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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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 <i>and</i> 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.
> 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.<p>Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities.
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.
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.<p>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.
That would be Amarna Letters 41-44.<p>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.
> 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.<p>I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.
Looking forward to seeing this expanding our understanding of the Hittite lexicon and its relationship with the rest of the Indo-European languages.
It looks like this is fairly late in Hittite's evolution, though, 14th century BCE.<p>Clarity about relationship with the rest of PIE would definitely be enhanced by having a corpus from substantially earlier on.
This article rephrases and shortens the original article: <a href="https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-184-tablets-unearthed-in-central-turkiye/news" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-1...</a>
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?
I always found the Jaynes' Bicameral Mind theory interesting, hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them. It's probably not true, but it's kind of like an era that can only exist through mythology and legend. So when actual details are discovered, and a little bit of the darkness is lifted, I always find it interesting
« hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them »<p>The Mesoamerican advanced Stone Age peoples who had an ongoing encounter with the Spaniards certainly did have conscious thought, despite their gods. Why would Bronze Age peoples have been different in that respect?
I always found it completely implausible, even outright ridiculous.
Ong casts Jaynes as misunderstanding the oral-literate divide, which seems to me to be far more compelling.
It certainly downplays the achievements of those olden daysers
Thank you, yeah, it is very much a fascinating time.
I love that the comments on TFA include Unicode cuneiform, not images
This is really interesting because there's an active debate around who Tudhaliya II actually is and how the records overlap with Tudhaliya I. hopefully this will shed more light on early early new Hittite kingdom chronology.
"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. "<p>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.
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.
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 <i>days</i> to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay.
What artifacts are we leaving which will allow people in 3400 years to get a glimpse of daily events in our lives?<p>Digital information and toner/ink on paper will not last nearly that long.<p>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?
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.
That’s not really an “odd” situation, though. That’s kind of just how it goes. The culturally important texts like the Bible get copied and spread, but who cares about the government’s documentation? Literally no one, unfortunately. Preservation within the historical record is in large part a mix of media used and popularity; a popular text can afford to be written on less durable materials, but using those less durable materials for unpopular documents? And they’ll be lost over time.
It is odd here because the surviving records are so much better when you go even a little bit further in the past. Compare Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah a century or so earlier. We have Judah's side of things recorded in Isaiah, II Kings, and Chronicles. We have Sennacherib's side of things recorded in his royal annals. When Nebuchadnezzar II actually succeeded in conquering Jerusalem a century later, we just have the Bible.
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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage</a>
They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models.
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).<p>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.
<a href="https://blog.archive.org/2025/10/29/a-peek-inside-the-physical-archive-where-the-past-finds-a-future/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2025/10/29/a-peek-inside-the-physic...</a>
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> One text tells of a fever epidemic that struck the infant daughter of the king. She was still a nursing baby when she became ill. She never recovered from the fever and her health declined precipitously until she passed away.<p>Wow, the infant daughter was nursing a baby? Were the Hittites like aphids which can be pregnant while still in the womb?<p>As much as I hate AI slop, sometimes I think people are better off leaving writing to robots.
The text says "a nursing baby," meaning the infant was being nursed, not that she was nursing a baby.
Seems like a fault of your English language parsing ability. Though deliberately misinterpreting grammar as you've done is a common type of joke that I appreciate.