Hittites

The Hittites is the conventional English name for an ancient people who spoke an Indo-European language and established a kingdom centered in Hattusa (the modern village of Bogazköy in north-central Turkey), through most of the second millennium BC.

The Hittite kingdom, which at its height controlled central Anatolia and north-western Syria, lasted from about 1680 BC to 1200 BC, with a hundred-year gap 1400–1500 BC. This kingdom, or at least its core region, was apparently called Hatti in the reconstructed Hittite language. The Hittites should be distinguished from the Hattians, an earlier people who inhabited the same region until the beginning of the second millennium BC, and spoke a non-Indo-European language — conventionally called Hattic.

The Hittites (from חתי or HTY in the consonant-only Hebrew script) were also a people mentioned several times in the Old Testament as present in the region around Canaan, from the time of the Patriarchs up to the time of King David. The Indo-European speakers of Hatti/Hattusas were assumed by their discoverers to be identical to the Biblical Hittites, and thus were named after them; however, this assumption is still disputed by some scholars.

Archaeological discovery

The Assyrians and Babylonians used the name "land of Hatti" for the lands west of the Euphrates River, including all of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, as late as the 6th century BC. Peculiar hieroglyphic scripts found at Aleppo and Hamath in Northern Syria were found to match the script on a monument at Bogazköy by a "People of the Land of Hatti" by William Wright in 1884.

In 1887, excavations at Tell El-Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaton. Two of the letters from a "kingdom of Kheta", apparently located in the same general region as the Assyrian/Babilonian "land of Hatti", were written in standard Akkadian cuneiform, but in an unknown language: although scholars could read it, no one could understand it. Shortly after this, Archibald Sayce proposed that the Anatolian Hatti was identical with the "kingdom of Kheta" mentioned in these Egyptian texts, and with the biblical Hittites. Sayce's identification came to be widely accepted over the course of the early 20th century; and so, rightly or wrongly, the name "Hittite" has become attached to the civilization uncovered at Bogazköy.

During sporadic excavations at Bogazköy/Hattusa that began in 1905, the archaeologist Hugo Winckler found a royal archive with 10,000 tablets, inscribed in cuneiform Akkadian and the same unknown language as the Egyptian letters from Kheta — thus confirming the identity of the two names. He also proved that the ruins at Bogazköy were the remains of the capital of a mighty empire that at one point controlled northern Syria.

The language of the Hattusa tablets (which the Hittites called Nesili, and archaeologists had come to call "the Hittite language") was eventually deciphered during World War I by a Czech linguist, Bedrich Hrozny (1879–1952), after he identified it as an Indo-European language. This discovery greatly added to the knowledge of Hittite civilization.

Under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute, excavations at Hattusas have been under way since 1932, with wartime interruptions.

History

The beginnings of the Hittite civilisation are recorded in the records of the merchant colonies the Assyrians established in Asia Minor. From this contact the existing inhabitants of the area obtained technologies such as cuneiform writing and the use of the cylinder seal. The largest known Assyrian colony was at Kültepe (Karum Kanesh).

Hattians and Hittites

Around 2000 BC, the region centered in Hattusa, which would later become the core of the Hittite kingdom, was inhabited by people with a distinct culture who spoke a non-Indo-European language. The name "Hattic" was coined to distinguish this language from the Indo-European "Hittite" (Nesilli), which appeared in the scene at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and became the administrative language of the Hittite kingdom over the next six or seven centuries.

Since Hattic continued to be used in the Hittite kingdom for religious purposes, and there is substantial continuity between the two cultures, it is not known whether the Hattic speakers — the Hattians — were displaced by the Nesilli speakers, were absorbed by them, or just adopted their language. In fact, the origins of both Hattians and Hittites are still the subject of much conjecture.

Origins of the Hittite kingdom

The survival of the Hittites' royal archives has enabled us to reconstruct much of their past. They apparently emerged as a small city-state named Kussara, which has yet to be identified by archeologists. Under king Anittas, the Hittite state grew to encompass the cities of Kanesh and Hattusa (also known as Hattush or Hattusas), which was the capital at the zenith of Hittite power. Located near the Turkish village of Bogazköy in central Anatolia, Hattusa can still be visited today.

The Hittite Empire

The founding of the Hittite Empire is usually attributed to Hattusilis I, who conquered the plain south of Hattusa, all the way to the outskirts of modern-day Aleppo in Syria. Though it remained for his heir, Mursilis I, to conquer that city, Hattusilis was clearly influenced by the rich culture he discovered in northern Mesopotamia and founded a school in his capital to spread the cuneiform style of writing he encountered there.

Mursilis continued the conquests of Hattusilis, reaching down Mesopotamia and threatening Babylonia itself. This lengthy campaign, however, strained the country's resources and left the capital in a state of near-anarchy. Mursilis was assassinated shortly after his return home, and the Hittite Empire was plunged into chaos. The Hurrians, a people living in the mountainous region along the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, took advantage of the situation to seize Aleppo and the surrounding areas for themselves.

The treaty of Kadesh

Hittite prosperity was largely depending on the control of trade routes and metal sources (some consider the Hittites to be the first to have discovered how to work iron). For this reason, all the kings' reigns passed mainly by struggles and wars with neighbouring Assyrians, Hurrians and Egyptians, especially when Hittites began to extend their control to Mesopotamia. They signed the earliest surviving treaty in history, with the Egyptians. This document, known as the Kadesh (or Qadesh) treaty, was signed somewhere between 1286 BC and 1300 BC, after endless and unsuccessful fights against Egyptian forces commanded by Rameses II (see Battle of Kadesh).

Demise of the Empire

After this date, the power of the Hittites began to diminish temporarily and they were pushed back by the Assyrians and Egyptians. The kingdom came to a sudden end, which is still mysterious due to lack of records. Archeologists believe the end came from a likely combination of migratory bands (such as the Sea Peoples) from outlying territories bringing plague and war, widespread environmental degradation and the ensuing famine and concomitant economic disasters (which affected Europe as far away as Britain as well as the Near East in the 14th-11th centuries BC). The Hittite people thus vanished from the historical record, although their language and culture remained as late as the 5th century BC, and their legacy can be traced in several small independent states in central and southeastern Anatolia.

Conventional Chronology

Old Hittite Kingdom (1750 - 1500 BC) Hattusas becomes the capital
Middle Hittite Kingdom (1500 - 1450 BC)
New Hittite Kingdom (Empire) (1450 - 1180 BC): Suppiluliumas I conquers Syria; Muwatallis attacks Egyptians (Kadesh)

The Biblical Hittites

The Biblical Hittites are mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), whose present form was probably edited between the 7th and 5th centuries BC, during or after the Babylonian exile.

The first reference to the Hittites is in Genesis 23:10, where Abraham is said to have bought the family burial cave at Machpelah from Ephron of the Hittites, who are said to be living in Hebron. Two of Esau's wives were Hittites, and ditto for two of King David's generals, Ahimelech (1 Samuel 26:6) and Uriah (2 Samuel 11:3); the latter was murdered by David for the sake of his wife Bathsheba. King Solomon had Hittite wives and bought Egyptian horses for the Hittite king (2 Chronicles 1.17; 1 Kings 11.7). (See Hittites in the Bible for a more detailed list of references.)

Given the casual tone in which the Hittites are mentioned in most of these references, Biblical scholars have traditionally regarded them as a small tribe, living in the hills of Canaan during the era of the Patriarchs — quite a different picture from the archaeological finds, that place the center of the Hatti/Hattusas civilization far to the north, in modern-day Turkey. Because of this discrepancy and other reasons, many Biblical scholars reject Sayce's identification of the two people, and believe that the similarity in names is only a coincidence. In order to stress this distinction, E.A. Speiser called the Biblical Hittites Hethites in his translation of the Book of Genesis for the Anchor Bible series.

On the other hand, many scholars still favor the view that the Biblical Hittites are the Anatolian Hittites. Apart from the coincidence in names, the latter were a powerful political entity in the region, so one would expect it to be mentioned in the Bible. Indeed, in 2 Kings 7:6 the Hittites seem to be mentioned as a military power on the same class as the Egyptians. In the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan, the Hittites are generally mentioned on par with the Canaanites, and not as if they were part of them. Moreover, they are said to dwell "in the mountains" and "towards the north" of Palestine — so at least the general direction and character of their homeland, if not the distance, is consistent with the identification of the two people.

Books

Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, (Oxford, 1999)
C. W. Ceram, The Secret of the Hittites: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire. Phoenix Press (2001), ISBN 1842122959.
Mendenhall, George E. The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition, The Johns Hopkins University Press (1973). ISBN 0-8018-1654-8.