Warriors of Hatti

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Just who were the Hittites?

When this question began to be asked a little more than a century ago, our only knowledge of the Hittites came from the Hebrew Bible.¹ Abraham buys a burial plot for his wife Sarah from “Ephron the Hittite” (Genesis 23:3–20). King David falls in love with Bathsheba, the wife of “Uriah the Hittite,” as he watches her bathe (2 Samuel 11:2–27). David’s son Solomon chooses “Hittite women” to number among his wives (1 Kings 11:1).

Perhaps the most famous biblical reference to the Hittites comes in Exodus, when God appears to Moses in the burning bush and declares:

I have come down to deliver them [the Israelites] from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites (Exodus 3:7).

From such biblical references, one would gather that the “country of the Hittites” was in northern Palestine or Syria. After David commands that the people of Israel be counted, for instance, the census takers visit, among other places, “Kadesh in the land of the Hittites” (2 Samuel 24:6), probably referring to a Syrian site that David is said 046to have conquered. The problem was that scholars could find no evidence of a Hittite kingdom in that region.

In the late 19th century, however, German and Swiss archaeologists began investigating the ruins of a strange, unknown civilization far to the north, in modern Turkey. Here was a classic conundrum: Ancient historians could name a people (the Hittites) but not their homeland, and they could name a homeland (ancient Anatolia) but not its people.

Thanks largely to archaeological excavations by German archaeologists—including Hugo Winckler in the first decade of the 20th century and Kurt Bittel in the years before World War II—we now know that those Anatolian ruins are the remains of a great Hittite empire that flourished in the second millennium B.C. The Hittites developed from little-known kingdoms into a fledgling empire in the mid-17th century B.C., when they built their capital at Hattusa (modern Bogazköy, 100 miles east of Ankara). Some decades later they were powerful enough to attack Babylon, bringing down the Old Babylonian dynasties. Thereafter, until the collapse of Hittite civilization in the 12th century B.C., they rivaled Egypt as a Near Eastern superpower.

Their story is masterfully told by Australian scholar Trevor Bryce in The Kingdom of the Hittites, the most important book yet written in English about Hittite civilization. It’s so good—filled with interesting facts, novel insights and rollicking stories—that it reads like a work of historical fiction.

The name “Hittites,” Bryce reminds us, is something of a misnomer. Because the Bible referred to Hittites, the term was simply adopted by scholars to refer to this Late Bronze Age Anatolian kingdom. The Hittites, however, never referred to themselves as Hittites; rather, they called themselves the “people of the Land of Hatti.” Had we learned about the Hittites in a more orderly way, we would probably have called them “Nesites” or “Nesians,” for the earliest Hittite rulers—shadowy figures named Pithana and his son Anitta—based their kingdom at the city of Nesa (about 200 miles southeast of Hattusa), where a dagger with Anitta’s name on it was discovered. Nesite was also the name the Hittites gave to their language, an Indo-European tongue that we instead call Hittite.

Our knowledge of the early Hittite kings comes from chronicles found at Bogazköy/Hattusa. These documents consist of cuneiform tablets inscribed in Hittite and Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians. Two documents concern the first clearly attested Hittite king, Hattusili I (1650–1620 B.C.), who established the capital at Hattusa (Hattusili means “man of Hattusa”). The Annals and Testament of Hattusili, which survive only in later copies dating to 400 years after his reign, tell of the king’s military expeditions and numerous courtly intrigues—including his wresting the throne from his grandfather and later bestowing it on his grandson, Mursili I (1620–1590 B.C.).

According to the 16th-century B.C. Proclamation of the Hittite king Telipinu, which also survives only in later copies, in 1595 B.C. Mursili marched the Hittite army hundreds of miles southeast from Anatolia to Mesopotamia and destroyed Babylon; then he turned his men around and marched them home again. No one knows why Mursili conducted this “weekend raid” on Babylon; the whole affair seems gratuitous and unprovoked. But the campaign was long remembered as one of the major military triumphs of the early Hittite period. Only a few years later, however, fate turned against Mursili, who was assassinated by his brother-in-law.

The floruit of Hittite power came during the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. In 1991 a bulldozer operating near ancient Hattusa’s famous Lion Gate uncovered dramatic new evidence from this period: a bronze sword from the Neo-Hittite kingdom’s first king, 047Tudhaliya. The sword contained an inscription in Hittite: “As Duthaliya [Tudhaliya] the Great King shattered the Assuwa-Country, he dedicated these swords to the Storm-God, his Lord.”² This confirmed accounts written during Tudhaliya’s reign about a rebellion by a group of small vassal kingdoms, collectively known as Assuwa, along the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Tudhaliya, the accounts tells us, marched west to crush the Assuwa Rebellion.

The texts from Tudhaliya’s reign also suggest that one of the allies of the Assuwa league were men from “Ahhiyawa.” This place name comes up frequently in Hittite documents; it has been the cause of debates among Hittitologists since at least the 1920s, when the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer claimed that “Ahhiyawa” was a Hittite transliteration of the Greek “Achaea,” the word Homer uses to refer to mainland (or Mycenaean) Greece. Initially, Forrer’s identification of the Ahhiyawans with the Mycenaeans won little support; nowadays, however, more and more scholars believe that the Ahhiyawans were in fact either people from the Greek Peloponnesus or Greek settlers along Anatolia’s Aegean coast.³ According to Bryce, the inscribed bronze sword was likely “produced in a western Anatolian/Aegean workshop” and was “booty from the Assuwan campaign.” Indeed, the bronze sword looks suspiciously like weapons found on mainland Greece during this period.⁴

So here, in Hittite annals, we may well meet the Achaeans who, according to 048Homer, crossed the Aegean and destroyed Troy. Bryce intriguingly suggests that the Trojan War was not simply a one-time conflagration; instead, it was the consummation of centuries-long contacts—sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile—between Mycenaean and Anatolian peoples.^a

Not surprisingly for a Late Bronze Age power, the Hittites also had relations with Egypt. Letters from Hittite kings have been found among the Amarna Letters, the diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian pharaohs Amenophis III (1390–1352 B.C.) and his son Akhenaten with other Near Eastern monarchs. And Hittite annals contain similar references to letters—sometimes describing dynastic marriages—exchanged between Hittite rulers and foreign kings. One such reference comes from The Deeds of Suppiluliuma, a chronicle written by the Hittite king Mursili II (1321–1295 B.C.) about his predecessor and father, Suppiluliuma I. According to the Deeds, Suppiluliuma, after returning from vigorous campaigns in western Anatolia and northern Syria, received an unusual letter, purportedly from the Egyptian queen:

My husband is dead. I have no son. But they say that you have many sons. If you would give me one of your sons, he would become my husband. I will never take a servant of mine and make him my husband!

Suppiluliuma doubted that this letter was indeed from the queen of Egypt, since the Egyptians and Hittites were on hostile terms and had been fighting for decades over control of 049northern Syria. So he sent an emissary to Egypt, instructing the man to find out the truth. The next spring, after the winter snows had thawed, the emissary returned from Egypt bearing a furious response from the queen:

Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country’s shame to a foreign land? You did not believe me, and you even spoke thus to me! He who was my husband is dead. I have no son! Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband! I have written to no other country. Only to you I have written. They say you have many sons; so give me one son of yours. To me he will be husband. In Egypt he will be king!

Who was this queen? The Deeds refers to her simply as Dahamunzu, which means “the wife of the king,” and to her dead husband as Niphururiya. This latter name, Niphururiya, is a fairly precise rendering in cuneiform of one of the royal names of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (1336–1327 B.C.), Nebkheperure. Thus many scholars argue that the vitriolic queen was none other than Ankhesenamun, the widow of Tutankhamun, who died at a young age.

Apparently persuaded that the royal marriage proposal was genuine, Suppiluliuma sent one of his younger sons, Zannanza, to forge a dynastic alliance with Egypt. But the marriage never took place: Zannanza and his party were ambushed and murdered while on their way to Egypt.

Bryce gives a riveting account of the ensuing events. Suppiluliuma retaliated for his son’s death by attacking the Egyptians in northern Syria, only to be killed by a plague brought back to the Hittite homelands by captured Egyptian prisoners. This pestilence (probably the bubonic plague, which would decimate medieval Europe 2,500 years later) ravaged the Hittite homelands for the next 20 years. It prompted Suppiluliuma’s successor and son, Mursili II, to write a series of prayers to the gods known as the Plague Prayers of Mursili. In these prayers, Mursili “remonstrates with the gods for punishing his land so severely, warns them that the kingdom is falling prey to enemy forces that surround it, and seeks reasons for the divine wrath.”

Relations between the two Near Eastern superpowers, Egypt and Hatti, were mended only after a furious battle in 1274 B.C. at Kadesh, on the Orontes River in modern Syria. We possess a great deal of information about this battle, thanks to two separate versions of the subsequent treaty signed by both powers. One version was inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs on the walls of two temples: the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.) in western Thebes, and the Temple of Amun at Karnak in eastern Thebes (modern Luxor). The other version of the treaty, inscribed on a clay tablet in Akkadian cuneiform, was uncovered at Hattusa (a translation of the latter is now mounted at the entrance to the Security Council of the United Nations in New York).

The Battle of Kadesh began when the Hittite king Muwatalli II (1295–1272 B.C.) amassed a huge army of nearly 50,000 troops and marched southward through 051Syria, determined to crush the Egyptians once and for all. Ramesses II marched north to oppose the Hittites. Along the way, the Egyptian army came across two Bedouins, who reported that the Hittite army was far to the north, near the Syrian city of Aleppo. The Bedouins, however, had been planted by the Hittites to give false information to the Egyptians. In fact, the Hittite forces had already reached Kadesh; they were just across the Orontes River.

Ramesses fought valiantly against the surprise attack, holding off the Hittites until reinforcements arrived. The Egyptians may have been unwittingly aided by Hittite soldiers who stopped to plunder the Egyptian camp before vanquishing Ramesses’s army. As it turned out, the battle ended in a draw, though both sides claimed victory. Ramesses had his “triumph” recorded in the usual Egyptian bombastic style:

Then my army came to praise me … my high officers having come to magnify my strong arm, and my chariotry likewise boasting of my name and saying … “You are great of victory in the presence of your army, in the face of the entire land … You have broken the back of Hatti forever!”

Some 13 years after the treaty was signed, a royal wedding was arranged between Ramesses II and a daughter of Hattusili III, Muwatalli II’s successor. A short time later, a second Hittite princess was married to Ramesses II as well, and Hattusili III may have visited Egypt in 052person. The Hittites and Egyptians agreed to divide the Near East between them.

The last great Hittite king, Tudhaliya IV (1227–1209 B.C.), is perhaps best known for completing the rock-hewn religious shrine at Yazilikaya, less than a mile from Hattusa.^b Tudhaliya IV, however, was no stranger to international campaigns. He claims to have conquered Cyprus, for example, carrying away gold and silver. One text from Tudhaliya’s reign is a treaty drawn up between the Hittites and Sausgamuwa, the ruler of Amurru, a small kingdom on the coast of north Syria. The treaty is primarily concerned with prohibiting trade with Assyria, with whom the Hittites were then at war. The most interesting part of the so-called Sausgamuwa Treaty, however, has to do, once again, with those pesky Ahhiyawans—or Mycenaeans/Achaeans—whom Tudhaliya IV’s ancestor, also named Tudhaliya, had defeated in the Assuwa Rebellion 200 years earlier. In the treaty, Tudhaliya also places an embargo on trade between Ahhiyawa and Assyria. For some reason, in the surviving draft of the treaty the name of the king of Ahhiyawa was crossed out from the list of kings whom Tudhaliya considered his equals: “the king of Egypt, the king of Karadunia [Kassite Babylonia], the king of Assyria, the king of Ahhiyawa [with a line though the last phrase].”

Why Tudhaliya included, and then omitted, the king of Ahhiyawa remains a mystery. What is clear, however, is that the Ahhiyawans were still a presence in the Aegean or in Anatolia itself at the end of the 13th century B.C., when the destruction of the great Late Bronze Age city of Troy took place.

The Hittite Empire collapsed around 1200 B.C., perhaps destroyed by the mysterious Sea Peoples—who, according to Egyptian documents, destroyed the “Land of Hatti”—or perhaps by unfriendly neighbors. After the fall of Hattusa, the so-called neo-Hittite city-states in northern Syria continued to function for almost 500 years. Originally Hittite vassal kingdoms, these petty monarchies assumed the mantle of their former masters, keeping alive Hittite writing, sculpture and mythology. Such continuity of culture on the periphery of a former empire can often be observed in history—such as playing cricket and speaking English in India today, long after the sun has set on the British Empire.

Thus in the first millennium B.C., a semblance of the Hittite Empire could be found at Aleppo, Carchemish and other northern Syrian sites. It was these neo-Hittite city-states that the writers of the Hebrew Bible would have known. In Bryce’s words, “Assyrians, Urartians, and Hebrews continued to refer to Syria and the Taurus regions as ‘the Land of Hatti,’ and the Bible makes reference to the local Syrian rulers as ‘Kings of the Hittites’.” So it’s not 062surprising that when archaeologists and historians first began to look for the Hittites, they searched in the wrong place.

Just who were the Hittites?