Flame went before them

Flame went before them

Their security was an illusion. Gradually the empire began to crumble. The dependencies began to fall away. Then over the plateau swept a terrible horde. Who they were is still not known; the Egyptians called them 'the sea people'. But we do know that about 1200 BC they swarmed over Anatolia and through Syria. "They swept on,' says an Egyptian chronicler with a vivid turn of phrase, 'flame going before them, onwards towards Egypt'. The lively description by the Pharaoh Rameses III of how the Egyptian army prepared to meet the sea raiders show the formidable nature of the threat: 'I made the river-mouths ready, like a strong wall, with warships, galleys and skiffs; they were manned fore and aft with brave fighters armed with their weapons, the pick of Egypt's infantry, like roaring lions on the mountain; able warriors were in the chariotry ...their horses quivered in every limb, eager to crush the foreigners under their hooves'.

Egypt was saved - but the Hittite empire had disappeared, destroyed in a horror of looting and burning, of dead charioteers and razed cities. Its western boundary had been Arzawa, in the southwest of Asia Minor; its eastern, Carchemish on the Euphrates; its southern, the land of Kode or Kizzuwadna on the Cilician coast. It also ruled Alashya,the island of Cyprus conquered some decades earlier by the Hittite king. A great empire had fallen.

A neo-Hittite relief from Carchemish showing a Hittite
 battle chariot and warriors.To the right stands a
sphinx with two heads, one human and other lion.

This empire, which had lasted six long centuries, had once comprised, at its greatest extent, an area of some hundred thousand square miles. Yet less than a century ago, its very existence was not known.

Then, in 1906, Dr Hugo Winckler, excavating in Turkey on behalf of the German Oriental Society, made a sensationaldiscovery. In the ruins of the citadel at Boghazkoi, some 80 miles east of the present Turkish capital, Ankara, a hoard of clay tablets came to light. They were written in the cuneiform script of Baby-lonia. Some were in Akkadian, the language of Babylonia, and could at once be read. They revealed that the city in which they had been found was Khattusas, the capital of the land of Khatti, and that Khatti itself had been a great power hundreds of years before King Solomon's reign, in the second millennium BC. The majority of the tablets, however, thoughin the same script, were in an unknown tongue. This language when eventually deciphered turned out to be one of thegreat family of Indo-European languages of which Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are the best-known examples. It then became clear that although the clumsy hieroglyphic picture-writing had been used for monuments and although the language of diplomacy had been Akkadian, yet the normal language used for administrative and religious purposes had been the Indo-European tongue. They themselves called this language Nesite, after the city Nesas, an early capital. Having, it is assumed, no writing of their own when they first entered the area, they adopted the Mesopotamian habit of writing on clay tablets, and took over the cuneiform script, adapting it to their own tongue as best they could.

As the archaeologists and the philologists went to work, the story of the Hittite Empire gradually unfolded. It is still incomplete. Both its beginning and its end are shrouded in uncertainty; the exact number of its kings and the length of many of their reigns is uncertain.But every year fresh evidence comes to light - new texts are published, a little more is added to history. From the mists of oblivion, the Hittites are beginning to appear as a vigorous, intelligent people who played an important role as an imperial power in that first age of diplomacy, the formative centuries of the second millennium BC