Hittites: A History from Beginning to End (Mesopotamia History)

by Hourly History

The 1906 expedition yielded 30,000-35,000 texts and fragments representing about 3,000-3,500 original tablets. They include treaties, royal correspondences, prayers, rituals, festival descriptions, myths, literature, and laws.

Many of the historical works written by the Hittites were primarily works of royal propaganda, according to Professor Henry Hoffner, a notable Assyriologist and Hittotologist and the Executive Editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary. Often, their scribes presented a picture of a kingdom geared for chronic warfare, since rulers emphasized military successes in the records. Their official records presented only their public face: there were never any bad rulers and they documented no criticism. Very diplomatic, and we'll see how central formality and diplomacy were to administrative aspects of their lives in the following pages. Instead, they blamed circumstances beyond their control rather than lack of ability or missteps on the part of their leaders. Kings were cut off from their subjects and many of these official records screen readers from their private lives, idiosyncrasies and defects.

Sponsored by the British Museum, a very young 20-year-old Lawrence of Arabia, studying Middle Eastern architecture at Oxford University, was passionate about medieval epics and conducted a thesis to prove that the Western architecture of the Crusaders was inspired by Eastern influences. This work led him to Syria in 1909.

Carchemish was an important site during the many scenes of battles over the millennia between Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Hittites.

While Hittite (or as they called it, Nesite) is considered among the oldest recorded Indo-European languages, expert Gary Beckman reported that eight different languages were found in documents from Hattusa. While most of them were in Hittite, they were also in Semitic Akkadian, Hattic, Palaic, Luwian, Hurrian, Sumerian, and Indic.

In 2014, it emerged that a tablet referred to as tablet CTH 183 written in the Hittite language utilizing the cuneiform script was a letter commissioned by a Mycenaean Greek king and sent to a Hittite king (most likely Muwatalli II who reigned ca 1295-1272 BCE) over the rightful ownership of a group of islands off of the Anatolian coast that had formed a part of a dowry in a previous generation. The diplomatic marriage of the Mycenaean king to an unknown Assuwan princess was the reason that the Assuwa people had given the lands in question as part of her marriage dowry to the king. Archaeologists and historians find it plausible that this unknown Assuwan princess is the prototype for Homer's Helen, the heart of countless legends and the basis for extensive research on the links between Homer's Trojan Wars and the Hittite empire.

Several key scholars now believe that Wilusa and Troy are one and the same, bringing the almost one-hundred-year search for references to Troy in the Hittite tablets closer to an answer.

There is some possibility that the Trojan Wars were not between great kings, but low-level endemic conflicts between ambitious mercenary captains that were loyal to their own ethnic groups, but that at some point the Hittites did have to assert their dominion over the area. Troy risked drawing the attention of greedy conquerors because of its attractive geopolitical position on the trade routes running from the Mediterranean into Anatolia.

They built their city out of the granite mountains of the North-Central Anatolian Mountain Range, using the natural landscape to build a thick wall along sheer cliffs to secure their city, home to more than 50,000. Their brutal army and their ambitions helped them build an empire that rivaled Egypt and Babylon. Their armies stretched their vast empire westward across Anatolia to the Aegean Sea, south eastwards through northern Syria, and then across the Euphrates River into the western fringes of Mesopotamia.

During their formative years in the 18th and 17th centuries BCE, the Hittites bent the natural landscape to their will in order to fit their needs.

Their fortress city was enclosed in a wall over five miles long and is considered among the thickest walls in the ancient world.

They devised a groundwater management system that was ahead of their time, where they piped in natural springs from the hills above their city and ran the water into seven storage pools within the city walls.

The Hittite Kingdom accomplished a great deal during the middle Bronze Age and subsequent Iron Age. They made full use of Anatolia's mineral wealth and nearby territories. The silver-rich Hittites made animal figurines that date back to the 3rd millennium BCE. They were the first in history to mine, smelt and utilize iron from the region of present day Armenia in order to craft tools and weapons. Their means of refinement made iron stronger, which secured them a great advantage in warfare as a Mesopotamian civilization, cutting through the copper swords and shields of their enemies. Following their invention of tempering, iron came to widespread use and was highly prized for use in weaponry and in farm equipment. One of the tribes subject to Hittite rule, the Chalybes, were the first people to make steel in approximately 1400 BCE.

Hittites did not share their knowledge of iron with their own farmers, because they did not trust them but instead feared them, seeing them as potential rebels. Still, they were willing to export their weapons as prized items in trade. They withheld knowledge of how iron was made.

Levant (the eastern Mediterranean coastal lands of Asia Minor and Phoenicia, which is modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon).

Syria's importance during ancient times cannot be underestimated, since it became the meeting place of ancient empires given its geographical position.

great chariot battle at Kadesh (Qadesh) around 1275 BCE.

Artifacts and seals reveal an extensive trade network existed within the empire. Israelites acted as intermediaries in trade between Egyptians and Hittites.

Hittites relied heavily on simply conquering areas that produced goods that they wanted. They had a loan and credit system that operated widely in Eastern Anatolia where rates of interest were high, ranging from 30% to as much as 180%. Local kings had to resolve problems by issuing decrees cancelling all debts, since indebtedness grew to become a big problem.

Hatti also extended its rule beyond the Taurus Mountains into Northern Syria initially in the late 17th century. They broke the power of Yamhad, the Amorite kingdom centered in Aleppo, and put an end to their system of independent city-states. Aleppo was one of the earliest threats to Hittite ambitions and had once actually cut the Hittites off from the rich trade of Syria.

the rulers of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and the Hittites formed an elite highly exclusive club and addressed each other as brothers, despite the underlying tensions and distrust that erupted into open conflicts when their interests crossed.

Hittites are considered to have developed the first system of diplomacy and since they were prone to contemplate treaties and peace under certain conditions, their ideas surrounding international relations are considered remarkable by experts.

the Hittites’ greater purpose was to impose their power on the world.

They developed an unstoppable war machine to create ruthless, disciplined warriors and revolutionized warfare. If a soldier missed a target, there was severe punishment; the training for Hittite troops was constant and absolute.

Sayce

They were of mixed ethnic origin: Indo-European, native Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian and other ethnicities. Some scholars claim that their mixed population, augmented by repeated arrivals of deportees and prisoners of war, made it so that the government could no longer rely on its subjects’ loyalty in the face of enemy incursions.