The Ancient Hittites
The Kingdom Of The Hittites

The figure probably held a staff or sword in one hand. The Hittites were the first ancient people to use iron for tools and weapons, and they spoke an Indo-European language—a branch of language that includes Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, German, and English.
Hittite mythology and Hittite religion were the religious beliefs and practices of the Hittites, who created an empire centered in what is now Turkey from c. 1600 BC to 1180 BC.
The whole tour of the ancient city can be completed following the main sightseeing circular route of 3 - 4 km (2 - 3 miles) either on foot or by car. The site is divided by the Kızlarkayası creek into the lower city in the north and the upper city in the south with multiple stopovers along the way.

The first thing to realize about the Hittites is that they are not Hittites. The sad fact is that we are stuck with an incorrect terminology, but it is too late to do anything about it now. This unfortunate situation came about as a result of several deductions made by earlier scholars which, though entirely reasonable at the time, have proved to be false. The Bronze Age civilization of Central Anatolia (or Turkey), which we today call Hittite, completely disappeared sometime around 1200 B.C. We still do not know exactly what happened, though there is no lack of modern theories, but that it was destroyed, of that there can be no doubt. The capital city was burnt to the ground and remained uninhabited for several hundred years. Out of the wreckage of Bronze Age civilization there emerged a group of small independent states, retaining some of the features and one of the languages of their all but forgotten ancestors, but dominated by the new ethnic groups in the area, chiefly the Arameans. The greatest number of these states were situated about the Taurus and Amanus mountain ranges, in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. This is the area known to the kings of Assyria as the “HattiLand,” and this terminology is also to be found in the Old Testament where we meet such Hittites as the unfortunate Uriah and his beautiful wife, Bathsheba.

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The Bronze Age civilization of Central Anatolia had disappeared from the pages of history without a trace, but, thanks to the Assyrians and their Hebrew contemporaries, the Iron Age Hittites survived to enter into the western historical tradition. Thus, when sites in northern Syria and southern Turkey began to be investigated, it was only natural to apply to them the name Hittite, meaning the inhabitants of the Hatti-Land. Such terminology is correct: these people are the true Hittites, the Hittim of the Old Testament.

General view of the area of Boghazköy, looking northeast through the Lion’s Gate.

In 1906 the Assyriologist Hugo Winckler, representing the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, and Theodore Macridy Bey of the Ottoman Museum in Istanbul, opened excavations at a site near the Turkish vilage of Boghazkoy (“Gorge Village”), today modern Boghazkale. In 1907 they were joined by the architect Otto Puchstein, working on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute, and excavations continued in 1911 and 1912 till they were interrupted by the First World War. The Germans returned to the site in 1931 and, with a long hiatus caused by the Second World War, they have been there ever since and will be for some time to come. The recent excavations have been under the general direction of Kurt Bittel.

The site of Boghazkoy had been known to European scholars since 1834, when Charles Texier visited it and published his account and drawings of the existing visible ruins, both at Boghazkoy and at nearby Yazilikaya (“Inscribed Rock”). A plan of the city had been prepared by Carl Humann in 1883. In 1893-1894 the French archaeologist Ernest Chantre had explored the site, even finding a few clay tablets written in cuneiform characters. This is what attracted the attention of Winckler, who was then working on similar texts, the Amarna Letters, found in Egypt in 1887. Winckler hoped to find similar tablets at Boghazkoy and he was not to be disappointed, for, in that first season in 1906, working on the west slope of the citadel or Buyukkale, he and Macridy Bey excavated some 2500 tablets or fragments of tablets. I use the term “excavated” in a very general sense, for they were hacked out of the ground with a pickaxe and carted away in baskets. Fortunately, Hittite tablets were baked for contemporary use or little would have survived. By 1912 the count had reached some 10,000 pieces and virtually all of them had been sent to the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, where they still remain.

As chance would have it, many of the first tablets to be found were written in Akkadian , the lingua franca of the day, a language with which Winckler was very much at home. They revealed a kingdom situated in an area called the “Hatti-Land,” using the same name as the later Assyrian texts, this kingdom being ruled by kings bearing such names as Hattushili, Tudhaliya, and Shuppiluliuma, kings who stood on an equal footing with and were in diplomatic relations with the kingdoms of Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt during the mid second millennium B.C. Winckler announced the discovery of the capital city of the Hittites, and so we know it still today. The ancient name of the site turned out to be Hattusha. Winckler also found in these texts a group of people called the Hur-ri or Har-ri (the signs could be read either way), governed by kings with Indo-Aryan sounding names like Tushratta. Winckler chose the latter reading, to his and our great misfortune, as the Harrians were, of course, soon to be identified with the Aryan master race, a confusion which still exists today, though it has long been apparent that the Hurrians have nothing to do with any Indo-European language group.

Mycenean pottery from Ephesus (fourteenth century B.C.) as displayed in the Ephesus Museum, located in the town of Seljuk. The pottery comes from a tomb found by chance in the course of levelling for a parking lot on the Ayasoluk hill, near basilica of Saint John.

The majority of the tablets found in these early excavations, and in all subsequent ones, were written not in Akkadian but in some hitherto unknown language. Transliterations of the texts were published, but they could not be read. The situation was similar to that which exists today between Linear B and Linear A. In 1915 the Czech scholar, Bedrich Hrozny, published a paper in which he claimed to read this language as an early form of Indo-European. His decipherment was greeted with great scepticism, but has proved to be correct. We now know that these people we call Hittites were Indo-Europeans, belonging to the so-called Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The similarity between Hittite and other Indo-European languages was quickly established.

It is now believed that the Hittites came into Anatolia sometime in the latter part of the third millennium B.C., though exactly when and from where are questions we still cannot answer. Presumably the arrival of the Hittites is related to that general migration now dated to the years around c. 2200 B.C., which also brought the first Greek-speaking peoples (or Proto-Greeks) into the Balkan peninsula, but the connection remains purely hypothetical and much work remains to be done on the whole question of early Indo-European history. At the present time, historical linguistics is about the only remaining field still dominated by the diffusionist theories of the nineteenth century.

The decipherment and translation of the Hittite texts themselves confirmed the historical picture derived from the Akkadian letters and treaties. The Hittites were indeed a major world power in the period 1700-1200 B.C., but they were not Hittites. That is, they did not call themselves Hittites. They refer to themselves as Neshians, “inhabitants of the city Nesha,” and their language Neshian. But so much for that; the scholarly world had already labelled them Hittites and, like it or not, Hittites they shall forever remain. It is just as well for the term Neshian only calls attention to our ignorance of this early period; we do not even know where Nesha is to be located.

The Ancient Hittites

With the decipherment of Hittite, scholars were finally able to appreciate the evidence provided by one of the Amarna letters, a text long known but of no use to anyone because no one could read it. The letter turned out to be one of two Amarna Letters actually written not in Akkadian but in Hittite. They represent corresponden

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