Hittites

The Hittite empire dominated the central plateau of Anatolia (the Asian portion of modern-day Turkey) from about 1800 BCE to 1200 BCE, and survived until about 700 BCE as a series of smallerkingdoms based in southern Turkey and northern Syria. During its period of dominance, it was surrounded in the north by Kaska tribes, in the east by the Mitanni, and in the west by several related tribes of which little is known; on the extreme western seaboard were newly founded Mycenaean colonies.

Remains of the Hititte presence are found at the Royal Gate of Hattusa in Bogazkoy, Turkey. (GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS)

The Hittites seem to have migrated into Anatolia from the Caucasus in around 2000 BCE, and achieved ascendancy over the eastern Anatolian Hurri population. By the eighteenth century BCE their king, Anitta, had conquered neighboring tribes and established a capital at Kussana, in Cappadocia. A century later they had moved the capital to Hattusa, an easily defended citadel 150 kilometers east of what is now Ankara, commanding trade routes from the Black Sea to the Cilician Gates and from the Aegean to Central Asia. Labarnas I (reigned 1680–1650 BCE) and his successors campaigned as far afield as northern Syria; in 1595 BCE Mursilis I captured Babylon from the Hammurabic dynasty, but he was murdered by a pretender to the Hittite throne.

After fifty years of dynastic chaos, the frontiers were consolidated and from the fifteenth century BCE a new dynasty used diplomacy instead of force to dominate client kingdoms. From 1450 BCE, under kings of mixed Hurrian-Hittite lineage, the kingdom again absorbed Aleppo in Syria and Arzawa in southwest Turkey. The kingdom reached its maximum extent under Suppiluliumas I (1380–1340 BCE). The widow of King Tutankhamen of Egypt was so impressed by the deeds of Suppiluliumas I that she asked for his son's hand in marriage.

In about 1300 BCE the Hittites again encountered the Egyptians, in a battle at Kadesh (Syria), which is described in the poem of the Egyptian poet Pentaus. Maneuvering over hilly ground, the Hittite king, Muwatalli, successfully launched his three-man war chariots crewed by archers at the Egyptian forces, but as the Hittites stopped to plunder, Ramses II counterattacked. The resulting stalemate was formalized in a treaty that is described both on the temple walls at Karnak in Egypt and on cuneiform tablets found at Bogazkoy. To cement the alliance, Ramses married a Hittite princess.

The aggressive Assyrians in the east and the influx of Phrygians from the Balkans led to severe pressure on the Hittite kingdom. In unexplained circumstances the capital, Hattusas, was burned in 1200 BCE. The scattered and defeated Hittites moved southeast under pressure from the Phyrgians and other "sea peoples" and established new kingdoms south of the Anti-Taurus mountains, based on fortified capital cities discovered at Carchemish (Kargamis), near Gaziantep, and Karatepe, north of Adana. These minor kingdoms, which were far less disciplined and centralized than their predecessor, were eventually overrun by the Assyrians in about 700 BCE.

The Hittite civilization was discovered from hieroglyphic inscriptions identified and catalogued by Archibald Henry Sayce (1845–1933), an expert in Sumerian and Assyrian. In 1880 he postulated that an extensive civilization, the Hittites, previously only known from the Old Testament, had existed in the wide area between northern Syria and the mid-Aegean Turkish coast, with its capital at Bogazkoy. Hugo Winckler (1863–1913), an archeologist affiliated with the German Oriental Society, obtained the concession to excavate Bogazkoy, and in 1906, within a few days of starting work, he unearthed, in the foundations of a major temple, a library of 10,000 tablets bearing cuneiform, not hieroglyphic, inscriptions. Excavations ceased during World War I, but Bedrich (or Friedrich) Hrozny (1879–1952), professor of Assyriology at the University of Vienna, and others continued to work on decipherment of the cuneiform script. In 1915 Hrozny declared that cuneiform Hittite was an Indo-European language. Based on Sumerian and Akkadian insertions into Hittite texts, scholars were able to postulate a vocabulary, which was more or less complete by 1933. From the tablets, an outline of history complete with rulers was established, although minor controversy over dates remained. The tablets also illuminate the social and legal systems; the ones describing religious ceremonies have proved more difficult to interpret. Much later, in 1947, a bilingual tablet discovered at Karatepe proved to be in Phoenician and the hieroglyphic script. The pictographs were identified as Hittite of a slightly different form to the cuneiform language; probably cuneiform Hittite was the commercial and hieroglyphic Hittite the ceremonial language.

The inscriptions revealed the Hittites as a nationalistic, feudal people with a strong code of justice outlined in over two hundred laws. The priest king was supported by the panka, an advisory council (later dissolved); a bureaucratic class; and an underclass of slaves. Councils of elders administered distant areas. The king's duties included serving as both military leader and high priest; his campaigns were sometimes curtailed by the need to attend religious ceremonies. Women appear to have had extensive rights; the queens entered into diplomatic correspondence with foreign rulers, many priestesses are known, and rape was one of the few capital offenses under the law. Equitable laws, mainly based on restitution for wrongs by payment in money or kind, reveal an organized agricultural society whose main crops were barley, wheat, and wine-producing grapes. The wealth of the nation lay in the gold, silver (which provided a currency), and iron, which were probably traded extensively.

The Hittite religion was based on the Hurri weather god Teshub, who rode a chariot pulled by sacred bulls, and his sun-goddess wife Hebat, referred to as "Queen of the land of Hatti, queen of heaven and earth." The city of Hattusas held many major temples, cleverly constructed so that light from huge windows fell on the sacred statue; an unidentified holy city of Arinna is also mentioned in texts. In the countryside, huge reliefs and inscriptions appear both within and outside Hittite boundaries, often near water sources. The best known religious site, Yazilikaya, 3 kilometers east of Bogazkoy, consists of two adjacent clefts in a hillside, where lines of gods and kings have been carved into the cliffs; a cult building on level ground outside provided a center of worship. This site dates from the reign of King Tudhaliyas IV (reigned 1250–1220 BCE), just before the abandonment of Bogazkoy. The Hittites augmented their pantheon with their neighbors' gods and goddesses; up to a thousand of them were worshipped in local or national festivals with blood sacrifices, or invoked in curses and prayers.

The Hittite culture is represented in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara by many bold reliefs on basalt and limestone blocks and by statues in the round. The motifs are animals (lions, sphinxes, and bulls), the royal family, and the gods. Human figures wear conical hats or helmets, kilts, and boots with turned up toes and are armed; they are usually shown in profile. The Kultepe/Assyrian type of pottery features elegant burnished monochrome pots with long spouts. The museum also houses numerous cuneiform tablets in pottery, silver, and bronze. Hittite writings describe statues made of iron, but it seems that these have not survived. The Turks, supported by the cultural ministry, ascribe great importance to Hittite civilization and in recent years the quest for objects linking the Hittites to sites all over Turkey has become something of a holy grail for Turkish archaeologists.

Kate Clow

Gurney, O. R. (1952) The Hittites. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.

Seton, Lloyd. (1989) Ancient Turkey: A Traveller's History. London: British Museum Publications.

——. (1956) Early Anatolia. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.