“Evil Hittites without respect for the command of the gods, whisperers of treachery”—these and similar reproaches were hurled by Sargon II's scribes against the peoples of Syria and Palestine who would not submit to the Assyrian yoke, or who having submitted sought relief in rebellion. Sargon's anger marked a crisis in the long but intermittent Assyrian relationship with the Anatolian peoples of North Syria and the Taurus, loosely termed “Hittites”. The purpose of this article is to review the sources for this relationship from the fall of the Hittite Empire, c. 1200 B.C. until the final extinction of the Syrian successor states by the Assyrians under Sargon. In it I shall concentrate on the less well-known evidence of the hieroglyphic inscriptions and refer to the comparatively better-known Assyrian cuneiform documentation only in so far as it illuminates these. It is a study which I hope may be appropriately dedicated to Sir Max Mallowan, whose archaeological work has provided so much material of the latter type, and whose interests amply attested by his publications have always centred on the tracing of links between various cultures, not the least between Assyria and the West.