Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

Christian history begins with the triumph of the Church. With Eusebius of Caesarea the apologetic pamphlets of the age of persecutions gave way to a calm review of three centuries of Christian progress. Eusebius' biography of Constantine shows what distortion of fact the father of Church history permitted himself, but the Ecclesiastical History was fortunately written for those who wanted to know what really happened, and remains to-day an invaluable repository of Christian antiquities. With the continuations of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, and the Latin manual which Cassiodorus had woven from them (the _Historia tripartita_), it formed the body of Church history during all the middle ages. An even greater influence, however, was exercised by Eusebius' _Chronica_. Through Jerome's translation and additions, this scheme of this world's chronology became the basis for all medieval world chronicles. It settled until our own day the succession of years from the Creation to the birth of Christ,--fitting the Old Testament story into that of ancient history. Henceforth the Jewish past,--that one path back to the beginning of the world,--was marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and revelation. Jerome had marked it out; Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of St Martin, in his _Historia sacra_, adorned it with the attractions of romance. Sulpicius was admirably fitted to interpret the miraculous Bible story to the middle ages. But there were few who could write like him, and Jerome's _Chronicle_ itself, or rather portions of it, became, in the age which followed, a sort of universal preface for the monastic chronicler. For a time there were even attempts to continue "imperial chronicles," but they were insignificant compared with the influence of Eusebius and Jerome.

From the first, Christianity had a philosophy of history. Its earliest apologists sought to show how the world had followed a divine plan in its long preparation for the life of Christ. From this central fact of all history, mankind should continue through war and suffering until the divine plan was completed at the judgment day. The fate of nations is in God's hands; history is the revelation of His wisdom and power. Whether He intervenes directly by miracle, or merely sets His laws in operation, He is master of men's fate. This idea, which has underlain all Christian philosophy of history, from the first apologists who prophesied the fall of the Empire and the coming of the millennium, down to our own day, received its classic statement in St Augustine's _City of God_. The terrestrial city, whose eternity had been the theme of pagan history, had just fallen before Alaric's Goths. Augustine's explanation of its fall passes in review not only the calamities of Roman history--combined with a pathetic perception of its greatness,--but carries the survey back to the origin of evil at the creation. Then over against this _civitas terrena_ he sets the divine city which is to be realized in Christendom. The Roman Empire,--the last general form of the earthly city,--gives way slowly to the heavenly. This is the main thread of Augustine's philosophy of history. The mathematical demonstration of its truth was left by Augustine for his disciple, Paulus Orosius.

Orosius' _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_, written as a supplement to the _City of God_, is the first attempt at a Christian "World History." This manual for the middle ages arranged the rise and fall of empires with convincing exactness. The history of antiquity, according to it, begins with Ninus. His realm was overthrown by the Medes in the same year in which the history of Rome began. From the first year of Ninus' reign until the rebuilding of Babylon by Semiramis there were sixty-four years; the same between the first of Procas and the building of Rome. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years after each city was built, it was taken,--Babylon by Cyrus, Rome by Alaric, and Cyrus' conquest took place just when Rome began the Republic. But before Rome becomes a world empire, Macedon and Carthage intervene, guardians of Rome's youth (_tutor curatorque_). This scheme of the four world-monarchies, which was to prevail through all the middle ages, was developed through seven books filled with the story of war and suffering. As it was Orosius' aim to show that the world had improved since the coming of Christ, he used Trogus Pompeius' war history, written to exalt Roman triumphs, to show the reverse of victory,--disaster and ruin. Livy, Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius were plundered for the story of horrors; until finally even the Goths in Spain shine by contrast with the pagan heroes; and through the confusion of the German invasions one may look forward to Christendom,--and its peace.

The commonest form of medieval historical writing was the chronicle, which reaches all the way from monastic annals, mere notes on Easter tables, to the dignity of national monuments. Utterly lacking in perspective, and dominated by the idea of the miraculous, they are for the most part a record of the trivial or the marvellous. Individual historians sometimes recount the story of their own times with sober judgment, but seldom know how to test their sources when dealing with the past. Contradictions are often copied down without the writer noticing them; and since the middle ages forged and falsified so many documents,--monasteries, towns and corporations gaining privileges or titles of possession by the bold use of them,--the narrative of medieval writers cannot be relied upon unless we can verify it by collateral evidence. Some historians, like Otto of Freising, Guibert of Nogent or Bernard Gui, would have been scientific if they had had our appliances for comparison. But even men like Roger Bacon, who deplored the inaccuracy of texts, had worked out no general method to apply in their restoration. Toward the close of the middle ages the vernacular literatures were adorned with Villani's and Froissart's chronicles. But the merit of both lies in their journalistic qualities of contemporary narrative. Neither was a history in the truest sense.

The Renaissance marked the first great gain in the historic sense, in the efforts of the humanists to realize the spirit of the antique world. They did not altogether succeed; antiquity to them meant largely Plato and Cicero. Their interests were literary, and the un-Ciceronian centuries were generally ignored. Those in which the foundations of modern Europe were laid, which produced parliaments, cathedrals, cities, Dante and Chaucer, were grouped alike on one dismal level and christened the middle ages. The perspective of the humanists was only one degree better than that of the middle ages. History became the servant to literature, an adjunct to the classics. Thus it passed into the schools, where text-books still in use devote 200 pages to the Peloponnesian war and two to the Athens of Pericles.

But if the literary side of humanism has been a barrier to the progress of scientific history, the discovery and elucidation of texts first made that progress possible. Historical criticism soon awoke. Laurentius Valla's brilliant attack on the "Donation of Constantine" (1440), and Ulrich von Hutten's rehabilitation of Henry IV. from monkish tales mark the rise of the new science. One sees at a glance what an engine of controversy it was to be; yet for a while it remained but a phase of humanism. It was north of the Alps that it parted company with the grammarians. Classical antiquity was an Italian past, the German scholars turned back to the sources of their national history. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had discovered Otto of Freising and Jordanes. Maximilian I. encouraged the search for manuscripts, and Vienna became a great humanistic centre. Conrad Celtes left his _Germania illustrata_ unfinished, but he had found the works of Hroswitha. Conrad Peutinger gathered all sorts of Chronicles in his room in Vienna, and published several,--among them Gregory of Tours. This national movement of the 15th century was not paralleled in France or England, where the classical humanities reigned. The Reformation meanwhile gave another turn to the work of German scholars.

The Reformation, with its heated controversies, seems a strange starting-point for science, yet it, even more than the Renaissance, brought out scientific methods of historical investigation. It not only sobered the humanist tendency to sacrifice truth for aesthetic effect, it called for the documents of the Church and subjected them to the most hostile criticism. Luther himself challenged them. Then in the _Magdeburg Centuries_ (1559-1574) Protestantism tried to make good its attack on the medieval Church by a great collection of sources accompanied with much destructive criticism. This gigantic work is the first monument of modern historical research. The reply of Cardinal Baronius (_Annales ecclesiastici_, 1588-1697) was a still greater collection, drawn from archives which till then had not been used for scientific history. Baronius' criticism and texts are faulty, though far surpassing anything before his day, and his collection is the basis for most subsequent ones,--in spite of J. J. Scaliger's refutation, which was to contain an equal number of volumes of the errors in Baronius.

The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years' War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard (1535-1573), Johannes Pistorius (1576-1608), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Melchior Goldast (1576-1635) and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (1670). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of "correcting" them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little progress,--although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time.

France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilian's Renaissance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was Andre Duchesne (1584-1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (_Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem_, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. Few of those in the audiences of Moliere, returning home under the grey walls of St Germain-des-Pres, knew that within that monastery the men whose midnight they disturbed were laying the basis for all scientific history; and few of the later historians of that age have been any wiser. But when Luc d'Achery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martene, Bouquet and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product. Jean Mabillon's treatise, _De re diplomatica_ (1681), was due to the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose _Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur_ (1643, &c., see BOLLANDISTS) was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebroch's criticisms of the chronicle of St Denis, Mabillon prepared this manual for the testing of medieval documents. Its canons are the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomatic (q.v.), the touchstone of truth for medieval research. Henceforth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rules by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in medieval documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon implements. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any medieval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instruments. The great "glossary" of Ducange is still in enlarged editions the indispensable encyclopaedia of the middle ages. Chronology and palaeography were placed on a new footing by Dom Bernard de Montfaucon's _Palaeographia graeca_ (1708), the monumental _Art de verifier les dates_ (3rd ed., 1818-1831, in 38 vols.), and the _Nouveau Traite de diplomatique_ (1750-1765) of Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain. The collections of texts which the Maurists published are too many and too vast to be enumerated here (see C. Langlois, _Manuel de bibliographie historique_, pp. 293 ff.). Dom Bouquet's _Historiens de la Gaule et de la France_--the national repertory for French historians--is but one of a dozen tasks of similar magnitude. During the 18th century this deep under-work of scientific history continued to advance, though for the most part unseen by the brilliant writers whose untrustworthy generalities passed for history in the salons of the old regime. Interrupted by the Revolution, it revived in the 19th century, and the roll of honour of the French Ecole des Chartes has almost rivalled that of St Germain-des-Pres.

The father of critical history in Italy was L. A. Muratori (1672-1750), the Italian counterpart of Leibnitz. His vast collection of sources (_Rerum Italicarum scriptores_), prepared amid every discouragement, remains to-day the national monument of Italian history; and it is but one of his collections. His output is perhaps the greatest of any isolated worker in the whole history of historiography. The same haste, but much less care, marked the work of J. D. Mansi (d. 1769), the compiler of the fullest collection of the Councils. Spain, stifled by the Inquisition, produced no national collection of sources during the 17th and 18th centuries, although Nicolas Antonio (d. 1684) produced a national literary history of the first rank.

England in the 16th century kept pace with Continental historiography. Henry VIII.'s chaplain, John Leland, is the father of English antiquaries. Three of the most precious collections of medieval manuscripts still in existence were then begun by Thomas Bodley (the Bodleian at Oxford), Archbishop Matthew Parker (Corpus Christi at Cambridge), and Robert Cotton (the Cottonian collection of the British Museum). In Elizabeth's reign a serious effort was made to arrange the national records, but until the end of the 18th century they were scattered in not less than fifteen repositories. In the 17th and 18th centuries English scholarship was enriched by such monuments of research as William Dugdale's _Monasticon_, Thomas Madox's _History of the Exchequer_, Wilkins's _Concilia_, and Thomas Rymer's _Foedera_. But these works, important as they were, gave but little idea of the wealth of historical sources which the 19th century was to reveal in England.

In the 19th century the science of history underwent a sort of industrial revolution. The machinery of research, invented by the genius of men like Mabillon, was perfected and set going in all the archives of Europe. Isolated workers or groups of workers grew into national or international associations, producing from archives vast collections of material to be worked up into the artistic form of history. The result of this movement has been to revolutionize the whole subject. These men of the factory--devoting their lives to the cataloguing of archives and libraries, to the publication of material, and then to the gigantic task of indexing what they have produced--have made it possible for the student in an American or Australian college to master in a few hours in his library sources of history which baffled the long years of research of a Martene or Rymer. The texts themselves have mostly become as correct as they can ever be, and manuals and bibliographies guide one to and through them, so that no one need go astray who takes the trouble to make use of the mechanism which is at his hand. For example, since the papal archives were opened, so many _regesta_ have appeared that soon it will be possible to follow the letter-writing of the medieval popes day by day for century after century.

The apparatus for this research is too vast to be described here. Archives have been reformed, their contents catalogued or calendared; government commissions have rescued numberless documents from oblivion or destruction, and learned societies have supplemented and criticized this work and co-ordinated the results. Every state in Europe now has published the main sources for its history. The "Rolls" series, the _Monumenta Germaniae historica_, and the _Documents inedits_ are but the more notable of such national products. A series of periodicals keeps watch over this enormous output. The files and indices of the _English Historical Review_, _Historische Zeitschrift_, _Revue historique_, or _American Historical Review_ will alone reveal the strength and character of historical research in the later 19th century.

Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together again. Psychology has been drawn upon to interpret the movements of revolutions or religions, anthropology and ethnology furnish a clue to problems to which the key of documents has been lost. Genealogy, heraldry and chronology run parallel with the wider subject. But the real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those traces of the past that still exist, the science of language (philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures, and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to classify and interpret the remains of the "pre-historic" age.

This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history--the recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary history began. The perspective stretches out as far the other side of Homer as we are this. The old "providential" scheme of history disintegrates before a new interest in the "gentile" nations to whose high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast _corpora inscriptionum_, stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism. Medieval archaeology has, since Quicherat, revealed how men were living while the monks wrote chronicles, and now cathedrals and castles are studied as genuine historic documents.

The immense increase in available sources, archaeological and literary, has remade historical criticism. Ranke's application of the principles of "higher criticism" to works written since the invention of printing (_Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber_) was an epoch-making challenge of narrative sources. Now they are everywhere checked by contemporary evidence, and a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source has discredited much of what had been currently accepted as true. This is true not only of ancient history, where last year's book may be a thousand years out of date, but of the whole field. Hardly an "old master" remains an authoritative book of reference. Gibbon, Grote, Giesebrecht, Guizot stand to-day by reason of other virtues than their truth. Old landmarks drop out of sight--e.g. the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the coming of the Greeks to Italy in 1450, dates which once enclosed the middle ages. The perspective changes--the Renaissance grows less and the middle ages more; the Protestant Revolution becomes a complex of economics and politics and religion; the French Revolution a vast social reform in which the Terror was an incident, &c., &c. The result has been a complete transformation of history since the middle of the 19th century.

In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuet's _Histoire universelle_. Voltaire's reply to it in the 18th (_Essai sur les moeurs_) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the _philosophe_ historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupes--the real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labours leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the 19th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heeren's own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyle's "great man theory of history" is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is God's revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of each--Judaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity love--does not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.

In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritism--recognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his _History of Civilization in England_ (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that "the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws," and "the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents." Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those "historians whose indolence of thought" or "natural incapacity" prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckle's too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however, Buckle's theory received but little favour for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the "economic theory of history." Accepting with reservation Feuerbach's attack on the Hegelian "absolute idea," based on materialistic grounds (_Der Mensch ist, was er isst_), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and "finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven" (_Die heilige Familie_, p. 238). In his _Misere de la philosophie_ (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous _Manifesto of the Communist Party_ (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of _Das Kapital_ was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.

The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.

This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer attempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operative--the _Cambridge Modern History_, Lavisse and Rambaud's _Histoire generale_, or Lavisse's _Histoire de France_, like Hunt and Poole's _Political History of England_, and Oncken's _Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen_. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and arts--a tendency noted before, to which this edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaph--_si historiam requiris, circumspice_.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--See Ch. V. Langlois, _Manuel de bibliographie
historique_ (2 vols., 1904). This forms the logical bibliography of
this article. It is a general survey of the whole apparatus of
historical research, and is the indispensable guide to the subject.
Similar bibliographies covering sections of history are noted with the
articles where they properly belong, e.g. in English medieval history
the manual of Chas. Gross, _Sources and Literature of English
History_; in German history the _Quellenkunde_ of Dahlmann-Waitz (7th
ed.); for France the _Bibliographie de l'histoire de France_ of G.
Monod (antiquated, 1888), or the _Sources de l'histoire de France_ so
ably begun by A. Molinier's volumes on the medieval period. Perhaps
the sanest survey of the present scientific movement in history is the
clear summary of Ch. V. Langlois and Ch. Seignobos, _Introduction to
the Study of History_ (trans. with preface by F. York Powell, London,
1898). Much more ambitious is E. Bernheim's _Lehrbuch der historischen
Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie mit Nachweis der wichtigsten
Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte_ (3rd and 4th ed.,
Leipzig, 1903). (J. T. S.*)

HIT, a town of Asiatic Turkey, in the vilayet of Bagdad, on the west bank of the Euphrates, 70 m. W.N.W. of Bagdad, in 33 deg. 38' 8" N., 42 deg. 52' 15" E. It is picturesquely situated on a line of hills, partly natural, but in large part certainly artificial, the accumulation of centuries of former habitation, from 30 to 100 ft. in height, bordering the river. The houses are built of field stones and mud. A striking feature of the town is a lofty and well-proportioned minaret, which leans quite perceptibly. Behind and around Hit is an extensive but utterly barren plain, through which flow several streams of bitter water, coming from mineral springs. Directly behind the town are two bitumen springs, one cold and one hot, within 30 ft. of one another. The gypsum cliffs on the edge of the plain, and the rocks which crop out here and there in the plain, are full of seams of bitumen, and the whole place is redolent of sulphuretted hydrogen. Across the river there are naphtha springs. Indeed, the entire region is one possessing great potential wealth in mineral oils and the like. Hit, with its fringe of palms, is like an oasis in the desert occasioned by the outcrop of these deposits. From time immemorial it has been the chief source of supply of bitumen for Babylonia, the prosperity of the town depending always upon its bitumen fountains, which are still the property of the government, but are rented out to any one who wishes to use them. There is also a shipyard at Hit, where the characteristic Babylonian boats are still made, smeared within and without with bitumen. Hit is the head of navigation on the Euphrates. It is also the point from which the camel-post starts across the desert to Damascus. About 8 m. inland from Hit, on a bitter stream, lies the small town of Kubeitha. Hit is mentioned, under the name of Ist, in the Karnak inscription as paying tribute to Tethmosis (Thothmes) III. In the Bible (Ezra viii. 15) it is called Ahava; the original Babylonian name seems to have been _Ihi_, which becomes in the Talmud _Ihidakira_, in Ptolemy [Greek: Idikara], and in Zosimus and Ammianus [Greek: Dakira] and Diacira.

See Geo. Rawlinson's _Herodotus_, i. 179, and note by H. C. Rawlinson;
J. P. Peters, _Nippur_ (1897); H. V. Geere, _By Nile and Euphrates_
(1904). (J. P. Pe.)

HITA, GINES PEREZ DE (1544?-1605?), Spanish novelist and poet, was born at Mula (Murcia) about the middle of the 16th century. He served in the campaign of 1569-1571 against the Moriscos, and in 1572 wrote a rhymed history of the city of Lorca which remained unpublished till 1889. He owes his wide celebrity to the _Historia de los bandos de Zegries y Abencerrajes_ (1595-1604), better known as the _Guerras civiles de Granada_, which purports to be a chronicle based on an Arabic original ascribed to a certain Aben-Hamin. Aben-Hamin is a fictitious personage, and the _Guerras de Granada_ is in reality a historical novel, perhaps the earliest example of its kind, and certainly the first historical novel that attained popularity. In the first part the events which led to the downfall of Granada are related with uncommon brilliancy, and Hita's sympathetic transcription of life at the Emir's court has clearly suggested the conventional presentation of the picturesque, chivalrous Moor in the pages of Mlle de Scudery, Mme de Lafayette, Chateaubriand and Washington Irving. The second part is concerned with the author's personal experiences, and the treatment is effective; yet, though Calderon's play, _Amar despues de la muerte_, is derived from it, the second part has never enjoyed the vogue or influence of the first. The exact date of Hita's death is unknown. His blank verse rendering of the _Cronica Troyana_, written in 1596, exists in manuscript.

HITCHCOCK, EDWARD (1793-1864), American geologist, was born of poor parents at Deerfield, Massachusetts, on the 24th of May 1793. He owed his education chiefly to his own exertions, and was preparing himself to enter Harvard College when he was compelled to interrupt his studies from a weakness in his eyesight. In 1815 he became principal of the academy of his native town; but he resigned this office in 1818 in order to study for the ministry. Having been ordained in 1821 pastor of the Congregational church of Conway, Mass., he employed his leisure in making a scientific survey of the western counties of the state. From 1825 to 1845 he was professor of chemistry and natural history, from 1845 to 1864 was professor of natural theology and geology at Amherst College, and from 1845 to 1854 was president; the college owed its early success largely to his energetic efforts, especially during the period of his presidency. In 1830 he was appointed state geologist of Massachusetts, and in 1836 was made geologist of the first district of the state of New York. In 1840 he received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard, and in 1846 that of D.D. from Middlebury College, Vermont. Besides his constant labours in geology, zoology and botany, Hitchcock took an active interest in agriculture, and in 1850 he was sent by the Massachusetts legislature to examine into the methods of the agricultural schools of Europe. In geology he made a detailed examination and exposition of the fossil footprints from the Triassic sandstones of the Connecticut valley. His collection is preserved in the Hitchcock Ichnological Museum of Amherst College, and a description of it was published in 1858 in his report to the Massachusetts legislature on the ichnology of New England. The footprints were regarded as those of reptiles, amphibia and birds (?). In 1857 he undertook, with the aid of his two sons, the geological survey of Vermont, which was completed in 1861. As a writer on geological science, Hitchcock was largely concerned in determining the connexion between it and religion, and employing its results to explain and support what he regarded as the truths of revelation. He died at Amherst, on the 27th of February 1864.

His son, CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK (1836- ), did good service in geology, in Vermont, New Hampshire (1868-1878), and other parts of America, and became professor of geology at Dartmouth in 1868.

The following are Edward Hitchcock's principal works: _Geology of the
Connecticut Valley_ (1823); _Catalogue of Plants growing without
cultivation in the vicinity of Amherst_ (1829); _Reports on the
Geology of Massachusetts_ (1833-1841); _Elementary Geology_ (1840; ed.
2, 1841; and later ed. with C. H. Hitchcock, 1862); _Fossil Footmarks
in the United States_ (1848); _Outline of the Geology of the Globe and
of the United States in particular_ (1853); _Illustrations of Surface
Geology_ (1856); _Ichnology of New England_ (1858); _The Religion of
Geology and its Connected Sciences_ (1851; new ed., 1869);
_Reminiscences of Amherst College_ (1863); and various papers in the
_American Journal of Science_, and other periodicals.

HITCHCOCK, GEORGE (1850- ), American artist, was born at Providence, Rhode Island, in 1850. He graduated from Brown University in 1872 and from the law school of Harvard University in 1874; then turned his attention to art and became a pupil of Boulanger and Lefebvre in Paris. He attracted notice in the Salon of 1885 with his "Tulip Growing," a Dutch garden which he painted in Holland. He had for years a studio at Egmond, in the Netherlands. He became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, France; a member of the Vienna Academy of Arts, the Munich Secession Society, and other art bodies; and is represented in the Dresden gallery; the imperial collection, Vienna; the Chicago Art Institute, and the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts.

HITCHCOCK, ROSWELL DWIGHT (1817-1887), American divine, was born at East Machias, Maine, on the 15th of August 1817, graduated at Amherst College in 1836, and later studied at Andover Theological Seminary, Mass. After a visit to Germany he was a tutor at Amherst in 1839-1842, and was minister of the First (Congregational) Church, Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1845-1852. He became professor of natural and revealed religion in Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1852, and in 1855 professor of church history in the Union Theological Seminary in New York, of which he was president in 1880-1887. He died at Somerset, Mass., on the 16th of June 1887.

Among his works are: _Life of Edward Robinson_ (1863); _Socialism_
(1879); _Carmina Sanctorum_ (with Z. Eddy and L. W. Mudge, 1885); and
_Eternal Atonement_ (1888).

HITCHIN, a market town in the Hitchin parliamentary division of Hertfordshire, England, on the small river Hiz, 32 m. N. from London by the Great Northern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 10,072. It is the junction of the main line with the Cambridge branch, and with a branch of the Midland railway to Bedford. The church of St Mary is Perpendicular, with a fine porch, a painting of the Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Rubens, a small crypt said to have been used by Cromwell as a prison for the Royalists, and many interesting monuments. Hitchin Priory is a mansion on the site of a Carmelite foundation of the early 14th century. A Gilbertine nunnery, founded later in the same century, stood adjacent to the church, and portions of the buildings appear in an existing block of almshouses. The grammar school (1632) was reconstituted in 1889 for boys and girls. Straw-plaiting, malting, brewing, and the cultivation and distillation of lavender and peppermint are carried on.

HITTITES, an ancient people, alluded to frequently in the earlier records of Israel, and also, under slightly variant names, in Egyptian records of the XVIIIth, XIXth and XXth Dynasties, and in Assyrian from about 1100 to 700 B.C. They appear also in the Vannic cuneiform texts, and are believed to be the authors of a class of monuments bearing inscriptions in a peculiar pictographic character, and widely distributed over Asia Minor and N. Syria, around which much controversy has raged during the past thirty years.

1. _The Bible._--In the Old Testament the name of the race is written _Heth_ (with initial aspirate), members of it being _Hitti_, _Hittim_, which the Septuagint renders [Greek: chet], [Greek: chettaios], [Greek: chettein] or [Greek: chetteim], keeping, it will be noted, [epsilon] in the stem throughout. The race appears in two connexions, (a) In pre-Israelite Palestine, it is resident about Hebron (Gen. xxiii. 3), and in the central uplands (Num. xiii. 29). To Joshua (i. 4) is promised "from the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites." The term "wilderness" here is of geographical ambiguity; but the promise is usually taken to mean that Palestine itself was part of the Hittite land before the coming of Israel; and an apostrophe of Ezekiel (xvi. 3) to Jerusalem, "thy mother (was) an Hittite," is quoted in confirmation. Under the monarchy we hear frequently of Hittites within the borders of Israel, but either as a small subject people, coupled with other petty tribes, or as individuals in the Jewish service (e.g. Uriah, in the time of David). It appears, therefore, that there survived in Palestine to late times a detached Hittite population, with which Hebrews sometimes intermarried (Judges iii. 5-6; Gen. xxvi. 34) and lived in relations now amicable, now tyrannical (e.g. Hittites were made tributary bondsmen by Solomon, 1 Kings ix. 20, 21; 2 Chron. viii. 7, 8). (b) An independent and powerful Hittite people was domiciled N. of Palestine proper, organized rather as a confederacy of tribes than a single monarchy (1 Kings x. 28; 2 Kings vii. 6). Presumably it was a daughter of these Hittites that Solomon took to wife. If the emendation of 2 Sam. xxiv. 64, "Tahtim-hodshi," based on the Septuagint version [Greek: gen chetteim kades] be accepted, we hear of them at Kadesh on Orontes; and some minor Hittite cities are mentioned, e.g. Luz; but no one capital city of the race is clearly indicated. Carchemish, on the Euphrates, though mentioned three times (2 Chron. xxxv. 20; Isa. x. 9; Jer. xlvi. 2), is not connected explicitly with Hittites, a fact which is not surprising, since that city was no longer under a Hatti dynasty at the epoch of the Old Testament references. So far as the Old Testament goes, therefore, we gather that the Hittites were a considerable people, widely spread in Syria, in part subdued and to some extent assimilated by Israel, but in part out of reach. The latter portion was not much known to the Hebrews, but was vaguely feared as a power in the early days of the monarchy, though not in the later pre-Captivity period. The identification of the northern and southern Hittites, however, presents certain difficulties not yet fully explained; and it seems that we must assume Heth to have been the name both of a country in the north and of a tribal population not confined to that country.

2. _Egyptian Records._--The decipherment of the inscriptions of the XVIIIth Theban Dynasty led, before the middle of the 19th century, to the discovery of the important part played in the Syrian campaigns of Tethmosis (Thothmes) III. by the H-t8 (vulgarly transliterated _Kheta_, though the vocalization is uncertain). The coincidence of this name, beginning with an aspirate, led H. K. Brugsch to identify the Kheta with Heth. That identification stands, and no earlier Egyptian mention of the race has been found. Tethmosis III. found the Kheta ("Great" and "Little") in N. Syria, not apparently at Kadesh, but at Carchemish, though they had not been in possession of the latter place long (not in the epoch of Tethmosis I.'s Syrian campaign). They were a power strong enough to give the Pharaoh cause to vaunt his success (see also EGYPT: _Ancient History_, S "The New Empire"). Though he says he levied tribute upon them, his successors in the dynasty nearly all record fresh wars with the Kheta who appear as the northernmost of Pharaoh's enemies, and Amenophis or Amenhotep III. saw fit to take to wife Gilukhipa, a Syrian princess, who may or may not have been a Hittite. This queen is by some supposed to have introduced into Egypt certain exotic ideas which blossomed in the reign of Amenophis IV. The first Pharaoh of the succeeding dynasty, Rameses I., came to terms with a Kheta king called Saplel or Saparura; but Seti I. again attacked the Kheta (1366 B.C.), who had apparently pushed southwards. Forced back by Seti, the Kheta returned and were found holding Kadesh by Rameses II., who, in his fifth year, there fought against them and a large body of allies, drawn probably in part from beyond Taurus, the battle which occasioned the monumental poem of Pentaur. After long struggles, a treaty was concluded in Rameses's twenty-first year, between Pharaoh and "Khetasar" (i.e. Kheta-king), of which we possess an Egyptian copy. The discovery of a cuneiform tablet containing a copy of this same treaty, in the Babylonian language, was reported from Boghaz Keui in Cappadocia by H. Winckler in 1907. It argues the Kheta a people of considerable civilization. The Kheta king subsequently visited Pharaoh and gave him his daughter to wife. Rameses' successor, Mineptah, remained on terms with the Kheta folk; but in the reign of Rameses III. (Dyn. XX.) the latter seem to have joined in the great raid of northern tribes on Egypt which was checked by the battle of Pelusium. From this point (c. 1150 B.C.)--the point at which (roughly) the monarchic history of Israel in Palestine opens--Egyptian records cease to mention Kheta; and as we know from other sources that the latter continued powerful in Carchemish for some centuries to come, we must presume that the rise of the Israelite state interposed an effective political barrier.

3. _Assyrian Records._--In an inscription of Tiglath Pileser I. (about 1100 B.C.), first deciphered in 1857, a people called _Khatti_ is mentioned as powerful in Girgamish on Euphrates (i.e. Carchemish); and in other records of the same monarch, subsequently read, much mention is made of this and of other N. Syrian names. These Khatti appear again in the inscriptions of Assur-nazir-pal (early 9th century B.C.), in whose time Carchemish was very wealthy, and the Khatti power extended far over N. Syria and even into Mesopotamia. Shalmaneser II. (d. 825 B.C.) raided the Khatti and their allies year after year; and at last Sargon III., in 717 B.C., relates that he captured Carchemish and its king, Pisiris, and put an end to its independence. We hear no more of it thenceforward. These _Khatti_, there is no reasonable doubt, are identical with _Kheta_. (For the chronology see further under BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA.)

4. _Other Cuneiform Records._--The name of the race appears in certain of the Tel-el-Amarna letters, tablets written in Babylonian script to Amenophis (Amenhotep) IV. and found in 1892 on the site of his capital. Some of his governors in Syrian districts (e.g. one Aziru of Phoenicia) report movements of the Hittites, who were then pursuing an aggressive policy (about 1400 B.C.). There are also other letters from rulers of principalities in N. Syria (Mitanni) and E. Asia Minor (Arzawa), who write in non-Semitic tongues and are supposed to have been Hittites.

Certain _Khate_ or _Khati_ are mentioned in the Vannic inscriptions (deciphered partially by A. H. Sayce and others) as attacked by kings of Bianas (Van), and apparently domiciled on the middle Euphrates N. of Taurus in the 9th century B.C. This name again may safely be identified with _Khatti-Kheta_.

The Khatti also appear on a "prophecy-tablet," referring ostensibly to the time of Sargon of Agade (middle of 4th millennium B.C.); but the document is probably of very much later date. Lastly, a fragmentary chronicle of the 1st Babylonian Dynasty mentions an invasion of Akkad by them about 1800 B.C.

From all these various sources we should gather that the Hittites were among the more important racial elements in N. Syria and S.E. Asia Minor for at least a thousand years. The limits at each end, however, are very ill defined, the superior falling not later than 2000 B.C. and the inferior not earlier than 600 B.C. This people was militant, aggressive and unsettled in the earlier part of that time; commercial, wealthy and enervated in the latter. A memorial of its trading long remained in Asia in the shape of the weight-measure called in cuneiform records the _maneh_ "of Carchemish." These Hittites had close relations with other Asia Minor peoples, and at times headed a confederacy. During the later part of their history they were in continual contact with Assyria, and, as a Syrian power, and perhaps also as a Cappadocian one, they finally succumbed to Assyrian pressure.

_The "Hittite" Monuments._--It remains to consider in the light of the foregoing evidence a class of monuments to which attention began to be called about 1870. In that year two Americans, Consul J. A. Johnson and the Rev. S. Jessup, rediscovered, at Hamah (Hamath) on Orontes, five basaltic blocks bearing pictographic inscriptions in relief, one of which had been reported by J. L. Burckhardt in 1812. In spite of their efforts and subsequent attempts made by Tyrwhitt Drake and Richard Burton, when consul at Damascus, proper copies could not be obtained; and it was not till the end of 1872 that, thanks to W. Wright of Beirut, casts were taken and the stones themselves sent to Constantinople by Subhi Pasha of Damascus. As usually happens when a new class of antiquities is announced, it was soon found that the "Hamathite" inscriptions did not stand alone. A monument in the same script had been seen in Aleppo by Tyrwhitt Drake and George Smith in 1872. It still exists, built into a mosque on the western wall of the city. Certain clay sealings, eight of which bore pictographic signs, found by A. H. Layard in the palace of Assur-bani-pal at Kuyunjik (Nineveh), as long ago as 1851 and noticed then as in a "doubtful character," were compared by Hayes Ward and found to be of the Hamathite class. A new copy of the long known rock-sculpture at Ivriz[1] in S.W. Cappadocia was published by E. J. Davis in 1876, and clearly showed Hamathite characters accompanying the figures. Davis also reported, but did not see, a similar inscription at Bulgar Maden, not far away. Sculptures seen by W. Skene and George Smith at Jerablus, on the middle Euphrates, led to excavations being undertaken there, in 1878, by the British Museum, and to the discovery of certain Hamathite inscriptions accompanying sculptures, a few of which were brought to London. The conduct of these excavations, owing to the death of George Smith, devolved on Consul Henderson of Aleppo, and was not satisfactorily carried out. Meanwhile Wright, Ward and Sayce had all suggested "Hittite" as a substitute for "Hamathite," because no other N. Syrian people loomed so large in ancient records as did the Hittites, and the suggestion began to find acceptance. Jerablus was confidently identified with Carchemish (but without positive proof to this day), and the occurrence of Hamathite monuments there was held to confirm the Hittite theory.

In 1876 Sayce pointed out the resemblance between certain Hittite signs and characters in the lately deciphered Cypriote syllabary, and suggested that the comparison might lead to a beginning of decipherment; but the hope has proved vain. To this scholar, however, is owed the next great step ahead. In 1879 it first occurred to him to compare the rock-monuments at Boghaz Keui (see PTERIA) and Euyuk in N. Cappadocia, discovered by Texier and Hamilton in 1835 and subsequently explored by G. Perrot and E. Guillaume. These, he now saw, bore Hittite pictographs. Other rock-sculptures at Giaur Kalessi, in Galatia, and in the Karabel pass near Smyrna, he suspected of belonging to the same class[2]; and visiting the last-named locality in the autumn, he found Hittite pictographs accompanying one of the two figures.[3] He announced his discoveries in 1880, and proclaimed the fact that a great Hittite empire, extending from Kadesh to Smyrna, had risen from the dead. A month later he had the good fortune to recover copies of a silver boss, or hilt-top, offered to various museums about 1860, but rejected by them as a meaningless forgery and for a long time lost again to sight. Round the rim was a cuneiform legend, and in the field a Hittite figure with six Hittite symbols engraved twice over on either hand of it. Reading the cuneiform as _Tarqu-dimme sar mat Erme_ (i.e. "T. king of the country E."), Sayce distributed phonetic values, corresponding to the syllables of the two proper names, among four of the Hittite characters, reserving two as "ideograms" of "king" and "country," and launched into the field of decipherment. But he subsequently recognized that this was a false start, and began afresh from another basis. Since then a number of other monuments have been found, some on new sites, others on sites already known to be Hittite, the distribution of which can be seen by reference to the accompanying map. It will be observed that, so far as at present known, they cluster most closely in Commagene, Cappadocia and S. Phrygia.

The following notes supplement the map:--

A. WEST ASIA MINOR.--"_Niobe_" (_Suratlu Tash_) and _Karabel_ (two);
rock-cut figures with much defaced hieroglyphs in relief. Remains of
buildings, not yet explored, lie near the "Niobe" figure. Nothing
purely Hittite has been found at Sardis or in any W. Asian excavation;
but small Hittite objects have been sold in Smyrna and Aidin.

B. PHRYGIA.--_Giaur-Kalessi_; rock-cut figures and remains of a
stronghold, but no inscriptions. _Doghanludere_ and _Beikeui_ in the
Phrygian rock-monument country; at the first is a sculptured
rock-panel with a few pictographs in relief; at the latter a fragment
of an inscription in relief was disinterred from a mound. _Kolitolu
Yaila_, near Ilghin; block inscribed in relief, disinterred from
mounds apparently marking a camp or palace-enclosure. _Eflatun Bunar_
(= Plato's Spring), W. of Konia; megalithic building with rude and
greatly defaced reliefs, not certainly Hittite: no inscription.
Fassiler, W. of Konia; gigantic _stela_, or composite statue (figure
on animals), not certainly Hittite; no inscription. _Konia_; relief of
warrior, drawn by Texier in 1835 and since lost; of very doubtful
Hittite character. A gold inscribed Hittite ring, now at Oxford, was
bought there in 1903. _Emirghazi_ (anc. _Ardistama_?); three
inscriptions in relief (two on altars) and large mounds. Evidently an
important Hittite site. _Kara-Dagh_; hill-sanctuary with incised
carving of seated figure and inscriptions, found by Miss G. L. Bell
and Sir W. M. Ramsay in 1907 (see their _Thousand and One Churches_,
1909).