The Trojan War in Homer and History - Recorded Books

LECTURE THREE
Lecture 3:
The Hittites
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Michael Wood’s In Search of
the Trojan War.
Within these discussions, we must also consider the Hittites—those warlike
people who ruled over most of Anatolia (ancient Turkey) throughout the second
millennium BCE and to whom the people of Troy may have owed at
least a passing allegiance.
Just who were the Hittites? When this question began to be asked, a little
more than a century ago, our only knowledge of the Hittites came from the
Hebrew Bible. For instance, Abraham buys a burial plot for his wife Sarah
from “Ephron the Hittite” (Genesis 23: 3–20). King David falls in love with
Bathsheba, the wife of “Uriah the Hittite,” as he watches her bathe (2
Samuel 11: 2–27). David’s son Solomon chooses “Hittite women” to number
among his wives (1 Kings 11:1).
From such biblical references, one would gather that the “country of the
Hittites” was in northern Israel or Syria. After David commands that the people
of Israel be counted, for instance, the census-takers visit, among other
places, “Kadesh in the land of the Hittites” (2 Samuel 24: 6), probably referring
to a Syrian site that David is said to have conquered. The problem was
that scholars could find no evidence of a Hittite kingdom in that region.
In the late nineteenth century, however, German and Swiss archaeologists
began investigating the ruins of a strange, unknown civilization far to the
north, in modern Turkey. Here was a classic conundrum: ancient historians
could name a people (the Hittites), but not their homeland, and they could
name a homeland (ancient Anatolia), but not its people.
Thanks largely to archaeological excavations by German archaeologists—
including Hugo Winckler in the first decade of the twentieth century and Kurt
Bittel in the years before World War II—we now know that those Anatolian
ruins are the remains of a great Hittite empire that flourished in the second
millennium BCE. The Hittites developed from little-known kingdoms into a
fledgling empire in the mid-seventeenth century BCE, when they built their
capital at Hattusa (modern Bogazköy, 100 miles east of Ankara). Some
decades later, they were powerful enough to attack Babylon, bringing down
the Old Babylonian dynasties. Thereafter, until the collapse of the Hittite civilization
in the twelfth century BCE, they rivaled Egypt as the main Near
Eastern superpower.
The name “Hittites” is something of a misnomer. Because the Bible referred
to Hittites, the term was simply adopted by scholars to refer to this Late
Bronze Age Anatolian kingdom. The Hittites, however, never referred to
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