Hittite Empire

← Encyclopedia

On a bend of the Kızılırmak — the river the Greeks would call the Halys — the rock of a high Anatolian plateau was cut into a city of cyclopean walls, and into that city, before its final fire, a king carried home the gods of every land he had conquered. The Hittites kept count of them. Their treaties and prayers swear by the Thousand Gods of Hatti, and the tablets recovered from the capital preserve more than eight hundred divine names: storm-gods of particular towns, sun-deities of particular springs, mountains and rivers raised to godhood, the mother-goddess of the Hatti and the warrior-goddess of the Hurrians, deities borrowed from Sumer and Babylon and set down beside the local powers of the plateau. To rule from Hattusa was to be the chief priest of that crowded heaven, and the empire’s claim on Anatolia was, in its own telling, a claim made on the gods’ behalf and underwritten by their assembly.

From the rock of Hattusa to empire

The kingdom that grew around this pantheon began as one warband’s seizure of a defensible rock. In the seventeenth century BCE a ruler whose throne-name became Hattusili — the man of Hattusa — fixed his seat on the burned ruins of an earlier town and pushed his armies south toward the rich kingdoms of northern Syria. His successor Mursili I carried the campaign further than any Anatolian had before: he broke Yamhad and took Aleppo, then drove some two thousand kilometers down the Euphrates and in 1595 BCE sacked Babylon itself, ending the Amorite dynasty of Hammurabi and leaving the city to the Kassites. The raid won no lasting territory — Mursili was murdered on his return by his own brother-in-law — but it announced that a power on the Anatolian plateau could reach into the heart of Mesopotamia.

What followed was less a steady ascent than a long oscillation of murder, usurpation, and recovery. The Edict of Telepinu, issued near the close of what is called the Old Kingdom, reads as a king’s attempt to legislate against his own dynasty’s habit of fratricide, fixing for the first time a rule of royal succession. Stability of a sort came only with the New Kingdom, the imperial phase proper, founded in the fourteenth century BCE by Suppiluliuma I (c. 1344–1322 BCE). He reconquered the Anatolian heartland, shattered the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, and pressed Hittite power deep into Syria, installing his sons as viceroys at Aleppo and Carchemish. Under him and his heirs — Mursili II, Muwatalli II, Hattusili III, Tudhaliya IV — Hatti became one of the recognized great kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age, exchanging brotherly letters and marriages with the courts of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria.

Two great kingdoms at Kadesh

The empire’s most famous hour came in 1274 BCE on the Orontes, before the Syrian town of Kadesh. There the armies of Muwatalli II and the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II met in what remains the largest chariot engagement known from the ancient world — thousands of vehicles on each side, the Hittite king fielding contingents drawn from eighteen and more allied and vassal states. By the Egyptian account, carved in triumphal relief across the temples of the Nile, the pharaoh was lured into ambush, cut off from his own divisions, and rescued the day by his personal valor. The Hittite record tells the campaign differently. In sober military terms neither side broke the other; Egypt withdrew, and Kadesh and its Syrian hinterland stayed within the Hittite sphere. Each crown declared the victory its own.

The settlement, when it came, outlived the boasting. Roughly sixteen years after the battle, Hattusili III — who had taken the throne from his nephew — and Ramesses II bound their kingdoms by a sworn treaty of peace, c. 1259 BCE. Its terms survive in two voices: a hieroglyphic version cut into Egyptian temple stone, and a clay tablet from Hattusa written in Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca of the age. Neither text is a copy of a single master document; each kingdom set down its own version of the sworn oath, and between them they preserve the earliest ratified international treaty whose full text has come down to us — a pact of non-aggression, mutual defense, and the extradition of fugitives, each clause sworn before the gods of both lands, the Thousand Gods of Hatti standing as witnesses on one side and the gods of Egypt on the other. A modern copy hangs at the headquarters of the United Nations. The alliance held; Hattusili’s daughter went to Egypt as Ramesses’ bride, and the two thrones, having fought to a draw, kept faith for the rest of the Bronze Age.

The archive that gave back a language

For nearly three thousand years after the fire that ended it, this empire was a rumor — a people named in passing in the Hebrew Bible and in Egyptian and Assyrian records, with no voice of its own. That changed when, in 1906, the German Assyriologist Hugo Winckler, working with the Ottoman scholar Theodore Makridi, began to dig at Boğazköy and found, in burnt storage chambers that had once been royal archives, thousands of hardened clay tablets. Hattusa had returned. The site has yielded on the order of twenty-five to thirty thousand tablets and fragments — royal annals, sworn treaties, the king’s diplomatic correspondence, law collections, land grants, inventories, festival programs, prayers, omen reports, and ritual texts — the working memory of a Bronze Age state, set down by the scribes who ran it day to day.

The tablets are written in cuneiform but in several tongues at once: chiefly Hittite, but also Akkadian for diplomacy, Sumerian as the scribal classics, and the languages of the peoples the empire absorbed — Hattic, the speech of the land’s older inhabitants; Hurrian, from the southeast; Luwian and Palaic, kindred Anatolian dialects. In 1915 the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný announced, in a lecture before the Near Eastern Society in Berlin, that the dominant language of the archive was Indo-European — kin to Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Hittite thereby became the oldest attested member of the Indo-European family, and a vanished empire was restored to history through the recovery of its own language.

The Thousand Gods of Hatti

It is in religion that the Hittite world shows its distinctive cast, and the archives make it legible as few ancient cults are. The Thousand Gods are no rhetorical flourish: the empire genuinely carried, fed, and feared a vast multitude of powers, and its theology was an art of arrangement — of fitting many local heavens into one imperial one. At the head of the official assembly stood the storm-god, the weather-god of Hatti, lord of the thunderhead and the mountain, who granted kingship and gave victory in war. He bore the name Tarhun in the Anatolian tongues and Teshub in Hurrian, and like the West Semitic Baal of the coastal cities he was a god of the bull, the lightning, and the life-giving rain — a storm-king of the same Near Eastern type, worshipped under his own Anatolian and Hurrian names, one expression of the storm-kingship that ran from Anatolia down through the Levant.

His consort, and in many texts his equal or superior, was the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the great solar deity of the city of Arinna, addressed as mistress of the lands of Hatti and queen of heaven and earth. The sovereignty of the Hittite king and queen was held to descend from her; she directed their government, and her favor was the difference between a flourishing realm and a stricken one. The full theology of this divine pair, and the empire’s long labor of folding hundreds of other gods around them, can be read in the prayers of Queen Puduhepa, the formidable wife of Hattusili III. Daughter of a priest, she made the unification of the pantheon her work, and in one celebrated prayer she addresses the Sun-goddess as the queen of all lands and declares that the goddess is called by the name Sun-goddess of Arinna in Hatti and by the name Hepat in the cedar country of the south — one power under two names (the prayer survives on a tablet now held among the Koç University digital collections). That single sentence is the empire’s whole theological method in miniature.

A pantheon assembled

For the Hittite heaven was a made thing, assembled out of conquest and contact. The oldest stratum was Hattic — the gods of the land’s pre-Indo-European population, among them the Sun-goddess of Arinna and the storm-god of Nerik, whose very names the newcomers kept. Onto that base were layered Luwian and Palaic deities from the Anatolian kin-peoples, then a powerful Hurrian overlay from the southeast — Teshub and his wife Hepat, their son Sharruma, the warrior-goddess Shaushka — and finally figures drawn from the prestige cultures of the south: the sky-father Anu, the Babylonian sovereign Marduk, and above all the Mesopotamian Inanna-Ishtar, who entered Hittite cult as Shaushka and became a personal protectress of kings. This is syncretism practiced not as accident but as policy: from roughly 1400 to 1200 BCE the centralizing court worked to identify the duplicate storm-gods and sun-deities of a hundred towns with the gods of the capital, so that the diversity of a pantheon born of many peoples could be governed as a single imperial cult. Under Puduhepa and her son Tudhaliya IV the Hurrian gods rose to the highest ranks beside the old Hattic powers, and the Sun-goddess of Arinna was openly equated with Hurrian Hepat — the theological seal on an empire that ruled, and prayed, in several languages at once.

Yazilikaya, the pantheon carved in stone

A short walk northeast of the capital, a natural cleft in the rock was made into the most complete image the empire left of its gods. Yazılıkaya — the name means inscribed rock — is an open-air sanctuary whose limestone walls were carved, chiefly under Tudhaliya IV in the late thirteenth century BCE, with a procession of some sixty-four deities. Along the left wall of the main chamber a file of male gods advances in pointed shoes and horned caps; along the right wall a file of goddesses comes to meet them; and where the two processions converge, the storm-god Teshub stands upon the bowed necks of two mountain-gods and faces his wife Hepat, who stands upon a panther, her son Sharruma and the women of the divine family ranged behind her. Each figure is labeled in Anatolian hieroglyphs, and the names are overwhelmingly Hurrian — the carved confirmation of the syncretism the prayers describe, with even the Mesopotamian wisdom-god Ea taking his place in the male rank. A smaller, narrower gallery beside it holds larger reliefs, among them a row of twelve gods shouldering sickle-shaped swords and an image of Sharruma clasping the king in his protective embrace; it appears to have served as a memorial for Tudhaliya himself. Carved sanctuary and written festival meet here: the open chamber is widely understood as a stage for the New Year rites, the Thousand Gods gathered in stone to receive their king.

Reading the will of the gods

If the gods were many, the central problem of Hittite religion was knowing what they wanted — and, above all, why they were angry, for sickness, defeat, and famine were read as the symptoms of divine displeasure that had to be diagnosed and repaired. The empire met this problem with an elaborate machinery of divination, much of it imported and adapted. From Mesopotamia, by way of the Hurrians, came extispicy — the inspection of the liver and entrails of a sacrificed animal, whose markings the trained diviner read as a divine verdict, a discipline already old in the temples of Sumer. Beside it ran a distinctively Anatolian bird augury, in which specialists tracked the flight, direction, and behavior of birds across marked fields of sky, and a lot-oracle of tokens and symbols. The whole apparatus was framed as interrogation: the gods were put a long sequence of yes-or-no questions until the source of their anger — a neglected festival, a broken oath, an unpaid offering — was isolated and the remedy named. Dreams, too, were treated as messages, and a queen’s vow recorded in a dream could become a matter of state.

The gravest of these procedures touched the king’s own body. The empire shared with Babylon and Assyria the architecture of the substitute-king rite: when the omens — most fearfully an eclipse — foretold the death of the sovereign, the danger could be deflected onto a stand-in who briefly occupied the throne’s peril while the true king was held safe, the menace exhausted upon the substitute. The rite belongs to the same logic as extispicy and augury: a cosmos in which divine intentions are legible to the expert and, once read, can be answered, redirected, or appeased. What divination diagnosed, prayer and offering and festival were meant to cure — and the king, as the gods’ chief servant, spent much of his reign in their service, pouring out libations and keeping the calendar of feasts on which the realm’s welfare was thought to depend.

The dragon and the kingship

The deepest of the empire’s myths bound this whole order to the turning of the year and the person of the king. The tale of Illuyanka — a great serpent-dragon — was recited at the purulli, the spring festival of the New Year. In its first telling the dragon defeats the storm-god outright; only with the help of a goddess, and a trap laid at a feast, is the monster overcome. In a second version the storm-god, beaten, loses his heart and his eyes, which his son recovers by marrying into the dragon’s own house before the god is made whole and slays his enemy at last. The myth was no idle story. Spoken in the king’s presence at the year’s renewal, it staged the victory of the storm-king over chaos as the guarantee that the rains would return, the crops would grow, and the order of the realm would hold for another year — the cosmic combat reenacted in words so that earthly kingship might be renewed with it. Alongside Illuyanka the archives preserve the cycle of the vanishing god, in which an angry deity — the vegetation-god Telpinu chief among them — withdraws from the world, so that hearth-fires die, flocks and fields go barren, and gods and men alike hunt for the missing power until it is soothed and coaxed back to restore the failing earth. Combat and disappearance: two shapes of the same anxiety, that the powers on whom life depends might turn away, and that the right words and rites might bring them back.

Research and the recovery of Hatti

Almost everything said here rests on a single accident of preservation and a century of work upon it. The decipherment that opened the archive — Hrozný’s 1915 demonstration that Hittite is an Indo-European tongue — turned a heap of unreadable tablets into the deepest written record of any Indo-European people, and the Boğazköy corpus has since been organized into the standard catalog of Hittite texts and edited in long-running German and American series; the tablets themselves are now inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register. The political narrative depends on the royal annals and the chronological debates that still divide Hittitologists over the regnal dates of Suppiluliuma I and his line; the treaty with Egypt is uniquely double-attested, surviving in both the Hittite Akkadian tablet and the Egyptian hieroglyphic text, so that a single Bronze Age agreement can be read from both parties’ archives at once. The religion is reconstructed from festival texts, prayers, oracle reports, and the carved sanctuary at Yazılıkaya, with the comparative storm-god and dying-god patterns of the wider Near East — the Anatolian Illuyanka and Telpinu beside the West Semitic Baal cycle of the Syrian coast — supplying the frame within which scholars debate whether a given god truly dies and returns or merely withdraws and is recalled. Even the empire’s end has been brought under fresh scrutiny: tree-ring and stable-isotope analysis of ancient juniper timbers from central Anatolia has identified a run of severe drought years around 1198–1196 BCE, coinciding with the collapse, and giving an environmental edge to a crisis long blamed on the Sea Peoples alone.

The fire and after

The end, when it came, came fast. In the decades after 1200 BCE the eastern Mediterranean unmade itself in a cascade of failures — drought and famine, the severing of grain routes, the moving war-bands the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, internal revolt — and Hatti, dependent on imported grain and stretched across a hard plateau, was among the first of the great kingdoms to go under. The last attested king, Suppiluliuma II, records sea-battles fought off Cyprus, but the records then fall silent. Hattusa was emptied of its valuables and burned, the citadel that had held the Thousand Gods left to the wind. Yet the storm-god’s cult did not vanish with the capital. Along the upper Euphrates and across the Syrian north a constellation of smaller kingdoms carried the old gods and the old royal style forward for centuries — Carchemish, where a branch of the imperial house ruled on; Melid, Sam’al, Tabal, Karatepe — writing their inscriptions in Luwian hieroglyphs to the weather-god and the tutelary deities of the hunt, until the Iron Age empires of Assyria swallowed them one by one. These were the heirs the Hebrew scribes would remember as the Hittites, knowing nothing of the great kingdom behind the name.

→ Related: Ancient Egypt · Mesopotamia · Babylon · Sumer · Anu · Marduk · Ishtar · Gilgamesh · Baal · Ugaritic West Semitic Religion · Divination · Prophecy · Libation · Pantheon · Syncretism · Iron Age