The Hittites

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On a windswept ridge of the central Anatolian plateau, above a gorge in the bend of a river the Hittites called the Marassantiya, a city of cyclopean stone walls once held the cult of a storm-god who drove a chariot drawn by bulls. The people who built it were newcomers to the land — speakers of an Indo-European tongue who had pushed onto the high steppe of what is now central Türkiye early in the second millennium BCE, into a country already old, already named. The land was Hatti, and its first masters were the Hattians, who spoke a language unrelated to any other and worshipped their own gods on these uplands. The Indo-European arrivals took the country’s name and much of its religion, learned to write in a script borrowed from Mesopotamia, and over five centuries forged from this plateau one of the Bronze Age’s great powers — the equal, at its height, of Egypt and of Babylon, keeper of a state archive of tens of thousands of clay tablets, and worshippers of what their own kings called the thousand gods of Hatti.

They did not call themselves Hittites. The name is a modern coinage, taken from the biblical Hittim and the country-name Hatti; the people called their own language nešili, in the manner of Neša — Neša, also known as Kaneš, being the city that had been the seat of their earliest kings. Their speech was the oldest member of the Indo-European family to be set down in writing, the senior of the now-vanished Anatolian branch, and its kinship to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the rest lay hidden for three thousand years until the clay that recorded it was dug up and read.

The plateau and its first masters

Before the Indo-European Hittites, the central plateau belonged to the Hattians, whose tongue — Hattic — survives only as a substrate, embalmed in the ritual formulae the later Hittites recited but no longer fully understood, the way a liturgy can outlive the language it was first sung in. The country of Hatti and its towns, including Hattuš on its ridge, were Hattian foundations. To the east and south lay the Hurrians, a people of Upper Mesopotamia and northern Syria whose religion would saturate the Hittite imagination; to the southwest and along the Mediterranean coast spread the Luwians, close cousins of the Hittites who spoke a sister Anatolian language and would outlast the empire itself. The Hittite state, when it came, was never ethnically simple: it ruled a layered country and absorbed each layer’s gods.

The earliest voice that reaches us is the Anitta text, the oldest surviving document in the Hittite language and the oldest in any Indo-European tongue. In it Anitta, king of Kuššara, son of Pithana, records his conquests across the plateau — and the destruction of Hattuš, which he razed and cursed, sowing the ground and forbidding any king to settle there again. The curse did not hold. Within a few generations a line of kings out of the same small highland kingdom of Kuššara did exactly what Anitta had forbidden: they made the ruined, forbidden hill their capital, and took from it a throne-name. The first to do so, Hattušili — the man of Hattuša — reigned around 1650 BCE and is conventionally counted the founder of the Hittite Old Kingdom.

The Old Kingdom: the long reach south

Hattušili I was a campaigner. From his fortress-capital he drove west into the Anatolian lands and south across the Taurus Mountains into Syria, reaching toward the great commercial cities of the Levant. His grandson and successor Muršili I carried the reach to its astonishing limit. Around 1595 BCE Muršili led an army the length of the Euphrates and sacked Babylon itself — a raid of nearly two thousand kilometers that ended the dynasty of Hammurabi and closed the Old Babylonian age. The Hittites had no intention or capacity to hold so distant a prize; Muršili stripped the city, carried off the statue of Marduk, and withdrew up the river to Hatti. The vacuum he left was filled by the Kassites, who would rule Babylonia for centuries. The sack is one of the hinge-events of Near Eastern history, and it was the work of a king from the Anatolian highlands striking far outside his own world.

Muršili was murdered on his return, and the Old Kingdom fell into a long season of palace blood — kings made and unmade by assassination, queens and royal in-laws contending for the throne. The crisis produced one of the most remarkable Hittite documents: the Proclamation of Telipinu, issued by a king of that name late in the sixteenth century BCE, which recites the murders of the preceding reigns as a cautionary history and then fixes a law of succession, narrowing the eligible heirs and binding the great assembly of nobles, the panku, to enforce it. It is a constitutional act dressed as a chronicle, an attempt to make the kingship answer to rule rather than the knife.

The archive on the ridge

What sets the Hittites apart among Bronze Age powers is that they can still be read at length, in their own words. When German excavators opened the ruins of Boğazköy — Hattuša — at the start of the twentieth century, they found the floors of the citadel and the temples littered with the burnt and broken clay of a royal archive: somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand cuneiform tablets and fragments. The collection was placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register as the one continuous documentary record of the civilization. Its range is extraordinary: royal annals and edicts, the Hittite Laws with their some two hundred restitutive provisions, land grants, the great festival programs, inventories of cult, oracle inquiries, prayers, and — most famous of all — the diplomatic correspondence and treaties by which the empire managed its rivals and vassals.

The tablets speak in many tongues. The scribes wrote chiefly in Hittite, but the archive also preserves Luwian, Palaic, the non-Indo-European Hattic and Hurrian, and the international languages of scholarship and chancery, Akkadian and Sumerian — eight languages in one cuneiform house. The script itself was an import, the wedge-writing of Mesopotamia adapted to an Anatolian language, so that a king of Hatti spoke an Indo-European tongue through the syllables of Sumer.

For three millennia none of it could be read. The hill was a heap of named ruins; the people were known mainly from the hostile glimpses in the Hebrew Bible and a few Egyptian references to a kingdom of Kheta. Then in 1906 the excavator Hugo Winckler opened the Boğazköy archive, and in 1915 the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný announced — in a lecture before the Near Eastern Society in Berlin, on 24 November of that year — that the language of the tablets was Indo-European, recognizable in its noun and verb endings as a relative of the European and Indian tongues. The recognition rearranged the map of language, pushing the documented history of Indo-European back into the Bronze Age and giving the family its oldest written witness. The decipherment and the editing of the corpus has continued ever since, gathered now in digital form through the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz, which holds the running concordance of the tablets and an open transliterated edition of most of the published texts.

The Empire: Suppiluliuma and the great-king order

After a middle period of contraction, when enemies pressed Hatti on every front and Hattuša was at one point burned, the kingdom rose to its apogee under a single extraordinary reign. Suppiluliuma I, who ruled around 1344–1322 BCE, transformed Hatti from a beleaguered Anatolian state into an empire. His decisive act was the destruction of the kingdom of Mitanni, the Hurrian power that had dominated northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia; with Mitanni broken, Suppiluliuma extended Hittite control across the north Levant and made the king of Hatti one of the small circle of Great Kings — the diplomatic peers, addressing one another as brothers, who divided the civilized world among Egypt, Hatti, Babylonia, Assyria, and the remnant of Mitanni.

A famous episode shows the height the throne had reached. A widowed queen of Egypt — most plausibly Ankhesenamun, the widow of Tutankhamun — wrote to Suppiluliuma asking him to send one of his sons to marry her and become king of Egypt, an unheard-of proposal that would have joined the two greatest crowns of the age. Suppiluliuma, suspicious, sent an envoy to verify it, then dispatched his son Zannanza; the prince was killed before he reached Egypt, and the marriage came to nothing. From the same Egyptian campaigns the Hittite army carried home a plague that ravaged Hatti for decades — the affliction that Suppiluliuma’s son Muršili II addressed in the so-called Plague Prayers, pressing the gods to name the offense for which the land was being punished, and laying it in part at his own father’s door.

Kadesh: the chariots on the Orontes

The empire’s most celebrated hour came in a clash with the other superpower of the age. In 1274 BCE, on the Orontes River in Syria, the Hittite king Muwatalli II met the army of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II before the fortress of Kadesh. It was among the largest chariot engagements of the ancient world. Ramesses advanced in four divisions; Muwatalli, with thousands of the heavy three-man Hittite chariots concealed beyond the city, ambushed the lead Egyptian division and very nearly overran the pharaoh’s own camp before an Egyptian counterattack recovered the field. Both sides withdrew; both claimed victory. Ramesses covered the walls of Egypt’s temples with a triumphant account of how he alone broke the Hittite line — but Kadesh and the surrounding province of Amurru stayed in the Hittite sphere, and the engagement is best read as a bloody draw between two empires that had reached the limit of their reach.

Its true monument is not the battle but the peace. Some fifteen years later, around 1259 BCE, Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattušili III — Muwatalli’s brother, who had taken the throne in his own coup and recorded the seizure in a candid apologia — concluded a treaty of eternal peace and mutual defense. It is the earliest international treaty for which the texts of both parties survive: the Egyptian version carved in hieroglyphs on the walls at Karnak and the Ramesseum, and the Hittite version preserved on clay at Hattuša in Akkadian, the diplomatic common tongue. The two recensions, drafted from each side’s standpoint, swear the same things — non-aggression, alliance against attack, the return of fugitives — each calling its own gods as witnesses, the gods of Egypt and the thousand gods of Hatti summoned to guarantee one sworn order between the rivers and the plateau. A replica of it hangs at the headquarters of the United Nations, claimed as an ancestor of the diplomacy of states.

The thousand gods of Hatti

The Hittite religion was a religion of accumulation. As the kingdom swallowed peoples it swallowed their gods, and made a virtue of the inclusion: royal oaths and prayers invoke the thousand gods of Hatti, a deliberate gathering of Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian, and Mesopotamian deities into a single state cult so vast that many of its members survive only as names in a list. The principle was not tolerance in the modern sense but a logic of completeness — a king who held many lands held the favor of many gods, and dared not omit one.

At the head of the pantheon stood the storm-god, the power of the Anatolian sky and mountains, of thunder, rain, and the harvest they fed. He carried different names in the layered country: Tarḫunna to the Hittites, Tarḫunt to the Luwians, Taru in the old Hattic stratum, and Teššub among the Hurrians, whose figure came to dominate the imperial cult. He is the god of the bull, shown driving a chariot across the peaks behind a yoke of bulls — one of the great weather-gods of the ancient Near East, kin in type to the Mesopotamian and West Semitic storm-lord Adad–Hadad of the Ugaritic and West Semitic world, though never to be identified with him: each plateau and each river had its own thunderer. Beside the storm-god reigned the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the chief goddess of the realm, called the Queen of all lands and the protectress of king and kingdom; her old Hattic name was Wurušemu, and as the empire’s Hurrian coloring deepened she merged with the Hurrian goddess Ḫebat, consort of Teššub, just as the storm-god of Hatti merged with Teššub himself. The king was the chief priest of this state cult and his queen, the tawananna, a power in her own right; the royal year was an immense round of festivals, the spring Puruli, the autumn nuntarriyašḫaš, the great crocus festival of the new growth, in which the images of the gods were carried in procession and the king performed the rites on which the land’s fertility was thought to depend.

Two kilometers from the capital, in a cleft of living rock open to the sky, the Hittites carved the fullest portrait of this pantheon that survives. The sanctuary at Yazılıkaya, cut in the thirteenth century BCE, sets a procession of gods in low relief along its two chambers: the male deities advancing from one side, the goddesses from the other, the two files converging on a central scene where the storm-god Teššub and the goddess Ḫebat meet, each borne on the backs of mountains and beasts. The Great King Tudḫaliya IV stands among them, embraced by his protector-god, and a narrower second chamber gathers a row of underworld figures and a great dagger-god driven into the rock. It is the divine assembly made stone — the thousand gods given faces and an order, the cosmos of Hatti laid out where the king could walk through it.

Songs of kingship and the vanishing god

The Hurrian inheritance gave the Hittites their grandest myths. The Kumarbi cycle, composed in Hittite from Hurrian originals, tells of a war for the kingship of heaven across the generations of the gods. In the Song of Kumarbi — the “Kingship in Heaven” — the throne passes from Alalu to the sky-god Anu, until Kumarbi unseats Anu, bites off and swallows his manhood, and is thereby made pregnant with the storm-god who will dethrone him in turn. In the Song of Ullikummi, Kumarbi begets upon a great rock a blind and deaf stone monster, Ullikummi, grown to threaten heaven, against whom the storm-god must contend. The succession of divine sovereigns, the swallowed god, the stone-born challenger — the resemblance to the Greek theogony of Hesiod, with its castration of Ouranos and its rebellion of the younger gods, has long been noted as a sign of how Anatolian myth fed the eastern Mediterranean imagination that Mycenaean and later Greece would inherit.

Older and more Anatolian still are two myths of cosmic balance. The Illuyanka myth, recited at the Puruli festival of the new year, tells how the storm-god is first defeated by the dragon-serpent Illuyanka and then, by a stratagem — in one version with the help of the goddess Inara and a mortal man, in another by reclaiming his stolen heart and eyes — destroys the monster and restores the sky. The Telipinu myth turns on a gentler crisis: the fertility-god Telipinu, son of the storm-god, vanishes in a rage, and with him the life of the world — grain fails, beasts and gods go hungry, the hearth-fire smokes and dies. The gods search heaven and earth for him; the Sun-god’s eagle cannot find him; at last the storm-god’s mother sends a bee, which finds the sleeping god and stings him awake, and only ritual appeasement calms his returning fury and brings the world back to abundance. It is the Anatolian myth of the disappearing god, the seasonal logic of withdrawal and return rendered as divine temperament.

Iron, horses, and the limits of a famous claim

The Hittites were long credited in popular telling with a monopoly on iron, an edge that supposedly built their empire. The reality the tablets show is quieter. Anatolia worked iron early, and a Hittite royal letter speaks of good iron as a scarce and precious thing, doled out as a gift to a fellow king; but iron in the Hittite age was a rare prestige metal, not the basis of mass weaponry, and the notion of a guarded state secret has been steadily tempered by scholarship. The empire’s real military instrument was the chariot — the heavy, three-man Anatolian chariot that struck so hard at Kadesh — and the training of its horses was a science. A celebrated text from the archive, set down by a Hurrian master-trainer named Kikkuli around 1400 BCE, lays out a graduated conditioning program for chariot-horses, the oldest manual of its kind.

The collapse

In the decades around 1200 BCE the entire interlocking world of the Late Bronze Age came apart, and Hatti came apart with it. The last kings — Tudḫaliya IV, who left his image among the gods at Yazılıkaya, and his son Suppiluliuma II, who came to the throne around 1207 BCE and even fought a sea-battle against raiders off Cyprus — ruled an empire already under strain. The Egyptian records speak of the Sea Peoples sweeping down the coast, severing the trade routes and overrunning the dependencies; Hittite letters of the final years beg for grain, naming famine in the heartland; and the tree-rings of junipers felled at Gordion preserve the trace of a brutal multi-year drought centered on the years around 1198–1196 BCE, coinciding with the empire’s disappearance. No single cause carries the weight; the powers of the age failed together, in a cascade of dead harvests, broken commerce, migration, and war.

Hattuša itself was first largely emptied — the archives sealed, the precious cult images and tablets removed or hidden, the citadel given up — and then, around 1180 BCE, burned. The great walls and the temple of the storm-god went into the silence from which Anitta’s curse had once promised they could never be raised. What persisted moved eastward and southward: in the Iron Age, a scatter of smaller Luwian-speaking states across southern Anatolia and northern Syria — Carchemish chief among them — kept the storm-god, the royal titles, and a hieroglyphic Luwian script alive for centuries, near the rise of Urartu, long after the great king on the ridge was gone. The plateau itself would pass in time to other powers and finally to the Persians. But the thousand gods of Hatti had been carried in procession through a city of stone for five hundred years, sworn to in a treaty between empires, and cut into the rock at Yazılıkaya where the storm-god and his goddess still meet across the mountains; and when the clay of the burnt archive was read at last, it was their world — the storm in the sky, the king who fed it, the dragon and the vanishing god — that rose up again out of the ground.

Texts, archive, and scholarship

The Hittite world is recovered almost entirely from the Boğazköy archive and the sites of the kingdom, and the apparatus for reading it is now largely digital. The Hethitologie-Portal Mainz maintains the master concordance of the cuneiform tablets and an open transliterated corpus covering nearly all published texts; the Hittite Online lessons of the University of Texas Linguistics Research Center introduce the language and its grammar to non-specialists, beginning with the Anitta text and the proclamation of succession. The standard narrative history is Trevor Bryce’s The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford University Press, new edition 2005), complemented by his Life and Society in the Hittite World and the concise Warriors of Anatolia; Billie Jean Collins’s The Hittites and Their World (Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) is a compact archaeological and cultural orientation. For the primary genres in translation the foundational editions are Harry A. Hoffner Jr.’s The Laws of the Hittites (Brill, 1997) and his Hittite Myths (Society of Biblical Literature, 2nd edition 1998), which carry the Illuyanka, Telipinu, and Kumarbi compositions, and Gary Beckman’s Hittite Diplomatic Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 1999), which assembles the treaties — including the Hittite recension of the peace with Egypt — through which the empire spoke to its peers.

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