The Hittites were a Bronze Age Anatolia 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.
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 Egypt and Assyrian neighbors, with whom they were often in an uneasy relationship. 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.
Historic sites are in green while museums housing Hittite artifacts are in blue.
The most important Hittite sites of Anatolia can be geographically grouped into four areas: 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, and the eastern outposts of the empire around Malatya. There is also a scattering of associated sites in Western Anatolia.
A couple 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.
Çorum Museum, 40.5419°, 34.9510°. The museum of the region's modern capital hosts some artefacts excavated from the surrounding countryside. 2017-01-27
Boğazkale, 40.0216°, 34.6088°. South of Çorum, Boğazkale is a modern village just next to the ruins of the Hittite capital of Hattuşa 📍, making it one of the few Hittite sites relatively easy to access by public transport. While the ruins themselves are little more than foundation stones, it is easy to visualize how large a city this must have been in its heyday, and partially reconstructed city walls certainly help with this. Farther from the village, although still within walking distance if you are in reasonable shape, is the sanctuary of Yazılıkaya 📍, an impressive set of rock reliefs depicting the numerous Hittite gods. Both sites together constitute a UNESCO World Heritage site. 2020-09-12
Alacahöyük. Much of the rich Hittite collection of Ankara's Museum of Anatolian Civilizations was excavated here. The Hittite name of the place is yet to be identified, although the extensive ruins indicate that it was already a substantial community before the Hittite take-over. In the outskirts, the Gölpınar Dam dates back to 1240 BCE, built after a drought hit the Anatolian highlands, so that the Hittites would never put themselves to shame again by having to import wheat from their rivals, the Egyptians, to avoid famine. 2020-09-28
The southern extension of Central Anatolia is home to a number of striking and solitary sites literally lost in the hilly landscape.
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.
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 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.