his attention has been previously fixed. But at one period of his life, when his brain was much excited by over-study, he found that if he held a pencil and wrote questions the pencil would, in a feeble scrawling hand, quite unlike his own, write answers which he could in nowise foresee. Moreover, as will be seen, he was not only unable to foresee these answers, he was sometimes unable even to comprehend them. Many of them were anagrams – transpositions of letters which he had to puzzle over before he could get at their meaning. This makes, of course, the main importance of the case; this proof of the concurrent action of a secondary self so entirely dissociated from the primary consciousness that the questioner is almost baffled by his own automatic replies. The matter of the replies is on the usual level of automatic messages, which are apt to resemble the conversations of a capricious dream. The interest of this form of self-interrogation certainly does not lie in the wisdom of the oracle received.
“The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare,
But wonder how the devil they got there.”
I abridge Mr. A.’s account, and give the answers in italics.
“‘What is it,’ said Mr. A., ‘that now moves my pen?’ Religion. ‘What is religion?’ Worship. Here arose a difficulty. Although I did not expect either of these answers, yet, when the first few letters had been written, I expected the remainder of the word. This might vitiate the result. But now, as if the intelligent wished to prove by the manner of answering, that the answer could be due to it alone, and in no part to mere expediency, my next question received a singular reply. ‘Worship of what?’ Wbwbwbwb. ‘What is the meaning of wb?’ Win, buy. ‘What?’ Knowledge. On the second day the first question was – ‘What is man?’ Flise. My pen was at first very violently agitated, which had not been the case on the first day. It was quite a minute before it wrote as above. On the analogy of wb I proceeded: ‘What does F stand for?’ Fesi. ‘L?’ ‘;Le.’ ‘I?’ ‘;Ivy.’ ‘S?’ Sir. ‘E?’ Eye. ‘Is Fesi le ivy, sir, eye, an anagram?’ Yes. ‘How many words in the answer?’ Four.”
Mr. A. was unable to shift these letters into an intelligible sentence, and began again on the third day with the same question:
“‘What is man?’ Tefi, Hasl, Esble, Lies. ‘Is this an anagram?’ Yes. ‘How many words in the answer?’ Five. ‘Must I interpret it myself?’ Try. Presently I got out, Life is the less able. Next I tried the previous anagram, and at last obtained Every life is yes.”
Other anagrams also were given, as wfvs yoitet (Testify! vow!); ieb; iov ogf wle (I go, vow belief!); and in reply to the question, “How shall I believe?” neb 16 vbliy ev 86 e earf ee (Believe by fear even! 1866). How unlikely it is that all this was due to mere accident may be seen by any one who will take letters (the vowels and consonants roughly proportioned to the frequency of their actual use), and try to make up a series of handfuls completely into words possessing any grammatical coherence or intelligible meaning. Now in Mr. A.’s case all the professed anagrams were real anagrams (with one error of i for e); some of the sentences were real answers to the questions; and not even the absurdest sentences were wholly meaningless. In the two first given, for instance, Mr. A. was inclined to trace a reference to books lately read; the second sentence alluding to such doctrines as that “Death solves mysteries which life cannot unlock;” the first to Spinoza’s tenet that all existence is affirmation of the Deity. We seem therefore to see the secondary self struggling to express abstract thought with much the same kind of incoherence with which we have elsewhere seen it struggle to express some concrete symbol. To revert to our former parallel, we may say that “Every life is yes” bears something the same relation to a thought of Spinoza’s which the letters JICMNOS bear to the name James Simmonds.