The Hittites
Rediscovering a Lost Empire
For most of the 19th century, the Hittites were known only from brief references in the Hebrew Bible and a handful of Egyptian inscriptions that mentioned an obscure Anatolian power called 'Kheta'. Then in the 1870s and 1880s, archaeologists and epigraphers began encountering unusual hieroglyphic inscriptions on stone monuments in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria — inscriptions in a script and language neither Egyptian nor any known Semitic tongue. In 1887, the Amarna Letters, a cache of diplomatic correspondence found at the Egyptian New Kingdom capital of Akhetaten, included correspondence from a king identified as the ruler of Hatti, apparently an equal of the Pharaoh. And in 1906, German excavations at Bogazkoy in central Turkey began uncovering thousands of cuneiform tablets that proved to be an extensive state archive.
The decipherment of these tablets by the Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny in 1915 revealed that the language was Indo-European, distantly related to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and the modern European languages. The Hittites were not a Semitic people but speakers of one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages — a discovery that fundamentally reshaped understanding of both ancient Near Eastern history and the spread of Indo-European languages. The decipherment also revealed an empire of the first rank, one that had fought Egypt to a standstill and administered a complex multi-ethnic state from a capital in the Anatolian plateau.
The Rise of the Hittite State
The Hittites entered the historical record in the early second millennium BC. The Old Hittite Kingdom, founded in central Anatolia around the 17th century BC, expanded aggressively: Hattushili I raided into northern Syria, and his successor Mursili I conducted a remarkable long-distance raid that sacked Babylon around 1595 BC, ending the First Dynasty of Babylon. This was followed by a period of internal instability — assassinations, succession disputes, factional conflict — documented in one of the earliest surviving legal texts, the Edict of Telipinu (around 1500 BC), which attempted to regularise succession to prevent the cycle of palace murders.
The Hittite Empire reached its height under the New Kingdom rulers of the 14th and 13th centuries BC, particularly Suppiluliuma I, Muwatalli II and Hattushili III. Under Suppiluliuma (reigned roughly 1380–1344 BC), the Hittites dismantled the Mitanni Empire of northern Syria and Mesopotamia, establishing Hittite hegemony over much of the Levant. This expansion brought them into direct conflict with Egypt, then under the 18th Dynasty, for control of the lucrative Syrian city-states and trade routes.
The Battle of Kadesh
The clash between Hittite and Egyptian power culminated at Kadesh (modern Tell Nebi Mend on the Orontes River in Syria) around 1274 BC. The battle between Ramesses II of Egypt and Muwatalli II of Hatti was the largest chariot engagement in ancient history, involving perhaps 5,000 chariots and several tens of thousands of infantry on both sides. The outcome was militarily inconclusive: Ramesses narrowly avoided encirclement by Hittite forces and claimed a famous personal victory in his monumental inscriptions; the Hittites retained effective control of the disputed territories in Syria.
What followed Kadesh was arguably more significant than the battle itself. Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattushili III concluded what is sometimes described as the world's oldest surviving international peace treaty. Copies were inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs on the walls of the temples at Karnak and Ramesseum; the Hittite version in Akkadian cuneiform was recovered from the Bogazkoy archive. The two versions agree closely. The treaty covered mutual non-aggression, extradition of refugees, alliance against third-party aggressors, and provisions for humane treatment of returned fugitives. A replica of the Hittite version, presented by Turkey to the United Nations, hangs in the UN headquarters in New York.
Hattusa: The Capital
Hattusa, the Hittite capital, occupied a naturally defensible position on a rocky spur in the Kizilirmak river basin, roughly 150 kilometres east of Ankara near the modern village of Bogazkoy (now called Bogazkale). At its peak in the 13th century BC, the city covered roughly 180 hectares and was surrounded by approximately 8 kilometres of defensive walls constructed in a distinctive technique: a stone substructure supporting mudbrick superstructure, with regular projecting rectangular towers and casemate chambers between the inner and outer walls.
The site's most photographed feature is the Lion Gate on the western approach, where two large stone lions with open mouths flank the entrance passage. Similar in concept to the Lion Gate at Mycenae (though unrelated), the lions served an apotropaic function — warding off evil from the city's entrance. The nearby Sphinx Gate on the southern side was decorated with sphinxes and reliefs; its sphinxes were removed in the early 20th century and divided between Berlin and Istanbul (one from Istanbul was returned to Turkey in 2011, the other from Berlin followed in 2012, reuniting the pair in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara).
The royal citadel, Büyükkale ('Great Castle'), sits on the highest point of the site. The administrative archive from which the cuneiform tablets were recovered was excavated here and in the nearby temple precincts. The Great Temple (Temple I) in the lower city, dedicated to the storm god Teshub and the sun goddess Arinna, the two supreme deities of the Hittite pantheon, was a large complex with storerooms, workshops and residential quarters for the priesthood surrounding the central sanctuary. The enormous stone storage jars — some large enough for an adult to stand inside — still stand in the storerooms.
At Yazilikaya, a natural rock sanctuary roughly 2 kilometres from the city, two open-air chambers are lined with carved relief processions of Hittite deities. Chamber A shows over sixty gods and goddesses converging in two columns, male from the right and female from the left, meeting at a central scene depicting the divine marriage of the storm god and sun goddess. Chamber B is smaller and more intimate, carved with a standing figure of King Tudhaliya IV and an extraordinary image of a god standing on two mountains with twelve warrior-gods running beneath. Yazilikaya was the site's great open-air shrine, probably used for major festivals including the Hittite New Year ceremony.
UNESCO inscribed Hattusa as a World Heritage Site in 1986. The site is open to visitors year-round, with the underground 'postern tunnel' beneath the city walls — a corbel-vaulted passage roughly 70 metres long — being a particular highlight accessible to visitors.
The Hittites in the Wider Bronze Age World
The Hittites were active participants in the international diplomatic system of the Late Bronze Age, which connected Egypt, Hatti, Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, Cyprus (Alashiya) and the Aegean through royal correspondence, gift exchange, dynastic marriages and commercial treaties. The Amarna Letters, along with the Hittite archives and the Ugaritic correspondence, reveal a world of remarkable diplomatic sophistication: kings addressed one another as 'brother', exchanged luxury goods and artisans, negotiated the return of runaway subjects, and complained bitterly when gifts were of insufficient quality.
The Hittites contributed several significant legal and administrative innovations. The Hittite Laws, preserved in cuneiform, are notable for their relatively light use of the death penalty compared to Mesopotamian law codes and their emphasis on compensation rather than punishment. The Hittite practice of recording treaties as binding documents with divine witnesses, invoked through elaborate curses on those who violated the terms, influenced subsequent Near Eastern and possibly biblical covenant traditions.
Collapse and Legacy
The Hittite Empire collapsed around 1190–1180 BC as part of the broader Bronze Age Collapse. Hattusa was systematically emptied and burned; the imperial administrative structure disappeared. What survived were successor states in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria — the Neo-Hittite or 'Syro-Hittite' kingdoms that preserved elements of Hittite culture, language and art into the Iron Age and whose inscriptions, in Luwian hieroglyphics, remained in use until around 700 BC.
Explore Hattusa, Yazilikaya and the other Hittite sites of Anatolia by visiting Open the map, where they are plotted alongside the other great centres of the Bronze Age Near East.