Westward of the Halys and Kappadokia they are marked by certain peculiarities. They are found either in the vicinity of silver mines, like those of Lykaonia, or else on the line of the ancient roads, which finally converged in Lydia. None have been discovered in the central plateau of Asia Minor, in the mountains of Lykia in the south, or the wide-reaching coast-lands of the north. They mark the sites of small colonies, or else the lines of road that connected them. Moreover, with the exception of the image of the goddess who sits on her throne in Mount Sipylos, the western monuments represent the figures of warriors who are in the act of marching forward. This is the case at Karabel; it is also the case at Ghiaur-kalessi, where the rock on which the two Hittite warriors are carved lies close below the remains of a pre-historic fortress.
Such facts admit of only one explanation. The Hittite monuments of Western Asia Minor must be memorials of military conquest and supremacy. In the warriors whose figures stood on either side of the Pass of Karabel, the sculptor must have seen the visible symbols of Hittite power. They showed that the Hittite had won and kept the pass by force of arms. They are emblems of conquest, not creations of native art.
But it was inevitable that conquest should bring with it a civilising influence. The Hittites could not carry with them the art and culture they had acquired in the East without influencing the barbarous populations over whom they claimed to rule. The vassal chieftains of Lydia and the Troad could not lead their forces into Syria, or assist in the invasion of Egypt, without learning something of that ancient civilisation with which they had come in contact. The Hittites, in fact, must be regarded as the first teachers of the rude populations of the West. They brought to them a culture the first elements of which had been inspired by Babylonia; they brought also a system of writing out of which, in all probability, the natives of Asia Minor afterwards developed a writing of their own.
It is possible, therefore, that some of the Hittite monuments of Asia Minor are the work, not of the Hittites themselves, but of the native populations whom they had civilised and instructed. It may be that this is the case at Ibreez, where the faces of the god and his worshipper have Jewish features very unlike those found on monuments of purely Hittite origin. But apart from such instances, where the monument is due to Hittite influence rather than to Hittite artists, it is certain that most of the Hittite memorials of Asia Minor are the productions of the Hittites themselves. This is proved by the hieroglyphs which are attached to them, as well as by the uniform type of feature and dress which prevails from Carchemish to the Ægean. It is impossible to explain such an uniformity, and still more the extraordinary resemblance between the characters engraved at Karabel, or on Mount Sipylos, and those which meet us in the inscriptions of Hamath and Carchemish, except on the supposition that the monuments were executed by men who belonged to the same race and spoke the same language. Wherever Hittite inscriptions occur, we find in them the same combinations of hieroglyphs as well as the use of the same characters to denote grammatical suffixes.