Introduction to the Hittites

Essay First Published: December 01, 2001
Last Modified: May 24, 2003

Author: Steve Thurston

(All material copyrighted)

"Whoever becomes king after me and resettles Ḫattuša, may the Storm God of Heaven strike him!" - Anitta Text

In many ways, this statement begins, in a rather inauspicious way, the history of the Hittite empire. Anitta, King of Kuššara, attacked, destroyed, and forever cursed the city in the late 18th century B.C., at a time when the "Indo-European" Hittites were still establishing themselves in central Anatolia, and the indiginous Hattic rulers were firmly in control of the Hittite captial, Ḫattuša. But Anitta himself tells us about his deed in an archaic form of the Indo-European language of the future Hittite dynasty - "Hittite" to us, but "Nesite" to contemporaries (našili, nišili or nešumnili, in Hittite, literally "in the manner of the city Neša", not of Ḫattuša!).

When Ḫattuša was finally rebuilt, we find ourselves in a new world. The rulers in Ḫattuša still bear indiginous Hattic names and customs, but now they speak in Hittite. Nowhere is the non-Indo-European Hattic language (ḫatili in the texts, meaning "in the manner of Ḫattuša") still actively used - it has been relegated to a few native religious rituals and court titulary. For the next 400 years, the Hittite language would dominate Anatolia, in and out of the Empire. Then, even more quickly than it appeared, the Hittite language would disappear, along with the empire that sustained it. Around the turn of the 12th ceturty B.C., the empire collapsed seemingly overnight, and no documents in Hittite have been recovered from after this disaster.

It's not only the Hittite language that vanished with the collapse of the empire. Although the land of Ḫatti was known to nearby contemporaries for another half-millennium after the collapse of the empire, instead of being a reference to Anatolia, it became a reference to Syria and south-east Anatolia, the last place to retain some of the traditions of the Empire. History deep in the Anatolian interior is completely black for some time. Then, with the rise of imperial Assyria in the east and the Hellenes (Greeks) in the west, history once again conspired to destroy all traces of an empire that was geographically probably the largest ever to be achieved up to its time. The Greeks don't know about the Hittites, instead speaking of Ionians, Lydians, and Phyrigians, and the Assyrians slowly consumed the Hittites of Syria, incorporating them into their empire.

Its language forgotten, its remains burned, plundered, and destroyed by time, its glories forgotten in the dawning of a new, Iron Age of man, the Hittites came down to us only as an afterglow of an afterglow. The post-Empire Hittites of Syria were able to spread their presence south into Palestine, where, once Assyria had conquered the Syro-Hittites, the "Hittites" finally found a small but permanent toe-hold in history as only a locally important Palestinian tribe that had mixed and inevitably doomed relations with the Israelites in the Old Testament. For over 2,500 years the Hittites would be known as something that they weren't, and barely even that.

The rediscovery of the Hittites is usually considered one of the great triumphs of modern archaeology and linguistics. It was the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs that first brought the Hittites back to life, on a much larger than life scale. The battle reliefs of Ramesses the Great portrayed again and again his great victory (so he claimed) over the Hittites at Kadesh. The Battle of Kadesh, proving the existence of the Hittites, was also used by those who wished to prove the accuracy of the Bible. Up until that time, some scholars believed that the Hittites were an imaginary tribe invented by the Bible as a foil for the Israelites. Now there was contemporary documentation proving their existence! (Ever since, people have been using the rediscovery of the Hittites as an attack against those who question the accuracy of the Bible.)

However, virtually nothing was known about them. The Bible placed them in Palestine, and therefore scholars also wanted to place them there. There was a smattering of similarly styled rock carvings concentrated throughout Syria which scholars, more or less correctly, ascribed to the Hittites, and so they centered Hittite civilization in Syria. The first texts to be discovered in the Hittite langugage were actually from the ruler of the kingdom of Arzawa, and so that language was at first called "Arzawan".

All previous reconstructions of Hittite history were swept away by the discovery of the site of the true Hittite capital, Ḫattuša, near the small central Anatolian town of Boğazköy (now renamed Boğazkale). The massive, non-Classical "cyclopean" fortifications at Boğazkale made it perfectly clear that here had been a major settlement of some sort. (The term "Cyclopean" architecture stems from the description of Late Bronze Age fortifications in Greece. Early Classical Greeks, unable to imagine than men could create such massive stoneworks, claimed were built by the giant cyclopses.) And then the tablets started to come out of the ground. And kept coming. Boğazkale has yielded over 10,000 tablets and tablet fragments. Some of these tablets were in Akkadian, a language known to scholars, while the ones in "Arzawan" were frequently begun with headers in Akkadian, so that even though scholars couldn't read the text itself, they knew it had been written by "So-and-So, Great King, King of Hatti". With such overwhelming textual evidence, Boğazkale was recognized as the true capital of the Hittites, the "Arzawan" language was renamed "Hittite", and the Hittites were finally recognized as a major player in the Late Bronze Age Near East.

And major they were. At their greatest territorial extent, there had perhaps never previously been an empire as large as theirs. They ruled through the use of treaties - and they can arguably be credited with the invention of the treaty. Not only that, but an argument can also be made that they were the world's first historians. As part of their justification for political domination, their treaties included historical summaries of relations between the two states. The Assyrians later seem to have incorporated this into a textual genre of their own making, and finally the Greeks brought the art to entirely new levels (although the Far East beat the Greeks to the art).

In warfare they were the masters of the chariot, probably the most romantic form of warfare in history next to the European knight. In fact, it is probably chariot warfare to which the Hittites owe their rise to power in Anatolia, and subsequently their domination of Syria, even in the face of determined Egyptian opposition. Chariot warfare made the Late Bronze Age what it was. The Hittites perfected chariot warfare in what one might call the Golden Age of Chariotry. The chariot of the Late Bronze Age was a very lightweight vehicle pulled by two small horses, useful for it's rapid mobility as an archery, javelin, and spear platform. They fought in large formations, leaving to the archers and infantry masses the tasks of assaulting city walls and occupying territory once it was captured. After the Hittites, chariots became bigger, heavier, and less and less mobile. They more and more became weapons platforms or empty symbols of prestige. Ultimately, they were replaced altogether by cavalry.

In addition to their military prowess, the Hittites were the lynch pin of Late Bronze Age diplomacy. They overthrew the established order when they moved into Syria, and they became the central player in diplomatic relations between the great powers. It's not a great exaggeration to say that when the Hittites wanted war, the Near East was at war, and when the Hittites wanted peace, the Near East was at peace. The Bronze Age itself couldn't survive them, and when they collapsed, it marked the end of that era.

But as important as they were to the east, they were also equally as active in the west. Culturally, they were a mixture of east and west. It is sometimes difficult to know if a "Hittite" object came from Ionia or Syria. Their blended culture was useful in spreading eastern ideas to the west. Prototypes of Greek myths have been found in Hittite archives. Some of these prototypes are based on native Anatolian culture, but the most important transmissions were inspired from Hurrian and Mesopotamian models.

Hardly less important to the modern mind is that the Hittite archives have done for Homeric myth what the Egyptian inscriptions did for the Hittites and Biblical myth - they have proven that they contain at least an element of true history. Schliemann found artifacts to prove the words. The Hittites give us the words themselves. For the Hittites ruled over Troy. They also had direct political relations with the Achaeans. Hittite cultural artifacts have been found in Mycenaean ruins. Mycenaean artifacts have been found in Hittite ruins. Here, in Hittite archives, we find the first history of Greece. And that history is pregnant with clues about the Trojan War.

But perhaps the most significant connection between us and them was their language. The English language and a wide expanse of other languages that are today spread over three-quarters of the globe can all be traced back, connected together, and recognized as descending from a single language spoken by men some time deep in the shadows of prehistory. In the Hittite language we have the earliest attested Indo-European language. It predates even Mycenaean Greek (so-called Linear B). It is easily the most archaic form of Indo-European, preserving aspects of the original parent tongue that no other Indo-European language retained into the light of history. In fact, Hittite was considered the cap-stone of the entire Indo-European language theory. Decades before the decipherment of the Hittite language, scholars predicted that the original parent language had to have had certain very specific features that no attested language still showed. Then, Hittite was deciphered, and exactly these features were found. Hittite plays a key role in modern Indo-European comparative linguistics. Even more amazing, though, is what scholars are coming to realize only now. As the study of Indo-European linguistics continues, it seems to be coming clear that Hittite is not merely archaic, but in fact originates from some language that predates even proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical mother tongue of all Indo-European languages. As scholars still try to piece together the history and development of Indo-European languages back to proto-Indo-European, Hittite is already there, beckoning them back even further.

In spite of all of these connections to us, the Hittites remain comparatively unknown to the world at large. The lure of Biblical archaeology, the cultural appeal of familiar Aegean history (who wouldn't rather find the grave of Helen than of Pudu-Ḫepa?), the siren's song of Mesopotamian history - the very cradle of civilization, and the sheer glory and mystical appeal of Egypt; all of these things overshadow the Hittite contribution to the modern mind. This, combined with how history itself has conspired to erase them, has left modern knowledge and interest in the Hittites at a minimal level. Further, most Hittite scholarship has never been put into a form accessible to the masses. The results are that little information is known by the public, and most of that is old, out of date, and wrong. But recently, as more information comes to light and is published in works in multiple languages, public awareness of the Hittites is slowly growing. Their contribution to our past is being recognized.

Since the 18th century B.C., men have been trying to blot out the existance of Ḫattuša. It's not to be. Ḫattuša is a city that continues to rise again.