The Hittites

The Hittites as a legendary Palestinian tribe are familiar to us from our schooldays. In this book the story is told of the rediscovery of the historical Hittites during the last eighty years as the result of excavation and the decipherment of cuneiform and hieroglyphic documents. The Hittites of history were a great nation of Asia Minor, whose kings treated on equal terms with those of Egypt, Bablyon, and Assyria, during a period of about two hundred years in the second millennium BC. There was an Indo-European strain in them which is revealed in their language and perhaps in the physical types of some of the Hittite prisoners represented on Egyptian monuments. Their earliest social organization also shows some points of resemblance to that of the heroic age of Greece. Their religion on the other hand seems to have been largely that of the indigenous population, who must be supposed to have inhabited the country before the Indo-European reached it. They developed a rupestrian art, which has its roots in the soil of Mesopotamia, but exhibits a strong and independent style of its own.

This is an attempt to present a balanced picture of what is known of the Hittites and in the chapter on literature to give some impression of the more important types of documents found among their archives.