The Hittites

The Hittites built an Indo-European Bronze Age kingdom centered on Hattusa, in the bend of the Kizilirmak River in central Anatolia. Emerging from earlier polities at Kanesh and Kussara, Hattusili I founded the Hittite Old Kingdom around 1650 BCE; under Suppiluliuma I in the mid-fourteenth century BCE the kingdom came to encompass most of Anatolia and parts of northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, rivaling Egypt and Assyria as one of the dominant powers of the ancient Near East. The Hittites are known for a sophisticated legal code, extensive diplomatic archives including a peace treaty with Egypt, and early mastery of chariot warfare. Hattusa was destroyed around 1180 BCE amid the wider collapse of Bronze Age Near Eastern states, under pressure from new invaders including the Kaskians and Phrygians, alongside Assyrian expansion and disrupted trade routes. The Hittite economy rested on control of Anatolia's trade routes and metal sources, with gold, copper, silver and bronze serving as measures of value in a barter system; the once-common claim that the Hittites held an early monopoly on ironworking has been increasingly contested in twenty-first century scholarship, since most surviving Bronze Age Anatolian iron objects were worked from meteoric iron rather than smelted ore. Royal scribes recorded state business in Hittite cuneiform, a script adapted from Mesopotamian cuneiform, with diplomatic correspondence typically composed in Akkadian, the era's international language, alongside archives in Hittite itself and the related Luwian, Hattic and Hurrian languages; Hittite is the oldest historically attested Indo-European language. Hattusa was rediscovered for modern scholarship when the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler began excavating the site, known then as Boghazkoy, in 1906, uncovering a royal archive of ten thousand cuneiform tablets that confirmed the location as the Hittite capital.