The Hattians

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In the great bend of the Kızılırmak — the river the Greeks would call the Halys, looping through the dry uplands of central Anatolia — there stood in the early Bronze Age a town the people of the land called Ḫattuš. It was theirs before it was anyone else’s. When the kings who would make it famous arrived, they did not invent its name; they took it. The land was Ḫatti, and so the newcomers, an Indo-European people pressing in from somewhere to the east or north, came to be known to history by a word that was never their own. They were the Hittites. The people they found already in possession, already worshiping in the high places and naming the gods of the storm and the sun, were the Hattians — and the strange thing, the thing the archives of that lost town would eventually give up, is how much of what is called Hittite never stopped being theirs.

The people in the land of Hatti

The Hattians were the older population of the central Anatolian plateau, settled there in the third millennium before the present era — Britannica’s entry on the Hattian language places their flourishing roughly between 2500 and 2000 BCE. They were not a single empire but a scatter of towns and small principalities across the uplands north of the Halys bend: Ḫattuš itself, and northward the holy cities of Nerik and Zippalanda, and the rich settlement at Alaca Höyük, where Early Bronze Age tombs of princely dead were found heaped with standards of bronze — sun-discs and stags and long-horned bulls cast in dark metal, the oldest sacred emblems of the country. They worked copper and gold, they buried their leaders with ceremony, and they spoke a tongue unlike any of their neighbors’.

A Hattian bronze sun-disk standard of the Early Bronze Age, from the royal tombs of the central Anatolian plateau, now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. Photo by Dick Osseman, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

That tongue was Hattic — Hattili, “in the language of Hatti,” as the later scribes labeled it. It belongs to no family that anyone has been able to fix. It is not Indo-European, the great group to which Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic all belong; it is not Semitic, the family of the Akkadian that ran the trade and the diplomacy of the age; it answers to nothing in the Caucasus that can be proven. By the working consensus it is an isolate, an agglutinative language built up out of prefixes, standing alone. World History Encyclopedia’s account of Hatti puts it plainly: the Hattians spoke a language that was “neither Semitic nor Indo-European,” and they appear to have kept no script of their own, borrowing the cuneiform of Mesopotamia only as it served them. What survives of their speech survives because other people, later, wrote it down.

The arrival of the Hittites did not come as a single conquest. From around 2000 BCE the Indo-European speakers pressed into the country, and over some three centuries the Hattians were absorbed rather than expelled — Britannica’s reckoning has them gradually taken in by about 1700 BCE. The Assyrian merchant colonies of the early second millennium, the kārum of Kaneš among them, still moved through a country whose towns bore Hattic names and whose people prayed to Hattic gods; the incoming kings married into it, settled among it, learned its rites. When Ḫattušili I and his successors built their state on the old town of Ḫattuš, raising it into the walled capital of Ḫattuša, they ruled a land that was already, in its bones, Hattian. The conquerors took the name of the conquered. They did not, on the evidence, replace the conquered’s gods. They knelt to them.

The gods the Hittites inherited

This is the heart of the matter, and it is easy to state and hard to overstate: a great part of what is called the religion of the Hittites is in truth the religion of the Hattians, kept and carried forward. The newcomers brought their own sky-powers, and from the west and south the Luwians and from the southeast the Hurrians would add still more. But the deepest layer, the bedrock under the whole structure of the imperial cult, is Hattic — and at its center stand a goddess and a god.

The goddess is the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the chief deity of the Hittite state, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, she to whom the kings owed their thrones and called “Mother.” She is not a borrowing dressed up. She is Hattic to the root. Among the Hattians she was worshiped as Eštan, the solar power; her Hattic epithet, recorded in the bilingual texts, was Wurunšemu — read, with a question mark scholars are careful to keep, as “Mother of the land.” The Hittites would render her name as Ištanu and Urunzimu and at last Arinniti, “she of Arinna,” and a Hittite queen would pour out before her one of the great prayers of the ancient world. But the office she holds — a female sun, a solar mother who is also the warrant of kingship — is older than the Hittites who exalted her. She is a goddess the conquerors received from the people they conquered, and made the highest power of their empire. The location of her own city, Arinna, has never been securely fixed; it lay perhaps a day’s journey from the capital, near the old Hattian center of Alaca Höyük, but the holy city of the state’s chief goddess is, by a strange justice, lost.

Beside her stands the storm-god, and here too the Hattic substrate shows through the imperial surface. The Hittites’ weather-god is Tarḫunna, the Luwians’ is Tarḫunz — and these Indo-European names, the philologists observe, were shaped to echo an older one. The older one is Taru, the Hattian storm-god, lord of the thunder and the rain, of the well-being of men and herds and the growth of the grain, his emblem the bull whose name his own name may carry. The Hittites adopted him; the Luwians adopted him; the great weather-gods of the holy cities of Nerik and Zippalanda — children, in the developed Hittite theology, of the storm-god and the Sun-goddess — carry his cult forward under Indo-European patronage. When Tarḫunna thunders over the treaties and warrants the king, an older bull-god of the Hattians thunders inside him.

And there is the vanished one. Telipinu, the god whose anger empties the world of life and whose return restores it, is named, the scholars believe, from a Hattic word — pinu, a child. His is the story of the god who simply leaves: in his wrath he puts on his shoes wrong, the smoke chokes the hearth, the sheep refuse their lambs and the cattle their calves, the grain dies in the field, and “humans and gods perish from hunger,” as the Hittite text of the disappearance-myth tells it. The gods search and fail; the Mother-goddess sends out a bee, which finds the sleeping god and stings him; his fury redoubles; and only the spells of the goddess of magic draw the anger out of him and the life back into the land. The myth of the vanishing god, with its drought and its blight and its evocation home, is reckoned Hattic at its origin — as is, on the same authority, the combat of the storm-god with the dragon Illuyanka, the serpent the god overcomes at the turning of the year. The greatest of the Hittites’ ritual narratives, the dying-and-returning of the year’s fertility, came up to them out of the soil they had taken.

The Sphinx Gate of Alaca Höyük — a site sacred since Hattian times and a cult center of the Sun-goddess. Photo by Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Britannica’s survey of the religions of the Hittites, Hattians, and Hurrians traces the same layering: a stratum of Anatolian earth-and-water powers and a mother-goddess of the crops, indigenous and old, over which the later peoples set their own names and their own kings without ever clearing the ground beneath. The “thousand gods of Hatti” the Hittites invoked in their treaties were not a Hittite invention. They were the assembled powers of a country, and the oldest of them spoke Hattic.

A language kept for the gods

Here the Hattians do something almost no conquered people gets to do. Their language did not die when they were absorbed; it was preserved — not in the street or the market, where Hittite and then Luwian took over, but in the temple. Hattic became a sacred tongue, a liturgical language recited in the rituals long after no one used it for anything else, the way Latin outlived the Roman world in the Mass or Sanskrit outlived its spoken life in the rite. The old words were holy because they were old. The gods, it seems, were thought to hear best in the speech in which they had first been named.

So the scribes of Ḫattuša wrote Hattic down — and, crucially, wrote it down twice. The most important Hattic texts are bilinguals: the incantation or the festival-formula given first in the language of Hatti, and then, line answering line, the Hittite translation set beside it for the officiant who no longer understood the original. These are the texts that make the dead language faintly legible again. They are festival liturgies, purification spells, foundation rites for a temple or a palace, the incantation for the great festival of Nerik, the broken myth of the moon-god who fell from the sky. The published Hattic material is gathered in the Catalogue des Textes Hittites under entries in the 720s and 730s, recovered chiefly from the archives of the capital and from the secondary center of Šapinuwa to the east. The form of these documents is itself a kind of testimony. A line of Hattic stands first, an utterance no living person commanded; then, set against it, the Hittite that lets the priest perform the rite without grasping the words he opens with. The arrangement says, without saying it, that the older speech carried a power the translation could direct but not replace. The whole surviving corpus is small — on the order of a few hundred fragments, a handful of true bilinguals, perhaps three hundred recoverable words — and almost every line of it is religious. We possess Hattic, very nearly, only as a language of prayer.

That is a remarkable fate for a tongue. It was the everyday speech of a Bronze Age people, and it ends as the secret, sacred register of their conquerors’ state religion: untranslatable to the worshiper without the crib beside it, and kept all the same because the rite required it. The Hattians lost their land, their independence, and their name to the Hittites. What they did not lose — what their conquerors would not let them lose, because the gods were in it — was their voice in the temple.

The recovery of the substrate

For three thousand years none of this was readable. The capital burned around 1180 BCE in the upheavals that ended the Bronze Age; the tablets baked hard in the fire and lay in the ruin-mound of Boğazkale until the great archive was found and, after the decipherment of Hittite cuneiform in the early twentieth century, the long work of reading it began. And as the Boğazköy tablets gave up their thousands of texts, the Hattians came back into history — not as a name in a king-list but as a recovered substrate, a layer detectable underneath the documents that the documents themselves preserve.

This is how the Hattians are known: almost entirely through the writings of the people who absorbed them. There is no Hattian literature in Hattian hands, no monument inscribed in their own script, because they seem to have had none. There is the archaeology of Alaca Höyük and the other old sites — the bronze standards, the princely graves — and there are the bilingual ritual tablets, and there is the deep impression their gods left in everything the Hittites wrote about the divine. From these the scholars reconstruct a people and very nearly a religion: a Bronze Age population of the central plateau, with a solar mother-goddess and a bull-borne storm-god and a vanishing god of the grain, whose sacred order was taken up wholesale by the Indo-European kings who came after.

A cuneiform tablet from the archives of Hattusa — the kind of record in which Hattic survives, written in Hittite script with its translation alongside. Photo by Didia, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

It has become one of the quiet correctives of the field: a good part of what general readers file under “Hittite religion” is, at its origin, Hattian — the Sun-goddess of Arinna who ruled the imperial pantheon, the storm-god whose myth of the dragon turned the year, the vanishing Telipinu whose absence starved the land. The Indo-European newcomers gave these powers new names and a new state to serve, married them into the imported circles of the Hurrian gods, and carved a Hurrianized version of the company onto the rock at Yazılıkaya. But the foundation was laid before they came. The continuity ran on past them, too: the storm-god of the Iron Age, the great bringer of grain and wine the later kings still met in stone at sanctuaries across the country, descends in an unbroken line from the bull-god of the Hattians, by way of the Luwians’ Tarḫunza. When the Neo-Hittite princes of the first millennium cut a relief of a king standing before the god of the harvest, they were paying, at a remove of centuries and through two changes of language, a debt first owed to the people of Hatti. The mother-goddess of the crops whom the earliest dwellers of the plateau served — the power that kept the grain coming and the herds in milk — was never displaced from the country’s worship. She was only renamed, and re-renamed, and carried on.

To call the Hattians a lost people is to miss what actually happened to them. They were not erased. They were taken in — and the taking-in worked both ways. The conquerors took the country and the country’s name and have been called by it ever since; in exchange, without ever quite meaning to, they took on the country’s gods and kept the country’s speech alive on their own tongues at the altar. The Hittites are named for the Hattians. So, in a sense the Hittites would have recognized and honored, are their gods.

→ Related: Hittites · Hittite Empire · The Hurrians · The Luwians · Arinna Sun Goddess · Telipinu · Tarhunna · Teshub · Kumarbi · Hattusa · Yazilikaya · Eflatun Pinar · Ivriz Relief · Phrygia · The Sumerians · The Assyrians