u/ComedianSubject4654

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A series for anyone who has forgotten history, or never warmed to it. No dates to memorize: just how, and why, things turned out the way they did.

Here is a genuine puzzle. A people build an empire across most of the Near East, speak a language from the same family as Latin, Greek and English, and fight Egypt to a standstill in one of the largest chariot battles ever fought. Then, decades ago, scientists finally read their DNA, expecting to confirm where that language had come from. It didn't. Meet the Hittites, the empire whose language seems to have arrived from nowhere in particular.

1. An empire built on wheels

Around 1650 BC, in the highlands of central Anatolia (modern Turkey), a kingdom centred on the city of Hattusas started absorbing its neighbours. Its edge was technological: the two-horse chariot, fast enough to hit an enemy line before it had formed and fast enough to leave again before it recovered. Within a century this had grown into an empire reaching across most of Mesopotamia and down to the coast of what is now Lebanon.

The Hittites called their land Hatti. Politically it worked something like feudalism, centuries before the word existed: local princes and city governors swore personal loyalty to a Great King, kept their land and their local power, and turned up with troops when summoned. It held together reasonably well when the king was strong, and came under strain the moment he wasn't.

2. A king, not (yet) a god

Unlike most rulers we've met in this series, the Hittite Great King was never treated as divine while he was alive. He was the supreme judge, the commander of the army, and the high priest of every god of Hatti (and Hatti, by its own reckoning, hosted rather a lot of them: Hittite texts boast of the "thousand gods" of the land). What he was not, in life, was a god himself.

Death changed that. In Hittite royal texts the standard way of saying a king had died is that he "became a god." It is a small phrase that tells you a great deal: divinity here was not a birthright but a promotion, awarded on the way out rather than handed out at birth.

3. A state permanently at war

Hatti spent most of its history surrounded, and it shows in how the state was built. War was treated less as an occasional necessity than as the normal condition of the land, and the army ranked second only to the king among Hittite institutions. It was professional and well drilled, built around infantry but famous for its chariots, and backed by a genuinely capable siege corps and intelligence network; taking a walled city or knowing what the neighbours were planning mattered as much as any charge.

The empire reached its height between roughly 1450 and 1200 BC. Under the Great King Suppiluliuma I, the Hittites crushed Mitanni, an empire built earlier by the Hurrians, and took effective control of the whole of northern Mesopotamia. That put them on a collision course with the one power in the region they had not yet measured themselves against.

>!DID YOU KNOW? • TWELVE MEN AND A MANUAL!<

>!The Hittite royal bodyguard, the Mesedi, is one of the best documented in the ancient world, because a written instruction manual for it survives. Twelve spearmen guarded the king at any time, backed by a second rotating group known as the "golden spearmen." The manual spells out who could approach the king, how his food was tasted before he ate it, and the fact that a guard caught falling asleep on duty was in serious trouble. Assassination was a real and recurring risk in Hittite politics, several kings met their end at the hands of relatives, and the manual reads like an institution that had learned this the hard way.!<

4. Kadesh, and the peace that maybe wasn't first

In 1274 BC Hittite and Egyptian chariots collided at Kadesh, on the Orontes river, in a battle later carved across half the temple walls of Egypt. Ramses II told the story as a personal triumph, rescuing his own army from a Hittite trap through sheer heroics. The honest reading is closer to a tactical draw: Ramses failed to take Kadesh, but the Hittite king, Muwatalli II, kept it.

Sixteen years later, in 1259 BC, the two empires did something rarer than any battle: they made peace on paper. By then Muwatalli had died and his brother Hattusili III held the Hittite throne (having taken it from his own nephew, but that is a story for another time). The result, inscribed on silver tablets and copied into both Egyptian and Hittite archives, is usually called the first peace treaty in history. That claim needs the same caveat we ran into with Hammurabi's laws: an even older treaty, between the cities of Ebla and Abarsal, may predate it by centuries. What the Egyptian-Hittite treaty can fairly claim is a narrower, still remarkable record: it is the oldest peace agreement for which both sides' own copies have survived, letting historians read the same deal from two different desks.

5. The paradox hiding in their genes

Here the story takes a turn that overturns what older accounts. Hittite belongs to the Indo-European family, the same one behind Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and most European languages, and the textbook explanation for how that family spread is a wave of horse-riding migrants out of the steppe north of the Black Sea, the people archaeologists call the Yamnaya. Take that migration back far enough, the reasoning goes, and you should find its genetic fingerprint everywhere an Indo-European language turns up. Hittite Anatolia was where the model broke.

When ancient DNA from Bronze Age Anatolia was finally read, in a major study published in Science in 2022, it turned up almost no trace of steppe ancestry at all, this in a population speaking one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages on record. Geneticists called it the Anatolian paradox: a language with no matching migration. Newer work, from 2023 and 2025, points to a different origin: a population living between the Caucasus and the lower Volga, distinct from the Yamnaya and older than them, that seems to have sent one branch north onto the steppe and another south into Anatolia. If that holds up, the Hittites didn't drift down from the Balkans, as older popular accounts tend to say. They may simply have always been closer to home than the people who spread their sister languages across the rest of Europe.

>!DID YOU KNOW? • THE TREATY IS STILL COMING OUT OF THE GROUND!<

>!On 21 September 2026, World Peace Day, Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced a fresh find at Hattusas: a cuneiform fragment, unearthed the year before, that belongs to this very treaty. The excavation team, led by Andreas Schachner, is still piecing together the rest of the tablet, more than three thousand years after it was written. The oldest peace agreement we can read from both sides, it turns out, is not even finished being dug up.!<

6. Encircled to the end

For all its reach, Hatti's oldest and most persistent enemy was never Egypt. It was the Gasga, mountain raiders living just north of Hattusas, who harassed the Hittite heartland on and off for the entire life of the empire and were never permanently put down. Add pressure from the west and the general upheaval that struck the whole eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC, the collapse historians simply call the Bronze Age Collapse, and Hattusas was abandoned within a generation. An empire that had held Egypt to a draw could not, in the end, hold its own backyard.

IN 30 SECONDS

From about 1650 BC the Hittites, centred on Hattusas in Anatolia, built a chariot-based empire run through a network of vassal princes sworn to a Great King who was judge, priest and general, but not a god until he died. At their height, under Suppiluliuma I, they absorbed Mitanni and fought Egypt to a draw at Kadesh in 1274 BC, then signed one of the oldest peace treaties whose text survives from both sides, in 1259 BC. Their language was Indo-European, but ancient DNA shows Bronze Age Anatolia had almost none of the steppe ancestry that spread the rest of that language family, a genuine unsolved paradox. Never able to fully subdue the Gasga raiders on their own doorstep, the Hittites went under around 1200 BC, in the wider collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the region.

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Lion Gate photo:

The Lion Gate at Hattusas, the monumental southwest entrance to the Hittite capital, guarded by two carved lions since the fourteenth century BC.

Photo: Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 (Creative Commons); image resized.

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MAP: The Hittite Empire at its height, with Hattusas at its heart, the Gasga raiders on its northern doorstep, Mitanni absorbed to the east, and the long frontier with Egypt running through Kadesh.

I have been studying sumerian for two years now. My problem has been that I have been studying by myself, from books only, without a teacher. I have been giving myself my own excercises, and checking them myself. As you might conceive, this creates something of an epistemic problem: how do I know if I am in the right or not?

I live in Finland, so I asked the local assyriological society for feedback. They said that Finland mostly has experts in akkadian, assyrian and hittite, with sumerian being somewhat of a blind spot with only one academic-level expert being active. He happens to be the same guy who wrote the textbook I am studying from.

I sent email to the author of my textbook, and I haven't had a reply in some weeks.

My next option was to send a sumerian tablet, asking for feedback, straight to the british museum. So I did just that. In sumerian. In cuneiform. I will give pictures as attachment.

I sent the tablet without any invoice or info about a week ago. Now I got an email that they have sent something to me in response. It means I have written something right, because the only request for a reply was in the tablet, written in sumerian.

I'm going to be entirely honest: I am stoked as hell.

https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/new-digital-system-deciphers-3500-year-old-hittite-script-with-90-accuracy