The Hittites were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. The Hittite's ancestors migrated from the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic–Caspian steppe, arriving in central Anatolia some time before 2000 BC. They formed a succession of polities including Kussara (before 1750 BC), the Kanesh or Neša (c. 1750–1650 BC), and then an empire with its capital at Hattusa. The Hittite Empire reached its peak in the mid-14th century BC, encompassing most of Anatolia and parts of northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, and bordering the rival empires of the Hurri-Mitanni and Assyrians.
From the 15th to 13th centuries BC, the Hittites were a major power of the Near East, coming into conflict with the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Middle Assyrian Empire, and the empire of Mitanni. By the 12th century, much of the Hittite Empire had been annexed by the Middle Assyrian Empire. In the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age collapse at the end of the 12th century, the Hittites splintered into several small independent states; some of these survived into the 8th century BC before being absorbed into the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Lacking a unifying continuity, their descendants scattered and ultimately merged into the modern populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia.
The Hittite language belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family; it and the closely-related Luwian language are the oldest historically attested Indo-European languages.
Etymology
The Hittites called their kingdom Hattusa (Hatti in Akkadian), a name received from the Hattians, an earlier people who had inhabited and ruled the central Anatolian region until the beginning of the second millennium BC, and who spoke an unrelated language known as Hattic. The modern conventional name "Hittites" is due to the initial identification of the people of Hattusa with the Biblical Hittites by 19th-century archaeologists, a view that has since come under greater academic scrutiny. The Hittites would have called themselves something closer to "Neshites" or "Neshians" after the city of Nesha, which flourished for some two hundred years until a king named Labarna renamed himself Hattusili I (meaning "the man of Hattusa") sometime around 1650 BC and established his capital city at Hattusa.
Modern discovery
French scholar Charles Texier was the first modern investigator to encounter Hittite ruins, in 1834, near the village of Boğazköy in modern Turkey. Texier found what he described as "a city as big as Athens in its golden age". He wrote of finding a wall with two massive doors, one with a low relief representing a human form and another door decorated with stone lions. This was Hattusa, the Hittite capital. Texier was not aware of what he had uncovered; he was seeking the ruins of ancient Tavium on the shore of the old Halys River (Kızılırmak River) in modern Turkey.
The earliest written attestation of the Hittites is in tablets found at the karum of Kanesh (now called Kültepe) which contain accounting records between Assyrian merchants and a "land of Hatti". Some names in the tablets were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but clearly Indo-European.
The script on a monument at Boğazkale by a "People of Hattusas" discovered by William Wright in 1884 was found to match peculiar hieroglyphic scripts from Aleppo and Hama in Northern Syria. In 1887, excavations at Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son, Akhenaten. Two of the letters from a "kingdom of Kheta"—apparently located in the same general region as the Mesopotamian references to "land of Hatti"—were written in standard Akkadian cuneiform, but in an unknown language.
British Assyriologist and linguist Archibald Sayce proposed that Hatti or Khatti in Anatolia was identical with the "kingdom of Kheta" mentioned in these Egyptian texts, as well as with the biblical Hittites. Others, such as Max Müller, agreed that Khatti was probably Kheta, but proposed connecting it with Biblical Kittim rather than with the Biblical Hittites. Sayce's identification came to be widely accepted over the course of the early 20th century; the name "Hittite" became attached to the civilization uncovered at Boğazköy. The Amarna letters also reference names of the kings of the Mittani which at the time were little known.
During sporadic excavations at Boğazköy (Hattusa) that began in 1906, 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 Boğazköy were the remains of the capital of an empire that, at one point, controlled northern Syria.
Under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute, excavations at Hattusa have been under way since 1907, with interruptions during the world wars. Kültepe was successfully excavated by Tahsin Özgüç from 1948 until 2005. Smaller scale excavations have also been carried out in the immediate surroundings of Hattusa, including the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, which contains numerous rock reliefs portraying the Hittite rulers and the gods of the Hittite pantheon.
Writings
The Hittites used a variation of cuneiform called Hittite cuneiform. Archaeological expeditions to Hattusa have discovered entire sets of royal archives on cuneiform tablets, written either in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time, or in the various dialects of the Hittite confederation.
Geography
The Hittite kingdom was centered on the lands surrounding Hattusa and Neša (Kültepe), known as "the land Hatti" (URUHa-at-ti). After Hattusa was made the capital, the area encompassed by the bend of the Kızılırmak River (Hittite Marassantiya, Greek Halys) was considered the core of the Empire, and some Hittite laws make a distinction between "this side of the river" and "that side of the river". For example, the bounty for an escaped slave who had fled beyond the river is higher than for a slave caught on the near side.
To the west and south of the core territory lay the region known as Luwiya in the earliest Hittite texts. This terminology was replaced by the names Arzawa and Kizzuwatna with the rise of those kingdoms. Nevertheless, the Hittites continued to refer to the language that originated in these areas as Luwian. Prior to the rise of Kizzuwatna, the heart of that territory in Cilicia was first referred to by the Hittites as Adaniya. Upon its revolt from the Hittites during the reign of Ammuna, it assumed the name of Kizzuwatna and successfully expanded northward to encompass the lower Anti-Taurus Mountains as well. To the north lived the mountain people called the Kaskians. To the southeast of the Hittites lay the Hurrian empire of Mitanni.
At its peak during the reign of Muršili II, the Hittite empire stretched from Arzawa in the west to Mitanni in the east, and included many of the Kaskian territories north as far as Hayasa-Azzi in the far north-east, as well as south into Canaan near the southern border of Lebanon.
Origins
The Early and Middle Late Bronze Age Anatolian samples from Kaman-Kalehöyük and Ovaören were modelled as being predominantly derived from a neolithic North Mesopotamian-like population, with the addition of around 10 percent ancestry from a Caucasus-Lower Volga steppe population. The researchers suggested the roots of the Anatolian languages originate from this steppe component.
The ancestors of the Hittites came into Anatolia between 4400 and 4100 BC, when the Anatolian language family split from Proto-Indo-European. Recent genetic and archaeological research has indicated that Proto-Anatolian speakers arrived in this region sometime between 5000 and 3000 BC. The Proto-Hittite language developed around 2100 BC, and the Hittite language itself is believed to have been in use in Central Anatolia between the 20th and 12th centuries BC. The Hittites are first associated with the kingdom of Kussara sometime prior to 1750 BC.
Hittites in Anatolia during the Bronze Age coexisted with Hattians and Hurrians, either by means of conquest or by gradual assimilation. Archaeological findings indicate connections between the Hittites, the Balkan Ezero culture, and the Caucasian Maykop culture; these connections have historically been interpreted as evidence of migration.
Analyses by David W. Anthony in 2007 concluded that steppe herders who were archaic Indo-European speakers spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BC, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe. He thought their languages "probably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly preserved later in Anatolian," and that their descendants later moved into Anatolia at an unknown time but maybe as early as 3000 BC.
J. P. Mallory also thought it was likely that the Anatolians reached the Near East from the north either via the Balkans or the Caucasus in the 3rd millennium BC. According to Parpola, the appearance of Indo-European speakers from Europe into Anatolia, and the appearance of Hittite, was related to later migrations of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamnaya culture into the Danube Valley at c. 2800 BC, which was in line with the "customary" assumption that the Anatolian Indo-European language was introduced into Anatolia sometime in the third millennium BC.
The Hittite language also borrowed many words related to agriculture from cultures on their eastern borders, indicating a migration route across the Caucasus and not the Balkans. The Yamnaya expansion into the Balkans carried a component of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry that does not exist in any ancient Anatolian DNA samples, indicating that the proto-Hittites and their cousin groups split off from the Proto-Indo-Europeans before the formation of the Yamnaya which did admix with Eastern Hunter Gatherers.
The dominant indigenous inhabitants in central Anatolia were Hurrians and Hattians who spoke non-Indo-European languages. Some have argued that Hattic was a Northwest Caucasian language, but its affiliation remains uncertain, whilst the Hurrian language was a near-isolate (i.e. it was one of only two or three languages in the Hurro-Urartian family). There were also Assyrian colonies in the region during the Old Assyrian Empire (2025–1750 BC); it was from the Assyrian speakers of Upper Mesopotamia that the Hittites adopted the cuneiform script. It took some time before the Hittites established themselves following the collapse of the Old Assyrian Empire in the mid-18th century BC, as is clear from some of the texts included here. For several centuries there were separate Hittite groups, usually centered on various cities. But then strong rulers with their center in Hattusa (modern Boğazkale) succeeded in bringing these together and conquering large parts of central Anatolia to establish the Hittite kingdom.
History
Early period
The Hittite state formed in the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1900–1650 BC) from small polities on the Kızılırmak River in north-central Anatolia. The early history of the Hittite kingdom is known through four "cushion-shaped" tablets, (classified as KBo 3.22, KBo 17.21+, KBo 22.1, and KBo 22.2), likely produced in Kussara, Nēša that may be dated to the 18th century BC. They are in Old Hittite; three of them using the Old Script". Most of the tablets are Akkadian copies dated to the 14th and 13th centuries BC. They reveal a rivalry within two branches of the royal family up to the Middle Kingdom: a northern branch based in Zalpuwa and Hattusa and a southern branch based in Kussara and Kanesh. The northerners have Hattian names; the southerners adopted Hittite and Luwian names.
Zalpuwa attacked Kanesh in 1833 BC. when an Old Assyrian kārum (merchant colony) flourished there.
One set of tablets, known collectively as the Anitta text, was likely propaganda for the southern branch of the royal family against the northern branch who had fixed on Hattusa as capital. They told of Pithana king of Kussara, who conquered neighbouring Neša (Kanesh), around 1750 BC, and of his son Anitta (r. 1745–1720 BC), who conquered northern cities including Hattusa and Zalpuwa. Another set, the "Tale of Zalpuwa", supports Zalpuwa and exonerates the later Ḫattušili I from the charge of sacking Kanesh.
Anitta was succeeded by Zuzzu (r. 1720–1710 BC); but sometime in 1710–1705 BC, Kanesh and its karum were destroyed, along with the Assyrian trading system with it. A Kussaran noble family survived to contest the Zalpuwan/Hattusan family, though whether these were of the direct line of Anitta is uncertain.
The ruling family of Zalpa maintained continuity during this time. Huzziya I took over Hatti. His son-in-law Labarna I, a southerner from Hurma, usurped the throne and adopted Huzziya's grandson Ḫattušili as his own son and heir.
Old Kingdom
The founding of the Hittite Kingdom is attributed to either Labarna I or Hattusili I (the latter might also have had Labarna as a personal name), who conquered the area south and north of Hattusa. Hattusili I campaigned as far as the Semitic Amorite kingdom of Yamkhad in Syria, where he attacked, but did not capture, its capital of Aleppo. Hattusili I did eventually capture Hattusa and was credited for the foundation of the Hittite Empire. Hattusili I chose his grandson Mursili I as his successor.