Нittite empire

About 2000 ВС a people called Hatti occupied most of Anatolia. Then a new people came on the scene; they may have been invaders or people who had always been present but now emerged from the Stone Age to create Anatolia's first major civilization. These people were the Hittites. They spoke an Indo-European language, showing that they were not related to any other western Asian population.

The Hittite language was written down using a hieroglyphic script to represent ideas or less frequently the syllables found in its pronunciation. These hieroglyphs show pictures of objects in the Hittite vocabulary or stand for ideas. Some 25,000 Hittite tablets exist, dating from the seventeenth century ВС. They are the oldest writing in any Indo-European language.

The first use of the name Hittite comes from the records kept by merchants who speak of their presence in western Anatolia. They lived in the region of the Halys River (now the Red River), which makes a great arc on the Anatolian plateau and then empties into the Black Sea.

The Hittites capital was at Hattushash, near modern Boghazkoy in Turkey. It was centrally located and easily defended. Within their empire, the Hittites themselves were but a ruling elite, for the population of the area remained extremely diverse.

The ruler's title was Great King. The mythology of the state held that Labarnas, the first ruler, was reincarnated in each of his successors. During the period of the Hittite Empire, the king's title changed to My Sun, and the sun became the symbol of royal authority. After the king died, he became a god.

The period of Hittite history from 1460 to 1190 ВС is known as a period of the empire, a time when the Hittites were the most aggressive people of western Asia. Their great advantage now came from their knowledge of the process needed to smelt iron ore. Using iron weapons against bronze-armed enemies was hardly a contest. Their second advantage came from their mastery of the horse-drawn chariots. This kind of warfare was not known before the Hittites introduced it. A combination of iron weapons, iron-tipped spears, and arrows that archers and bowmen shot from the chariots made them invincible for several centuries.

The Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II, decided to challenge the Hittites. In 1299 ВС a great battle took place at Kadesh. Hittite and Egyptian forces fought each other with charge after charge, but the battle proved indecisive. Several years later Ramses offered to make peace, and the dispatch of a Hittite royal princess to Egypt sealed the agreement.

The Hittites were anxious to keep the secret of iron-making to themselves for it gave them a great advantage over all other peoples of western Asia. However, this proved impossible, and soon the secret got out. This discovery of how to make iron is the most important contribution of the Hittites to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, its more lethal weaponry also had the effect of making empire-building more attractive.