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File:Hattusa.king.jpg
Relief of Suppiluliuma II, last known king of the Hittite Empire

"Hittites" is the conventional English-language term for an ancient people who spoke an Indo-European language and established a kingdom centered in Hattusa (the modern village of Boğazköy in north-central Turkey), through most of the second millennium B.C.E.

The Hittite kingdom, which at its height controlled central Anatolia, north-western Syria down to Ugarit, and Mesopotamia down to Babylon, lasted from roughly 1680 B.C.E. to about 1180 B.C.E. After 1180 B.C.E., the Hittite polity disintegrated into several independent city-states, some of which survived as late as around 700 B.C.E.

The Hittite kingdom, or at least its core region, was apparently called Hatti in the reconstructed Hittite language. However, the Hittites should be distinguished from the "Hattians", an earlier people who inhabited the same region until the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C.E., and spoke a non-Indo-European language conventionally called Hattic.

Hittites or more recently, Hethites is also the common English name of a Biblical people (חתי or HTY in the consonant-only Hebrew script), who are also called Children of Heth (בני-חת, BNY HT). These people are mentioned several times in the Old Testament, from the time of the Patriarchs up to Ezra's return from Babylonian captivity; see Hittites in the Bible. The archaeologists who discovered the Anatolian Hittites in the 19th century initially believed the two peoples to be the same, but this identification remains disputed.

The Hittites were also famous for their skill in building and using chariots. Some consider the Hittites to be the first civilization to have discovered how to work iron, and thus the first to enter the Iron Age.

Archaeological discovery

File:Hattusa.liongate.jpg
Ruins of Hattusa (Lion Gate) at Boğazköy, Turkey

The first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the Assyrian colony of Kültepe (ancient Karum Kanesh), containing records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a certain "land of Hatti". Some names in the tablets were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but clearly Indo-European.

The script on a monument at Boğazköy by a "People of Hattusas" discovered by William Wright in 1884 was found to match peculiar hieroglyphic scripts from Aleppo and Hamath in Northern Syria. In 1887, excavations at Tell El-Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaton. 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 script, but in an unknown language; although scholars could read it, no one could understand it. Shortly after this, 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. Sayce's identification came to be widely accepted over the course of the early 20th century; and so, rightly or wrongly, the name "Hittite" has become attached to the civilization uncovered at Boğazköy.

During sporadic excavations at Boğazköy (Hattusa) that began in 1905, 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 a mighty empire that at one point controlled northern Syria.

The language of the Hattusa tablets was eventually deciphered by a Czech linguist, Bedřich Hrozný (1879–1952), who on 24 November 1915 announced his results in a lecture at the Near Eastern Society of Berlin. His book about his discovery was printed in Leipzig in 1917, with the title The Language of the Hittites; Its Structure and Its Membership in the Indo-European Linguistic Family. The preface of the book begins with:

The present work undertakes to establish the nature and structure of the hitherto mysterious language of the Hittites, and to decipher this language [...] It will be shown that Hittite is in the main an Indo-European language.

For this reason, the language came to be known as the Hittite language, even though that was not what its speakers had called it (see below).

Under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute, excavations at Hattusa have been underway since 1932, with wartime interruptions.

History

The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their empire, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East.

Around 2000 B.C.E., the region centered in Hattusa, that would later become the core of the Hittite kingdom, was inhabited by people with a distinct culture who spoke a non-Indo-European language. The name "Hattic" is used by Anatolianists to distinguish this language from the Indo-European Hittite language, that appeared on the scene at the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C.E. and became the administrative language of the Hittite kingdom over the next six or seven centuries. As noted above, "Hittite" is a modern convention for referring to this language. The native term was Nesili, i.e. "In the language of Nesa".

The early Hittites, whose prior whereabouts are unknown, borrowed heavily from the pre-existing Hattian culture, and also from that of the Assyrian traders — in particular, the cuneiform writing and the use of cylindrical seals.

Since Hattic continued to be used in the Hittite kingdom for religious purposes, and there is substantial continuity between the two cultures, it is not known whether the Hattic speakers — the Hattians— were displaced by the speakers of Hittite, were absorbed by them, or just adopted their language.

Template:History of Hittites Series

There was three main periods;


Israelite perspective

Some localized contacts with the outermost fringes of the Hittite empire are recorded in the edited selection of traditions of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that have been preserved in the Hebrew Bible. The Biblical references are summarized below. (See the article Hittites in the Bible for a detailed concordance.) It should be noted that the present corpus of the Hebrew Bible was probably compiled between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C.E., during or after the Babylonian exile, as related in the Book of Ezra, with a further revision in the Masoretic text occurring some time between ca. 200 B.C.E. and 100 C.E., as inferred from textual analysis of the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.

The references

The first reference to the Hittites is in Genesis 23:10, where Abraham bought the family burial cave at Machpelah from "Ephron the Hittite" (חתי, HTY). Later, in Genesis 26–36, two of Esau's wives are labeled as Hittites. In these accounts, the Hittites are mostly called "The Children of Heth" (בני-חת, BNY-HT) and described as a branch of the Canaanites, living in the Hebron area; indeed Heth (חת, HT) is listed in Genesis 10 as a son of Canaan, son of Ham.

Starting with the conquest of Canaan, the Hittites — from now on always called חתי, HTY — are listed, on a par with the Canaanites, as one of the seven mighty peoples living in the region. Later they are cited among the four nations whom the Israelites were not able to destroy completely. Indeed, some centuries later, two of King David's generals are labeled as Hittites: Ahimelech (1 Samuel 26:6) and Uriah (2 Samuel 11:3); David had the latter deliberately slain in battle for the sake of his wife Bathsheba. King Solomon also had Hittite wives (1 Kings 11:7), and traded with (or received tribute from) the kings of the Hittites, of Syria, and of Egypt (2 Chronicles 1:17). An episode in the time of Elisha (2 Kings 7:6) mentions "the kings of Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians" as mighty powers.

The Hittites are last mentioned by Ezra, on his return from Babylonian captivity (Ezra 9:1; around 450 B.C.E., long after the demise of the Anatolian Hittite empire). They are one of the peoples with whom the local Hebrew leaders, who had remained in Palestine during the captivity, had intermarried.

The traditional view

Given the casual tone in which the Hittites are mentioned in most of these references, Biblical scholars before the age of archaeology traditionally regarded them as a small tribe, living in the hills of Canaan during the era of the Patriarchs. This picture was completely changed by the archaeological finds, that placed the center of the Hatti/Hattusas civilization far to the north, in modern-day Turkey.

Because of this perceived discrepancy and other reasons, many Biblical scholars reject Sayce's identification of the two people, and believe that the similarity in names is only a coincidence. In order to stress this distinction, E. A. Speiser called the Biblical Hittites Hethites in his translation of the Book of Genesis for the Anchor Bible Series.

Other views

Some people have conjectured that the Biblical Hittites could actually be Hurrian tribes living in Palestine, and that the Hebrew word for the Hurrians (HRY in consonant-only script) became the name of the Hittites (HTY) due to a scribal error. Others have proposed that the Biblical Hittites were a group of Kurushtameans. These hypotheses are not widely accepted, however.

On the other hand, the view that the Biblical Hittites are related to the Anatolian Hittites remains popular. Apart from the coincidence in names, the latter were a powerful political entity in the region before the collapse of their empire in the 14th-12th centuries B.C.E., so one would expect them to be mentioned in the Bible, just in the way that the HTY post-Exodus are. Moreover, in the account of the conquest of Canaan, the Hittites are said to dwell "in the mountains" and "towards the north" of Canaan — a description that matches the general direction and geography of the Anatolian Hittite empire, if not the distance. Modern linguistic academics therefore propose, based on much onomastic and archaeological evidence, that Anatolian populations moved south into Canaan as part of the waves of Sea Peoples who were migrating along the Mediterranean coastline at the time in question. Many kings of local city-states are shown to have had Hittite and Luwian names in the Late Bronze - Early Iron transition period. Indeed, even the name of Mount Zion may even be Hittite in origin.

See also

  • Hittite military oath
  • Kings of the Hittites
  • Hittite pantheon

Literature

  • Trevor Bryce, "Life and Society in the Hittite World," Oxford (2002).
  • Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, Oxford (1999).
  • C. W. Ceram, The Secret of the Hittites: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire. Phoenix Press (2001), ISBN 1842122959.
  • Hans Gustav Güterbock, Hittite Historiography: A Survey, in H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld eds. History, Historiography and Interpretation: Studies in Biblical and Cuneiform Literatures, Magnes Press, Hebrew University (1983) pp. 21-35.
  • J. G. Macqueen, The Hittites, and Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor, revised and enlarged, Thames and Hudson (1975, 1986). (Series: Ancient Peoples and Places, Ed. G. Daniel.)
  • George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition, The Johns Hopkins University Press (1973), ISBN 0-8018-1654-8.
  • Erich Neu, Der Anitta Text, (StBoT 18), Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden (1974).
  • Louis L. Orlin, Assyrian Colonies in Cappadocia, Mouton, The Hague (1970).
  • The Hittites and Hurrians in D. J. Wiseman Peoples of the Old Testament Times, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1973).

External links

bg:Хети bs:Hetiti ca:Hitita da:Hittitterne de:Hethiter es:Hititas fr:Hittites it:Ittiti he:חתים (עם) nl:Hettieten ja:ヒッタイト pl:Hetyci pt:Hititas sk:Chetiti sl:Hetiti sv:Hettiter tr:Hititler zh:赫梯王国

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