It was an empire of this sort that the Hittites established in Asia Minor. How long it lasted we cannot say. But so long as the distant races of the West answered the summons to war of the Hittite princes, it remained a reality. The fact that the tribes of the Troad and Lydia are found fighting under the command of the Hittite kings of Kadesh, proves that they acknowledged the supremacy of their Hittite lords, and followed them to battle like the vassals of some feudal chief. If Hittite armies had not marched to the shores of the Ægean, and Hittite princes been able from time to time to exact homage from the nations of the far west, Egypt would not have had to contend against the populations of Asia Minor in its wars with the Hittites, and the figures of Hittite warriors would not have been sculptured on the rocks of Karabel. There was a time when the Hittite name was feared as far as the western extremity of Asia Minor, and when Hittite satraps had their seat in the future capital of Lydia.
Traditions of this period lingered on into classical days. The older dynasty of Lydian kings traced its descent from Bel and Ninos, the Babylonian or Assyrian gods, whose names had been carried by the Hittites into the remote west. The Lydian hero Kayster, who gave his name to the Kaystrian plain, was fabled to have wandered into Syria, and there, after wooing Semiramis, to have been the father of Derketo, the goddess of Carchemish. A Lydian was even said to have drowned Derketo in the sacred lake of Ashkelon; and Eusebius declares that Sardes, the Lydian capital, was captured for the first time in B. C. 1078, by a horde of invaders from the north-western regions of Asia.
But it is in the famous legend of the Amazons that we must look for the chief evidence preserved to us by classical antiquity of the influence once exercised by the Hittites in Asia Minor. The Amazons were imagined to be a nation of female warriors, whose primitive home lay in Kappadokia, on the banks of the Thermodon, not far from the ruins of Boghaz Keui. From hence they had issued forth to conquer the people of Asia Minor and to found an empire which reached to the Ægean Sea. The building of many of the most famous cities on the Ægean coast was ascribed to them,--Myrina and Kyme, Smyrna and Ephesos, where the worship of the great Asiatic goddess was carried on with barbaric ceremonies into the later age of civilised Greece.