18 Facts About Hittites

Hittites were an Anatolian people who played an important role in establishing first a kingdom in Kussara (before 1750 BC), then the Kanesh or Nesha kingdom (c.

The Hittites called their country the Kingdom of Hattusa, a name received from the Hattians, an earlier people who had inhabited and ruled the central Anatolian region until the beginning of the second millennium BC and who spoke an unrelated language known as Hattic.

The modern conventional name "Hittites" is due to the initial identification of the people of Hattusa with the Biblical Hittites by 19th-century archaeologists.

Hittites'story of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt and the Middle East, the decipherment of which was a key event in the history of Indo-European studies.

The Hittites attracted the attention of Turkish archaeologists such as Halet Cambel and Tahsin Ozguc.

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Sayce and other scholars noted that Judah and the Hittites were never enemies in the Hebrew texts; in the Book of Kings, they supplied the Israelites with cedar, chariots, and horses, and in the Book of Genesis were friends and allies to Abraham.

Hittites proved that the ruins at Bogazkoy were the remains of the capital of an empire that, at one point, controlled northern Syria.

Nevertheless, the Hittites continued to refer to the language that originated in these areas as Luwian.

Ancestors of the Hittites came into Anatolia between 4400 and 4100 BC, when Anatolian language family split from-Indo-European.

Hittites destroyed the lands one after the other, took away their power, and made them the borders of the sea.

Hittites entered a weak phase of obscure records, insignificant rulers, and reduced domains.

Part of the reason for both the weakness and the obscurity is that the Hittites were under constant attack, mainly from the Kaska, a non-Indo-European people settled along the shores of the Black Sea.

One innovation that can be credited to these early Hittite rulers is the practice of conducting treaties and alliances with neighboring states; the Hittites were thus among the earliest known pioneers in the art of international politics and diplomacy.

The Egyptians forced the Hittites to take refuge in the fortress of Kadesh, but their own losses prevented them from sustaining a siege.

The Hittites had vainly tried to preserve the Mitanni kingdom with military support.

Hittites was chief among the gods and his symbol is the bull.

Hittites was the god of battle and victory, especially when the conflict involved a foreign power.

In either case, the law codes of the Hittites provide very specific fines or punishments that are to be issued for specific crimes and have many similarities to Biblical laws found in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.