Hittites

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hittites built one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia, yet for centuries the only place anyone could read their name was the Hebrew Bible. The English classicist Francis William Newman spoke for many in the early 19th century when he insisted that no Hittite king could have compared in power to the King of Judah. He was wrong by a staggering margin. Buried under the soil of north-central Anatolia lay the capital of an empire that once bordered Egypt and Assyria and traded blows with both. How did a people vanish so completely that scholars doubted they had ever mattered? Why did their own descendants scatter and merge into other populations, leaving no unifying continuity behind? And what did a royal archive of 10,000 clay tablets finally reveal about the language they spoke and the world they ruled?

• 2. The Name They Never Used

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  The Hittites did not call themselves Hittites. They called their kingdom Hatti in Akkadian, a name they inherited from the Hattians, an earlier people who had ruled central Anatolia until the beginning of the second millennium BC. The Hattians spoke an unrelated language known as Hattic, and they left their name stamped on the land long after they faded. The label we use today comes from a 19th-century mistake. Early archaeologists identified the people of Hattusa with the Biblical Hittites, a view that has since drawn greater academic scrutiny. By their own reckoning, these people were closer to Neshites or Neshians, named for the city of Nesha. Nesha flourished for some two hundred years until a king called Labarna renamed himself Hattusili I, meaning the man of Hattusa, around 1650 BC. With that new name he fixed his capital at Hattusa and lent it to a civilization that would carry the wrong label for three thousand years.

• 3. Digging Up A Ghost

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  Charles Texier, a French scholar, found the first Hittite ruins in 1834 but had no idea what he was looking at. The first real clues came from clay tablets at the karum of Kanesh, now called Kultepe, where records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a land of Hatti held names that were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but clearly Indo-European. In 1884, William Wright discovered a monument at Bogazkale whose script matched strange hieroglyphs from Aleppo and Hama in northern Syria. Three years later, excavations at Amarna in Egypt turned up the diplomatic letters of the pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten. Two of those letters came from a kingdom of Kheta, written in Akkadian cuneiform but in a language no one could read. Archibald Sayce proposed that Hatti in Anatolia was the same as Kheta and the same as the Biblical Hittites. Max Muller agreed Khatti was probably Kheta, but tied it to Biblical Kittim instead. The matter was settled when Hugo Winckler, digging at Bogazkoy from 1906, uncovered a royal archive of 10,000 tablets in that same unknown tongue, proving the ruins were the capital of an empire that once held northern Syria.

• 4. The Oldest Recorded Voice

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  The Hittites called their own speech nesili, the language of Nesa, and it turned out to be the oldest historically attested member of the Indo-European family. A Czech linguist named Bedrich Hrozny, who lived from 1879 to 1952, cracked it open. On the 24th of November 1915 he announced his results in a lecture at the Near Eastern Society of Berlin, and his book followed in Leipzig in 1917 under the title The Language of the Hittites. He opened it by declaring that the hitherto mysterious language was in the main an Indo-European language. The decipherment confirmed the laryngeal theory, a prediction Indo-European scholars had made decades before the proof arrived. Hittite split off from Proto-Indo-European so early that it preserved archaisms the other branches lost. The differences were so marked that Warren Cowgill argued it should be classed as a sister language rather than a daughter, a position labeled Indo-Hittite. By the empire's end, Hittite had become a written language of administration, while most of the population spoke the closely related Luwian, which had originated to the west.

• 5. First Among Equals

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  Hattusili I campaigned as far as the Amorite kingdom of Yamkhad in Syria, attacking but never capturing its capital of Aleppo. On his deathbed he chose his grandson, Mursili I, as heir, and Mursili carried the conquests further. Around 1595 BC he raided down the Euphrates, bypassed Assyria, and sacked Mari and Babylon, ejecting the Amorite rulers of the Old Babylonian Empire. Rather than hold Babylonia, he handed it to his Kassite allies, who would rule it for the next four centuries. The campaign left the capital in near-anarchy, and Mursili was assassinated by his brother-in-law Hantili I on the journey home. What followed was a cascade of murder. Hantili escaped repeated attempts on his life, but his wife Harapsili and her son were killed, and other royals fell to Zidanta I, who was then murdered by his own son Ammuna. During the Old Kingdom before 1400 BC, the king was not seen as a living god like the pharaohs of Egypt, but as a first among equals. Succession was not legally fixed, which opened the door to War of the Roses-style rivalries between the northern and southern branches of the royal family.

• 6. A Throne Above The Gods

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  Tudhaliya I pulled the kingdom out of obscurity around 1430 BC and began strengthening the kingship that had stayed weak for so long. From 1400 BC onward the king became a high priest for the whole realm, making an annual tour of the holy cities, running festivals, and keeping up the sanctuaries. Citizens began addressing him as My Sun, and the office took on what one description calls a superhuman aura. The empire reached its peak under Suppiluliuma I around 1350 BC, who reconquered Aleppo, reduced Mitanni to vassalage, and defeated the Amorite city-state of Carchemish. He grew so powerful that Egypt sought a marriage alliance, offering the widow of Tutankhamen to one of his sons; that son was evidently murdered before he arrived. Suppiluliuma also reigned while an epidemic of tularemia swept the empire, a sickness that killed him and his successor Arnuwanda II and afflicted the Hittites for decades. His son Mursili II turned the plague into a weapon. When the Arzawans attacked a weakened Hatti around 1330 BC, Mursili repelled them by sending infected rams across the line, the first recorded use of biological warfare.

• 7. Treaties And Bloodlines

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  The Battle of Kadesh, fought in the fifth year of Ramesses II around 1274 BC, ended without a clear winner. The Egyptians forced the Hittites into the fortress of Kadesh but had taken too many losses to mount a siege. Decades later, under threat from rising Assyria, the two old enemies made peace. The Treaty of Kadesh, signed in the 21st year of Ramesses around 1258 BC, is one of the oldest completely surviving treaties in history. It fixed the boundaries in southern Canaan and sealed the bond with the marriage of a Hittite princess to the pharaoh. Hittite queens were not bystanders in these arrangements; Queen Puduhepa stands out as an influential wielder of power in foreign policy. The Hittites had pioneered this art early, conducting treaties and alliances with neighbors at a time when few states did. Their innovations reached into law as well. King Telipinu, the last king of the Old Kingdom around 1525 BC, issued an edict that designated the Pankus, a general assembly of army and court officials, as the high court for constitutional crimes. Even kings answered to the Pankus, which lasted to the end of the New Kingdom.

• 8. Drought, Sea Peoples, And Silence

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  Hattusa was burned to the ground around 1180 BC, struck from all directions by the Kaskians, Phrygians, and Bryges. The collapse came as part of the larger Bronze Age Collapse, and the land itself had turned against the Hittites. A study of tree rings from juniper trees in the region records a shift to drier conditions across the 13th and 12th centuries BC, with drought for three straight years in 1198, 1197, and 1196 BC. The Sea Peoples pushed down the Mediterranean coast from the Aegean to Canaan, founding the state of Philistia and seizing Cilicia and Cyprus, cutting off the trade routes the Hittites depended on. The empire was also bleeding manpower; every soldier lost was a worker gone from food production, and casualties from war grew unsustainable. The kingdom vanished from historical records, much of its territory taken by Assyria. Yet the line did not end cleanly. Syro-Hittite states rose in Anatolia and northern Syria, the most notable at Carchemish and Melid, with the ruling family at Carchemish believed to be a cadet branch of the old central Hittite line. These successors fell one by one to the Neo-Assyrian Empire, fully absorbed during the reign of Sargon II between 722 and 705 BC, while the Niğde Stele from the end of the 8th century BC still spoke in Luwian after the parent empire was three centuries gone.