The Kingdom of the Hittites

Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive history of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of the Hittites, and the role it played within the context of the ancient Near Eastern world. From their capital, Hattusa, in central Anatolia, the Hittite kings ruled a vast network of subject territories and vassalstates reaching from the Aegean coast of Anatolia through Syria to the river Euphrates. In the fourteenth century BC the Hittites became the supreme political and military power in the Near East. How did they achieve their supremacy? How successful were they in maintaining it? What brought abouttheir collapse and disappearance? In seeking to answer these questions, the book begins with an account of the Hittites predecessors in Anatolia, particularly in the early centuries of the second millennium, traces the rise and development of the Hittite kingdom over a period of some five hundredyears, and ends with the events which followed in the wake of the kingdoms collapse. Translations from the original texts are a particular feature of the book; thus on many issues the Hittites and their contemporaries are allowed to speak to the modern reader for themselves.