struggle. The text of the treaty is
engraved on the walls of Karnak. There we may read how the two rivals
swore henceforth to be friends and allies, how the existing boundaries
of their respective territories in Syria were to remain unchanged for
ever, and how a general amnesty was to be granted to the political
fugitives on either side. It was only the criminal to whom the right of
asylum in the dominions of the other was denied.

In the war they had waged with Egypt the Hittite princes of Kadesh had
summoned their vassal allies from the distant coasts of Asia Minor.
Lycians and Dardanians had come from the far west; and were joined by
the troops of Aram-Naharaim from the east. The extension of Hittite
supremacy to the shores of the AEgean Sea is testified by the monuments
it has left behind. Hittite inscriptions have been found near Smyrna
engraved on the rocks, as well as the figures of Hittite warriors
guarding the westernmost pass of the ancient road. The summer residences
of the Hittite princes were on the eastern bank of the Halys. Here the
roads of Asia Minor converged, and here we still see the sculptured
bas-reliefs of a Hittite palace and long rows of Hittite deities.

The Hittite empire broke up into a multitude of small principalities. Of
these Carchemish, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, was perhaps the most
important. It commanded the ford across the river, and the high-road of
commerce from east to west. Its merchants grew rich, and "the mina of
Carchemish" became a standard of value in the ancient world. Its capture
by Sargon destroyed a rival of Assyrian trade, and opened the road to
the Mediterranean to the armies of Assyria.

The decay of the Hittite and Mitannian power meant the revival of the
older Aramaean population of the country. The foreigner was expelled or
absorbed; Syria and Mesopotamia became more and more Semitic. Aramaean
kingdoms arose on all sides, and a feeling of common kinship and
interests arose among them at the same time. To the north of the Gulf of
Antioch, in the very heart of the Hittite territory, German excavators
have lately found the earliest known monuments of Aramaean art. The art,
as is natural, is based on that of their Hittite predecessors; even the
inscriptions in the alphabet of Phoenicia are cut in relief like the
older hieroglyphs of the Hittites. But they prove that the triumph of
the Aramaean was complete. The foreigner and his works were swept away;
no trace