Hittite Kingdom

The Hittite kingdom was formed around 1750 BC when a ruler called Anitta, and then more securely Hattusili I, welded the towns of central Anatolia into a single state with its capital at Hattusa, a defensible site ringed by gorges. Its people spoke an Indo-European language - the earliest one attested in writing anywhere - and wrote it in Mesopotamian cuneiform on clay, which is why an archive of some thirty thousand tablets survived the burning of the capital and was read again in 1915. The Hittites were the third great power of the late Bronze Age, alongside Egypt and Assyria. Mursili I sacked Babylon around 1595 BC and ended the dynasty of Hammurabi. Suppiluliuma I built an empire across Syria in the fourteenth century. The collision with Egypt came at Kadesh around 1274 BC, where Ramesses II and Muwatalli II fought the largest chariot battle recorded and both claimed victory; the treaty that followed, sworn some fifteen years later, survives in both Egyptian and Hittite versions and is the oldest surviving international agreement between equals. Hittite law was notably less brutal than its neighbours', preferring compensation to mutilation, and the state was a federation of vassal kingdoms bound by treaty rather than a centralised empire. It disappeared abruptly around 1180 BC in the general Bronze Age collapse - Hattusa was abandoned and burned, the archives left where they lay - and only small Neo-Hittite successor states in Syria survived, to be absorbed by Assyria. Their iron working was once thought to be a state monopoly that explained their power, an idea now largely abandoned. The decipherment of Hittite in 1915 by Bedrich Hrozny added an entire branch to the Indo-European family. Hattusa is now a World Heritage site in central Turkey.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history