So, again, the heraldic arrangement of animals face to face, or more rarely back to back, had its first home in Chaldæa, but it was the Hittites who raised it into a principle of art. We may perhaps trace their doing so to their love of animal forms.
The influence of Babylonian culture may have made itself first felt in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna represent the Hittite tribes as descending southward into the Syrian plains. It may on the other hand go back to a much earlier epoch. We have no materials at present for deciding the question. One fact, however, is clear; there was a time when the Hittites were profoundly affected by Babylonian civilisation, religion and art. Before this could have been the case they must have been already settled in Syria.
It is more easy to fix the period when the Hittite sculptor received that inspiration from Egyptian art which produced the sphinxes of Eyuk and the seated image on Mount Sipylos. It can only have been the age of Ramses II., and of the great wars between Egypt and the Hittite princes in the fourteenth century before our era. The influence of Egypt was but transitory, but it was to it, in all probability, that the Hittites owed the idea of hieroglyphic writing.
At a far later date Babylonian influence was superseded by that of Assyria. The later sculptures of Carchemish betray the existence of Assyrian rather than of Babylonian models. The winged figure of the goddess of Carchemish now in the British Museum is Assyrian in style and character, and it is possible that other draped images of the goddess may be derived from the same source. In Babylonian art Istar was represented nude.
However this may be, Professor Perrot has made it clear that the beginnings of Hittite art must be looked for in Syria, on the southern slopes of the Taurus, from whence it spread to the tribes of Kappadokia. It is in Northern Syria that its rudest and most infantile attempts have been found. The sculptors of Eyuk were already advanced in skill.
To Professor Perrot we also owe the discovery of bronze figures of Hittite manufacture. The execution of them is at once conventional and barbarous. Nothing can exceed the rudeness of a figure now in the Louvre, which represents a god with a pointed tiara, standing on the back of an animal. Though the face of the god has evidently been modelled with care, it is impossible to tell to what zoological species the animal which supports him is intended to belong. Almost equally far removed from nature is the bronze image of a bull which is also in the Louvre.