For a long time, the Hittites were a forgotten people. While the memory of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians endured in the collective imagination—passed down through generations by later civilizations—the Hittites simply vanished from historical consciousness. Only in the 19th century, with the advancement of archaeology and the growing interest of European explorers in the ancient Middle East, did this people begin to be rediscovered—and what was revealed astonished the world: the Hittites had built one of the most powerful civilizations of the Bronze Age, an empire that rivaled Egypt and shaped the fate of Anatolia and the Near East for centuries.
The Hittites were an Indo-European people who settled in north-central Anatolia at the beginning of the second millennium BCE. Possibly originating from regions beyond the Black Sea, they arrived in the area and gradually organized more complex political entities. Before reaching their imperial form, they went through different phases: the kingdom of Kussara, prior to 1750 BCE; the Kingdom of Kanesh, or Nesha, between 1750 and 1650 BCE; and finally, the great empire centered in the capital Hattusa, from approximately 1650 BCE onward. This city, located in what is now central Turkey, would become the political and administrative heart of a state that would reach continental proportions.
The peak of Hittite power occurred in the mid-14th century BCE, under the reign of Suppiluliuma I. During this period, the empire stretched across much of Anatolia and portions of northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, bordering the Hurri-Mitanni Empire and maintaining tensions with the Assyrians. Between the 15th and 13th centuries BCE, the Hittites were one of the dominant forces in the Near East, clashing directly with the New Kingdom of Egypt—a confrontation that culminated in the famous Battle of Kadesh, around 1274 BCE, and resulted in one of the oldest known peace treaties in history.
The Hittite language, called *nešili*—"the language of Nesa"—by its speakers, belonged to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family and is considered, alongside Luwian, the oldest attested Indo-European language in historical records. This alone grants the Hittites a prominent place in the study of historical linguistics. Our knowledge of this civilization comes mainly from cuneiform texts found in their territories, supplemented by diplomatic and commercial correspondence discovered in the archives of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt.
The rediscovery of the Hittites was a gradual process that accelerated in the late 19th century. In 1880, the English scholar Archibald Henry Sayce was the first to propose the existence of an ancient kingdom in Syria ruled by a people he called the "Hittites," based on biblical references—the *ḥittîm* mentioned in the Hebrew Bible—and inscriptions identified by European explorers decades earlier. The discovery of the Amarna letters in 1887 strengthened this hypothesis by revealing correspondence between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I and the Egyptian pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. Regular excavations at Boğazköy, the ancient Hattusa, began at the turn of the 20th century, and a German mission led by Hugo Winckler brought thousands of tablets to light. It fell to the Czech Assyriologist Bedřich Hrozný to decipher the Hittite language, an achievement that opened an entirely new historical universe to researchers.
For a long time, the Hittites were credited with inventing iron metallurgy, supposedly monopolizing this technology during the Bronze Age. However, more recent research has called this theory into question. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry analysis indicates that most iron objects found in Bronze Age Anatolia were actually derived from meteorites—and that the number of metal artifacts in this region was not significantly higher than in other civilizations of the same period. The spread of iron technology, it seems, occurred more gradually and widely during the subsequent Iron Age. What is known is that the Hittite armies made effective use of chariots, which contributed to their military strength on the battlefield.
The decline of the Hittite Empire was relatively swift and occurred in the context of the so-called Late Bronze Age Collapse, around the 12th century BCE, an event that destroyed or fragmented several civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean almost simultaneously. Most of the Hittite territory was absorbed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, while the Phrygians, newly arrived in the region, sacked what remained. From the late 12th century onward, the Hittites fragmented into several small independent states, some of which survived until the 8th century BCE before being incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Their descendants dispersed and merged with the populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia.
Modern interest in the Hittites gained momentum with the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Turkish archaeologists like Halet Çambel and Tahsin Özgüç dedicated their careers to studying this civilization, and its cultural impact extended beyond academia: the Turkish state bank Etibank, whose name means "Hittite Bank," and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, which houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of Hittite artifacts, stand as testaments to how this rediscovered people came to be part of the historical identity of contemporary Turkey.