Hittites

The Hittites were a Bronze Age Anatolian people who established an empire with Hattusa as its capital from 1600 BCE to around 1180 BCE, reaching its apex during the mid-14th century BCE. It collapsed at about the same time as several other civilizations in the "Late Bronze Age Collapse" for reasons historians still debate.

Neo-Hittite states who based their political legitimacy on supposed descent from the Hittite Empire existed in the Levant for centuries afterwards. It was those "Hittites" that are described in the Bible as they came into contact with the Israelites and the name "Hittite", used in modern parlance when referring to them, stems from those post-Hittite polities.

Understand
The earliest Anatolians known to form an organized state, the Hittites seemingly appeared out of thin air in the high plateau of northern Central Anatolia, although they identified much with their predecessors, the Hattis, who were of equally obscure origins. At their peak, the Hittites were a great power, with their area of control stretching well into modern-day Syria and Lebanon. The Hittites were comparable in might to their Ancient Egyptian and Assyrian neighbors, with whom they were always in an uneasy relationship and sometimes at war.

An attempted Egyptian invasion in 1274 BC was stopped by the Hittites at the city of Kadesh, on the Orontes River in what is now Syria. In the aftermath, the opposing sides celebrated the Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty, the first of its kind in recorded history, and the only ancient Near Eastern treaty for which both sides' versions have survived. The original tablets are in Istanbul's Archaeological Museum, while a replica is displayed in the United Nation headquarters in New York. It was ratified in the 21st year of pharaoh Ramses II's reign (1258 BCE) and continued in force until the Hittite Empire collapsed, 80 years later.

The Luwians were an associated, linguistically-related people mainly living in the west, south-central, and south of Anatolia. During both the empire and Neo-Hittite periods, they were so intertwined with the Hittites that the Assyrians called all Anatolians, without distinction, nuwaʿum after them.

Destinations
On the map, historic sites are in green while museums housing Hittite artifacts are in blue.

The Hittite Empire extended into the Levant and Mesopotamia at times, but its core was in Anatolia, what is now Turkey.

In Turkey
The most important Anatolian sites can be grouped into four main areas: There is also a scattering of associated sites in Western Anatolia.
 * the ancient Hittite heartland in what is now Çorum Province in Northern Anatolia
 * the southern reaches of Central Anatolia on the foothills of the Taurus Mountains
 * Southern Turkey east of Adana
 * the eastern outposts of the empire around Malatya

Northern Anatolia
A couple of hundred kilometres northeast of Ankara, this is where the Hittites first established their kingdom and the countryside is littered with a large number of sites.



Along the Taurus Mountains
The southern extension of Central Anatolia is home to a number of striking and solitary sites literally lost in the hilly landscape.



Southern Turkey
After the old kingdom centred around Hattuşa fell in the 12th century BC as part of the Late Bronze Age collapse that took place around the larger Eastern Mediterranean (due to numerous reasons, including loss of traditional trade partners, invasions from unfriendly neighbours, spread of ironworking technology and its advantages in weapon production over bronze and some even theorize environmental changes due to the eruption of some far away volcano), a number of successor states, collectively known as "Neo-Hittite" or "Syro-Hittite", emerged in what is now southern Turkey and northern Syria. Some major Neo-Hittite sites dot the countryside east of Adana.



Western Anatolia
Arzawa was a rival federation based in the valley of the Kaystros River (the modern Küçükmenderes). It became associated with or was conquered by the Hittites in the 15th century BCE. Since their territory — exceptionally fertile with a mild climate — has been home to several civilizations afterwards, not much remained from them: e.g. their capital Apasa was later completely re-built as Greco-Roman Ephesus.



The region of Lycia on the Mediterranean coast was a center of the Lycians or Neo-Hittites. Today it is one of Turkey's main tourist areas and there are some Neo-Hittite monuments and tombs still to be seen.

Do

 * The Hittite Trail (the official website is in Turkish only; the English webpage from the Culture Routes Society Turkey) is a collection of signposted hiking and cycling routes in the Hittite heartland, taking advantage of the ancient trails wherever possible while connecting the associated sites to each other. The cumulative length of the routes totals up to.

Talk
"𒉡 𒃻𒀭 𒂊𒄑𒍝𒀜𒋼𒉌 𒉿𒀀𒋻𒈠 𒂊𒆪𒌓𒋼𒉌 nu ninda-an eezzaatteni waatar-ma ekuutteni "Now bread you shall eat, and water you shall drink.""

- The earliest deciphered sentence in Hittite, from the Hittite legal code

The Hittite language was an ancient Indo-European language and therefore related to English. Indeed, even in a single sentence like the above, it is possible to find several cognates with English and other modern Indo-European languages: nu is "now", ezza is "eat" (cf German essen), and waatar is, guess what, "water". Ekuu is "drink"; the meaning of its cognates shifted to "water" in some of the related languages like Latin, aqua. These four words (and of course earlier knowledge of cuneiform the Hittites adapted from Mesopotamia) greatly helped Czech linguist Bedřich Hrozný in correctly identifying the language as Indo-European, and faciliated the eventual decipherment of the ancient language.

Hittite is the oldest attested language in the family but unlike Latin, Greek or Sanskrit, it has no modern-day descendants. Indeed the Anatolian branch of Indo-European has been extinct for 1,500 years.