History of the Ancient Near East · Part 9 · The age of the great kings · B2
The Hittites: An Empire Rediscovered
Part 9 of History of the Ancient Near East: for three thousand years, the Hittites were only a name in old books. Then, in the 20th century, their capital, their archives and their language came back to life, and with them one of the great powers of the ancient world, the rival of Egypt. Turn out, it was not until … that, and the language of treaties (agree to, neither … nor), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, an empire that the world forgot completely. Its kings wrote to pharaohs as equals, and then, for three thousand years, nobody remembered their names.
I know the name only from a few lines in our scriptures, where the Hittites seem to be a small people of Canaan. It seems my scrolls are not the best guide here.
Things to come: scholars will think the same for a long time. It will turn out that the Hittites were one of the great powers of the world, and that the Hebrew scriptures remember only a faint echo of them.
The Hittites ruled central Anatolia, in modern Turkey, from their capital Hattusa. In the 14th and 13th centuries BCE, their empire reached into Syria, and they were one of the “great kings” of the age, with Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Mitanni. They called their land “the land of a thousand gods”, because they adopted the gods of every people they ruled.
Around 1180 BCE, in the Bronze Age collapse, Hattusa was abandoned, and the empire disappeared. Smaller kingdoms in Syria, such as Carchemish, kept some Hittite traditions until the Assyrians conquered them in the 8th century BCE. After that, the Hittites survived only as a name in the Hebrew scriptures, and nobody knew who they had been.
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