We also do well to remember that the pictographic script of the Syro-Hittites had local, city state roots, and had nothing to do with a Hittite empire.
At the end of the 18th century AD bas-reliefs with pictographs were discovered by travelers passing near Ivriz, on the plateau of Asia Minor. These same peculiar signs were seen in the area of Jerablus-Carchemish on the bank of the Euphrates, and later on the site of ancient Babylon and in other places.
In the 1870's a solution was offered and accepted. Kheta were the Hittites, occasionally mentioned in the Scriptures. It was the phonetic similarity of the names that prompted this identification.
William Wright, a missionary in Damascus, came to this conclusion and also decided that the mysteries signs are Hittite writings.[5] Since almost nothing was known of Hittite history, it was like resurrecting an empire from oblivion, and it was called `a discovery of a forgotten empire.' These were sensational matters in the 1880's.
The Egyptian documents that mention Hatti [6] are the war annals of Thutmoses III [in a few lines only] and of Seti and Ramses II [extensively] [7]. The El Amarna letters, written in cuneiform, refer frequently to Hatti. This period in the conventional chronology covers the time from about 1500 - 1250 BC. Merneptah who followed Ramses II, said that Hatti was pacified. Ramses III, supposedly of about 1200 - 1180 BC, wrote that Hatti was already crushed or wasted:
"The countries ... the Northerners in their isles were disturbed, taken away in the fray ... at one time. Not one stood before their hands, from Kheta, Kode, Carchemish, Arvad, Alasa, they were wasted..."
[8]
A Babylonian chronicle mentions the Hatti in connection with an invasion of Babylon at the close of the ancient dynasty of Hammurabi supposedly in the 17th or 16th century before our time.
The Assyrian annals mention the Hatti for the first time in the days of Tiglath-Pileser I, who undertook a campaign against them, supposedly in 1107 BC. These annals refer to the Hatti sporadically until 717, when Sargon II conquered them and reduced them to full dependency by occupying Carchemish. It is asserted by modern scholars that whatever remained of them was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar when he occupied Carchemish shortly before the battle with Necho; he claimed to be the overlord of the Hatti lands.
In a double identification the Kheta of the Egyptian annals and the Hatti of the Assyrian annals were said to be the Hittites of the Scriptures, and the monuments with the pictographic script were attributed to them. Among these monuments are pieces of sculptured work, especially relief cuttings in rocks.
"Those who studied these rock reliefs in the middle of the 19th century viewed them in the context of the History of Herodotus. The nearby Halys River suggested to them that the processions were the meetings of contemporary kings of perhaps Lydia and Persia. The headdresses were different for each side with tall Phrygian mitre caps on the left and Persian tiaras on the right. They might be either Alyattes and Cyaxares (Lydians and Medes) or Croesus and Cyrus (Lydians and Persians)." [9]
Monuments with Hittite sculptures and pictographic script were found in Asia Minor, mainly in its eastern part, and in the region around Carchemish, in Hamath, in northern Syria, but also in western Asia Minor, on Mount Sipylus and at Karabel, near Smyrna. They were not found in southern Syria or Palestine, though biblical references to Hittites possessing land in ancient Palestine [Hebron , Genesis 25:9] should have made the discovery of some `Hittite' monuments in these places quite probable. [14]
Then something happened that really puzzled them. Out of a steep slope facing a river bed beneath the ancient ruins of Boghazkoi crept tablets inscribed with cuneiform signs. They were moved by sand and debris and their own weight. Boghazkoi, about 140 km east of Ankara, occupies a site with a few steep hills on which ruins of ancient buildings, among them a palace
were found. Rock reliefs at Yazilikaya, a gorge within walking distance of the village of Boghazkoi came to light. Short pictographic legends accompany the figures on the rock reliefs.
That the Kheta and the Hatti were the same was seen from the hieroglyphic and cuneiform versions of the treaty between Ramses II and Khetasar [Hattusilis of the cuneiform]: in the hieroglyphic text the latter is called `the great chief of Kheta' and in the cuneiform text `the great king of Hatti.' [17]
It became evident that the royal archives of the so-called Hittite Empire had been brought to light. The theory of the "forgotten empire" seemed fully confirmed.
One of their later chronicles reads as follows, "... the Hatti lands were sacked from beyond their borders. The enemy from Kaska came and sacked the Hatti lands and made Nenasse his frontier. From beyond the Lower Land came the enemy of Arzawa, and he too sacked the Hatti lands and made ... [a new] frontier." [18]
An Arzawa is also known from the El Amarna letters.
The tablets revealed the use of a multitude of languages on which I shall not elaborate at this time. The `Hittites' had in common with the Babylonians scholarly works, hymns, writings based on historical traditions, vocabularies, and other literary works. [19]
The Assyrian Empire is supposed to have risen after the fall of the `Hittite Empire.' But in some ways the `Hittites' were more advanced than the Assyrians, and consequently it is assumed that the Assyrians regressed culturally as compared with the `Hittites.' [20]
Scholars wondered about this unknown cause of this retrogression in cultural development when the age of the `Hittites' expired presumably about 1200 BC, and was superseded by the Assyrian Empire. They wondered how it could be that the `Hittite' culture of the 15th and 14th century BC, in all that concerns science, law, literature, royal annals, traditions, habits, and omens, so closely resembled the culture of the Assyrian Empire of the 7th and 6th centuries.
We may wonder today that we can find artifacts of the Hittites in many volumes on history, but where are the artifacts on the Chaldeans? Were there no Chaldeans? We encourage our readers to ask questions about the Chaldeans and the remains we can attribute to them. How would they differ from those of the Hittites? [22]
In revised chronology the `Great King of the Kheta,' against whom Ramses II moved his legions, was the king of the Chaldeans, and the signer of the peace treaty, Khetasar, or Hattusilis of the cuneiform version, was Nebuchadnezzar (Nabukudurri-usur). This conclusion is rich in consequences and collapses the `Hittite Empire' but in its place expands our knowledge of and reestablishes that of the Chaldean/Kassite/Babylonians to where it always should have been. It also makes Ramses II the same as pharaoh Necho known to us from Jeremiah and the Greek historians. For what Necho did and what Ramses II did are the same things just like we equated Ramses III with Nectanebo I.
Since we place the Hittite/Chaldean empire into a later period than conventional historians we may expect some references in old Greek literature or ancient remains to their contemporanity. This search among Greek sources for an empire based in Asia Minor has been done. We read:
"In ancient times Greater Armenia ruled the whole of Asia, after it broke the empire of the Syrians (Assyria), but later, in the time of Astyages, it was deprived of that great authority by Cyrus and the Persians." [23]
This can be none other than the Neo-Babylonian Empire placed between the Assyrian and Persian Empires. We also learn from Strabo that he knew the region of Hatti as Cappadocia. In Egyptian hieroglyphics `Cappadocia' is written as
Excavating the Capital of Hattusha
It was the French explorer Charles Texier who in the 1830's traveled to the forbidding uplands of Anatolia/Turkey and discovered high above the ruins of an ancient city the great gallery of Hittite figures we so often see today in history books on the subject. Texier thought he had found the ancient site of Pteria, scene of the famous conflict between the storied, rich Lydian King Croesus and the early Persian King Cyrus which took place ca. 546 BC. Later modern historians would say Texiers was in error but in our revision we concur with his identification. [25]
An artists drawing of the reconstructed inner and outer city wall of Hattusha can be seen in BA, 49, Mar 1986, p. 45.
Over 60 excavation campaigns have been conducted but much work still needs to be done. While interesting finds were made, so far archaeologists were unable to find the royal tombs or the cemetery of Hattusha. Until these are found, there is a painful lack of confirmation of lengthy king lists touted to be accurate. The ancient history of these regions and the king lists made in modern times based on data thought to be well understood, need to be critically examined with the most rigorous scholarly cautions for they may be based on scanty evidences and interpretations. Finding names on building blocks we don't always know if they all belong to kings vs. princes or local rulers, if they are contemporary, commemorative or were placed there for other reasons in societies who had a wide diversity in languages, habits, architecture and events. Finding grain storage areas, private dwellings and ritual objects or temples, while interesting, does little for chronology. Modern estimates of `in use' time spans for artifacts may be only just that, estimates. Connecting ancient sites with chalcolithic or other earlier periods could also just be areas were poorer populations lived simultaneous or in parallel with more developed sites. Like today, ancients also did not share their riches with their neighbors. When reading cuneiform inscriptions translated in modern times we need to be very aware of brackets, words included which are guesses and read such texts by using only the words which are there to recognize the limitations of what we really have before us in a given text vs. conjectured modern additions which may be plausible or they may not be so, especially if they lean on a given world view or chronological order. Complete king lists may be especially suspect if they have not been corroborated with archaeological evidences for these rulers from other sources. King lists may be interpreted vertically, horizontally or both. When we say `rulers' these may include the great king, kinglets, princes, usurpers, town mayors, local chieftains, military officers and who ever else had enough opportunities to influence things for a while.
These signs are regarded as the Hittite royal ideogram and appear slightly modified on coins of the Commogene kings.
We do well to recall that the Chaldeans as a tribe lived long after the fall of the Babylonian empire in the mountains of Cappadocia and Cilicia and as a class of priests continued on. Similarly the latest cuneiform and pictographic scripts are from about 72-75 AD.
[3]
They are completely different from hieroglyphics. It was then not known which people had left them.
However, mention of Kheta in the texts accompanying the bas-reliefs of the battle of Kadesh, in the poem celebrating this battle, and in the Egyptian text of the peace treaty stimulated conjecture about the identity of the rivals of Ramses II in the struggle for dominion over their world. Who were the `Ht
', Kheta? [4] An Egyptian hieroglyphic word which according to Budge means `a rectangular plot of land', while the verb form `khetta' means `to wander about the earth'.
However warning voices were also heard among scholars who opposed the idea, very strange to them, that the ancient world of the empires of Egypt and Assyro-Babylonia should be increased by a newly discovered empire of the Hittites.
Comparing 2 Hittite (left) with an Assyrian (right) battle ax and 2 Hittite war clubs.
`The club and battle-ax [10] appear for the first time on the Assyrian sculptures in the war pictures of the grandson of Sennacherib, who probably was the last king of Niniveh, and therefore the contemporary of Cyaxares.' [11] [12]
Hittite art [13] and script are regarded as material witnesses of an empire that played a role as great as that of Egypt, Assyria, or Babylonia but that, for some reason, was forgotten so that only late in the 19th century of our time it was reestablished in its historical place.
"When scholars refer to the Hittites, they will distinguish between the Hittite empire of the 14th-13th centuries BC (and their ancestors) and the so-called Neo-Hittites of Eastern Asia Minor in the 9th-7th centuries BC. Conventional Chronology sees the Neo-Hittites as successors of the empire following a `dark age' hiatus of several centuries. The Synchronized Chronology reverses this sequence with the Hittite Empire succeeding an earlier age of city-states sharing a common `Khaldi' or `Hattic' culture. In the Hittite Empire can be seen a stage of art at the end of a long history of evolution. The attempts by art historians to describe this evolution with the Empire period as the beginning has been a tortured exercise: the starting and ending points are the same." [15]
The peasants sold tablets to travelers. In 1906 Hugo Winckler and Makridi-Bey, two scholars, appeared on the scene. In three weeks excavations they hurriedly carried 2500 tablets and fragments from the slopes.
They tried to read them while new ones were brought in at the rate of 100 per day. Some were inscribed in the Babylonian [Akkadian] language. Other tablets bore cuneiform signs, too, but they spelled out some unknown tongue or tongues.
The Babylonian tablets were read without difficulty. Hugo Winckler was surprised to read there a copy or draft of the treaty between Ramses II and the king of Hatti, already known from its Egyptian version inscribed on the walls of the Ramesseum and of the great hypostyle hall of the temple of Amon at Karnak. [16]
In 1907 thousands more tablets and fragments were carried from the same slope in Boghazkoi, raising the number to about 10,000.
There was, however, a difficulty of a stratigraphic nature: the remains among which the tablets were found indicated a much more recent period than the age of these documents. But the existence of the treaty with Ramses II precluded even a consideration of the conflicting data, and a chronological place in accord with Ramses II was allotted to Hattusilis, the king of Hatti, and to the entire period.
Conventional History books will say that the collapse of the Hittite empire in ca. 1200 BC removed for the Assyrians their threat from the north and only now they could begin to expand. They then credit Tiglathpileser I with rebuilding temples, palaces and contesting other tribes and city states. And it is this king who refers to Carchemish as being in the land of the Hatti. [21]
Ramses II battle of Kadesh [Holy City] was Necho's march on Carchemish. Both descriptions, Ramses II annals and the book of Jeremiah have many parallels confirming this placement. For one simple one his army was divided into four groups or contingents.
Click here for a more detailed comparison look.
, Getpetkai. [24]
Names found in conventional Hittite King Lists
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