The Hittites were one of the largest empires in the ancient world, but up until the last two centuries, the only proper documentation of them was in the Bible, which is why many historians suspected that they were a fictional civilization.
In 1834, French archaelogist Texier found the ruins of their capital Hattusa in modern day Turkey. But he assumed it was Pteria, a city mentioned in ancient Greek documents.
It took another ~ 70 years for German archaelogist Winckler to realize that this was the Hittite capital, based on clay tablets.
The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.
> All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries
I don't see how this would invalidate the legitimacy of the documentation. The Hittites were large enough to be visible to contemporary historians and scriptures were used for information preserval. Even if our knowledge was only preserved through written documents, we'd have a good grasp of history 300 years ago, especially of major societies. People weren't primitive back then, they even had state archives with historical records which the Bible mentions in a few places for further reading.
We're talking about a Levantine Iron Age text discussing Bronze Age peoples where civilization collapsed in the interim. In the case of Ḫattuša, the state archives were almost certainly unreadable by the time the Biblical texts were written, evidenced by the lack of any Hittite cuneiform texts being produced or copied in the Iron Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia maintained texts and the ability to read those texts across the collapse. The same cannot be said about Syria-Anatolia and the Levant.
That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.
This is not correct because we don't know what the Hittites called themselves. This civilization, when it was found, was named after the Biblical tribe. There is no relation established between the two.
We have some copies of royal correspondence found in Egypt, written on cuneiform tablets. They used them for messages to foreign kings because they're compact and durable. A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.
Anyway I think some of these documents are of communications with Hittite kings, so it would be great to get some instances of the "other side" of some of these letters.
> A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.
I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.
A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.
The History Blog is a small gem because it is serious and not sensational. Always with a good level of detail for the average interested visitor, and from the original (or close by) sources. Plus pictures.
> This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life 3,400 years ago.
Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities.
My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.
This is such incredible news! I was just wondering the other day if we are ever going to find more Bronze age writings. Such an endlessly fascinating time period
"Another notable document is a letter from Hittite generals in western Anatolia appealing to the king for reinforcements in men, horses and chariots to fend off enemy forces. "
I had assumed they had to wait for clay to dry before it could be carried anywhere, which seems incompatible with using them for urgent military messages. I wonder if there was a way to transport them while soft, or if this was just the archival copy of a message sent by other means.
It's not like they had to wait for the clay to dry, and then sent the message via email over fiber optic cable. It would take days to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay.
Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.
Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia.
The data is preserved in plastic, which is (so far) a less-digestible hydrocarbon than wood (paper) and skin (vellum).
So, intermediary at best. My understanding is that R/W CDs are far less durable than earlier write-once CDs, but probably far less common for mass storage.
I wonder if Claude will descend into hell to rescue the poor souls of those who died before it's coming, patiently awaiting digitization in the bosom of Turing.
We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.
Instead of parsing "mountain Turkish" as "mountain+turkish", parse it as " mountain turk+ish". The use of the term "Mountain Turk" arose in the Atatürk era as a quick way to nip any discussions of those ethnic minorities in the bud. That is all the term serves for. It doesn't mean that Turks believe Kurds actually speak a language genetically related to their own.
The current consensus is not that Hittite is Indo-European, it's that Anatolian languages (including Hittite) are related to Indo-European, both stemming from proto-Indo-Anatolian.
I don't think that's the consensus. Even if it were the consensus, the I doubt the people making the argument would disagree that the Anatolian languages are closely related to the Indo-European languages. The grammar is classic Indo-European, with 7-9 cases depending on the period. The vocabulary has a lot of cognates with Indo-European languages. The only things that really distinguish Hittite from Indo-European languages are the system of enclitics and grammatical gender based on animacy rather than the usual masculine/feminine/neuter.
I actually work in this field, so I can encourage you to do some further reading and get to grips with the terminology. "Indo-European" remains among experts the most popular way to refer to the entire language family, Anatolian and non-Anatolian. Terms like "Nuclear IE" and "Core IE" are often employed to distinguish the non-Anatolian languages.
"Indo-Anatolian" for the higher-level family is a term that some may use here and there, but no expert would ever make a "well, acktually..." remark as you just did to those in a discussion, professional or layman, using "Indo-European"
The Hittites were one of the largest empires in the ancient world, but up until the last two centuries, the only proper documentation of them was in the Bible, which is why many historians suspected that they were a fictional civilization.
In 1834, French archaelogist Texier found the ruins of their capital Hattusa in modern day Turkey. But he assumed it was Pteria, a city mentioned in ancient Greek documents.
It took another ~ 70 years for German archaelogist Winckler to realize that this was the Hittite capital, based on clay tablets.
The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.
> All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries
I don't see how this would invalidate the legitimacy of the documentation. The Hittites were large enough to be visible to contemporary historians and scriptures were used for information preserval. Even if our knowledge was only preserved through written documents, we'd have a good grasp of history 300 years ago, especially of major societies. People weren't primitive back then, they even had state archives with historical records which the Bible mentions in a few places for further reading.
We're talking about a Levantine Iron Age text discussing Bronze Age peoples where civilization collapsed in the interim. In the case of Ḫattuša, the state archives were almost certainly unreadable by the time the Biblical texts were written, evidenced by the lack of any Hittite cuneiform texts being produced or copied in the Iron Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia maintained texts and the ability to read those texts across the collapse. The same cannot be said about Syria-Anatolia and the Levant.
That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.
This is not correct because we don't know what the Hittites called themselves. This civilization, when it was found, was named after the Biblical tribe. There is no relation established between the two.
We have some copies of royal correspondence found in Egypt, written on cuneiform tablets. They used them for messages to foreign kings because they're compact and durable. A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.
Anyway I think some of these documents are of communications with Hittite kings, so it would be great to get some instances of the "other side" of some of these letters.
> A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.
I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.
That would be Amarna Letters 41-44.
A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.
Looking forward to seeing this expanding our understanding of the Hittite lexicon and its relationship with the rest of the Indo-European languages.
The History Blog is a small gem because it is serious and not sensational. Always with a good level of detail for the average interested visitor, and from the original (or close by) sources. Plus pictures.
And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect
What's wrong with WordPress?
How much time you got?
RSS is RSS. Does it matter to a client how it’s generated?
> And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect
As well as Atom, though there's no <link> for it in the HTML:
* https://www.thehistoryblog.com/feed/atom
* https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww...
> This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life 3,400 years ago.
Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities.
My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.
In the case of the Assyrian rulers, really terrible people.
My favorite piece of this will always be the Pompeii bathroom graffiti, with all the usual suspects. Guys really are dudes and it’s a beautiful thing.
This article rephrases and shortens the original article: https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-1...
This is such incredible news! I was just wondering the other day if we are ever going to find more Bronze age writings. Such an endlessly fascinating time period
What about it?
"Another notable document is a letter from Hittite generals in western Anatolia appealing to the king for reinforcements in men, horses and chariots to fend off enemy forces. "
I had assumed they had to wait for clay to dry before it could be carried anywhere, which seems incompatible with using them for urgent military messages. I wonder if there was a way to transport them while soft, or if this was just the archival copy of a message sent by other means.
It's not like they had to wait for the clay to dry, and then sent the message via email over fiber optic cable. It would take days to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay.
Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.
What artifacts are we leaving which will allow people in 3400 years to get a glimpse of daily events in our lives?
Digital information and toner/ink on paper will not last nearly that long.
Maybe humans of this age should be curating some etching on stone or even more durable materials, to record some of our history for posterity?
Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
https://blog.archive.org/2025/10/29/a-peek-inside-the-physic...
We have those CDs made of stone we could use! That's sorta a stone .. thing.
The data is preserved in plastic, which is (so far) a less-digestible hydrocarbon than wood (paper) and skin (vellum).
So, intermediary at best. My understanding is that R/W CDs are far less durable than earlier write-once CDs, but probably far less common for mass storage.
https://blog.hagerman.com/written-in-stone-m-disc-technology...
They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models.
I wonder if Claude will descend into hell to rescue the poor souls of those who died before it's coming, patiently awaiting digitization in the bosom of Turing.
i have a mouth and am screaming
We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.
inb4 Turkish ultra-nationalists claiming their language is just a dialect of Turkish
isn't everything?
The languages aren't even related. Hittite is an Indo-European language, closer related to English than Turkish
Kurdish is also Indo-European, but that doesn't stop Turks claiming it's just a dialect of Turkish (mountain Turkish).
Apart from a few idiots nobody claims it is Turkish dialect.
There are some shared vocabulary, but thats pretty much it. Kurdish is much closer to Farsi.
Instead of parsing "mountain Turkish" as "mountain+turkish", parse it as " mountain turk+ish". The use of the term "Mountain Turk" arose in the Atatürk era as a quick way to nip any discussions of those ethnic minorities in the bud. That is all the term serves for. It doesn't mean that Turks believe Kurds actually speak a language genetically related to their own.
The current consensus is not that Hittite is Indo-European, it's that Anatolian languages (including Hittite) are related to Indo-European, both stemming from proto-Indo-Anatolian.
That's not the consensus and even if it were it's largely a pointless semantic argument.
I don't think that's the consensus. Even if it were the consensus, the I doubt the people making the argument would disagree that the Anatolian languages are closely related to the Indo-European languages. The grammar is classic Indo-European, with 7-9 cases depending on the period. The vocabulary has a lot of cognates with Indo-European languages. The only things that really distinguish Hittite from Indo-European languages are the system of enclitics and grammatical gender based on animacy rather than the usual masculine/feminine/neuter.
I actually work in this field, so I can encourage you to do some further reading and get to grips with the terminology. "Indo-European" remains among experts the most popular way to refer to the entire language family, Anatolian and non-Anatolian. Terms like "Nuclear IE" and "Core IE" are often employed to distinguish the non-Anatolian languages.
"Indo-Anatolian" for the higher-level family is a term that some may use here and there, but no expert would ever make a "well, acktually..." remark as you just did to those in a discussion, professional or layman, using "Indo-European"
In 1930s.
This is not reddit
Evergreen comment around here