The Hittites, 1750–1200 B.C.E.

By around 1750 B.C.E., the Hittites had made themselves the most powerful people of central Anatolia. They had migrated from the Caucasus area, between the Black and Caspian Seas, and defeated indigenous Anatolian peoples to found their centralized kingdom. It flourished because they inhabited a fertile upland plateau in the peninsula’s center, excelled in war and diplomacy, and controlled trade in their region and southward. The Hittites’ military campaigns eventually threatened Egypt’s possessions on the eastern Mediterranean coast, bringing them into conflict with the pharaohs of the New Kingdom.

Since the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, they belonged to the linguistic family that over time populated most of Europe. The original Indo-European speakers, who were pastoralists and raiders, had migrated as separate groups into Anatolia and Europe, including Greece, most likely from western Asia. Archaeological discoveries in that region have revealed graves of women buried with weapons. These burials suggest that women in these groups originally occupied positions of leadership in war and peace alongside men; the prominence of Hittite queens in documents, royal letters, and foreign treaties perhaps sprang from that tradition.

As in other early civilizations, rule in the Hittite kingdom depended on religion for its legitimacy. Hittite religion combined worship of Indo-European gods with worship of deities inherited from the original Anatolian population. The king served as high priest of the storm god, and Hittite belief demanded that he maintain a strict purity in his life as a demonstration of his justice and guardianship of social order. His drinking water, for example, always had to be strained. The king’s water carrier was executed if so much as one hair was found in the water. Like Egyptian kings, Hittite rulers felt responsible for maintaining the gods’ goodwill toward their subjects. King Mursili II (r. 1321–1295 B.C.E.), for example, issued a set of prayers begging the gods to end a plague: “What is this, o gods, that you have done? Our land is dying. . . . We have lost our wits, and we can do nothing right. O gods, whatever sin you behold, either let a prophet come forth to identify it . . . or let us see it in a dream!”

The kings conducted many religious ceremonies in their capital, Hattusas. Ringed by massive defensive walls and stone towers, it featured huge palaces aligned along straight, gravel-paved streets. Sculptures of animals, warriors, and, especially, the royal rulers decorated public spaces. Hittite kings maintained their rule by forging personal alliances—cemented by marriages and oaths of loyalty—with the noble families of the kingdom.

These rulers aggressively employed their troops to expand their power. In periods when ties between kings and nobles remained strong and the kingdom therefore preserved its unity, they launched far-reaching military campaigns. In 1595 B.C.E., for example, the royal army raided as far southeast as Babylon in Mesopotamia, destroying that kingdom. Although Hittite craftsmen did smelt iron, from which they made ceremonial implements, scholars no longer accept the idea that the kingdom owed its success in war to a special knowledge of making weapons from iron. Weapons made from iron did not become common in the Mediterranean world until well after 1200 B.C.E.—at the end of the Hittite kingdom. The Hittite army excelled in the use of chariots, a tactic that gave it an edge on the battlefield.

The economic strength of the Hittite kingdom came from control over long-distance trade routes for raw materials, especially metals. The Hittites dominated the lucrative trade moving between the Mediterranean coast and inland northern Syria, despite the New Kingdom pharaohs’ resistance against Hittite expansion to the south toward the Mediterranean coast and the benefits that access to the sea brought. In the bloody battle of Kadesh, around 1274 B.C.E., the Hittites fought the Egyptians to a standstill in Syria, leading to a political stalemate in the eastern Mediterranean. Fear of neighboring Assyria eventually led the Hittite king to negotiate with his Egyptian rival, and the two war-weary kingdoms became allies sixteen years after the battle of Kadesh by agreeing to a treaty that is a landmark in the history of international diplomacy. In it, the two monarchs pledged to be “at peace and brothers forever.” The alliance lasted, and thirteen years later the Hittite king gave his daughter in marriage to his Egyptian “brother.”