Hittitology

Hittitology is the study of the 'Hattian' and 'Hittite' ancient Anatolian Indo-European-speaking people, who, according to the Bible were descendants of Heth the great grandson of Noah.?

Hittitology is a branch of knowledge concerned with aspects of the archaeology, history, philology, mythology, and art history of the Hittite civilization.

Hittitology is a field of studies primarily dealing with the written documents. Hittite scribes used the cuneiform script that had been invented in southern Mesopotamia during the late 4th millennium, and subsequently adopted in other parts of the Near East by various languages. The Hittites are credited for creating Anatolia’s earliest indigenous scribal culture.

Present-day Hittitology looks back at one century of research that was enormously productive. Still at the beginning of the 20th century, Hittite studies faced more riddles than results, but in the course of the past century Hittite studies became a sound philology and contributed substantially to the understanding of ancient near eastern history and civilization.

A Hittitologist is an archaeologist, historian, linguist, or art historian who specializes in the Ancient Hittites and their Near Eastern Empire which was centered in Hattusa, near modern day Bo?azkale (Formerly known as?Bo?azk?y), ?orum Province, Turkey.

Before the archaeological discoveries that revealed the Hittite civilization, the only source of information about the Hittites had been the Hebrew Bible.

Bed?ich Hrozny, (also known in German as “Friedrich Hrozny”), was a Czech orientalist and linguist. He contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite language, identified it as an Indo-European language, and laid the groundwork for the development of Hittitology.

Francis William Newman expressed the critical view, common in the early 19th century, that, "no Hittite King could have compared in power to the King of Judah".

As the discoveries in the second half of the 19th century revealed the scale of the Hittite Kingdom, Archibald Sayce asserted that, rather than being compared to Judah, the Anatolian civilization "was worthy of comparison to the divided Kingdom of Egypt", and was "infinitely more powerful than that of Judah".

Sayce and other scholars also noted that Judah and the Hittites were never enemies in the Hebrew texts; in the Book of Kings, they supplied the Israelites with cedar, chariots, and horses, and in the Book of Genesis were friends and allies to Abraham. Uriah the Hittite was a captain in King David's army and counted as one of his "mighty men" in (1 Chronicles 11).

In 1834, French scholar Charles Texier found the first Hittite ruins, but did not identify them as such.

The first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the karum of Kanesh (now called Kültepe), containing records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a certain "land of Hatti".

In 1884, script on a monument at Bo?azk?y by the "People of Hattusas" discovered by William Wright was found to match peculiar hieroglyphic scripts from Aleppo and Hama in Northern Syria.

In 1887, excavations at Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son, Akhenaten. Two of the letters from a "Kingdom of Kheta", apparently located in the same general region as the Mesopotamian references to "land of Hatti", were written in standard Akkadian cuneiform, but in an unknown language; although scholars could interpret its sounds, no one could understand it.

Shortly after this, Sayce proposed that Hatti or Khatti in Anatolia was identical with the "Kingdom of Kheta" mentioned in these Egyptian texts, as well as with the biblical Hittites.

Others, such as Max Müller, agreed that Khatti was probably Kheta, but proposed connecting it with Biblical Kittim rather than with the Biblical Hittites.

Sayce's identification came to be widely accepted over the course of the early 20th century; and the name "Hittite" has become attached to the civilization uncovered at Bo?azk?y.

In 1906, during sporadic excavations at Bo?azk?y (Hattusa) archaeologist Hugo Winckler found a royal archive with 10,000 tablets, inscribed in cuneiform Akkadian and the same unknown language as the Egyptian letters from Kheta, thus confirming the identity of the two names. He also proved that the ruins at Bo?azk?y were the remains of the capital of a Hittite Empire that, at one time, controlled northern Syria.

Since 1907, under the direction of the “German Archaeological Institute”, excavations at Hattusa have been under way with interruptions during the 'World Wars'. Kültepe was successfully excavated by Professor Tahsin ?zgü? from 1948 until his death in 2005.

Smaller scale excavations have also been carried out in the immediate surroundings of Hattusa, including the rock sanctuary of Yaz?l?kaya, which contains numerous rock reliefs portraying the Hittite rulers and the Gods of the Hittite Pantheon.

The Hittites, a major power in the ancient Near East in the second millennium BC, are credited with being the first civilization to make iron into weapons and armor, thereby, transitioning from the Bronze to the Iron Age around 1200 BC.

The 'Museum of Anatolian Civilizations' in Ankara, Turkey houses the richest collection of Hittite and Anatolian artefacts...

Food for thought!