Bronze Age
Map 2: Late Bronze Age regions of Anatolia / AsiaMinor (circa 1200 BC) with main settlements.
Sphinx Gate entrance at Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire.
The earliest linguistic and historical attestation of the Anatolian peoples are names mentioned
in Assyrian mercantile texts from 19th Century BC at Kanesh.[6][8] Kanesh was at the time the center of a
network of Assyrian merchants overseeing trade between Assyria and the warring states of Anatolia.
This certainly increased the power of the Anatolian peoples who inhabited the city.[2]
The Hittites are by far the best known of the Anatolian peoples. Originally referring to themselves as
the Neshites after their capital at Kanesh, which they had at one point captured from the Hatti, the
Hittites then seized the Hattic capital of Hattusa. The Hittite language thereafter gradually
supplanted Hattic as the predominant language in Anatolia.[1] Uniting several independent Hattic
kingdoms in Anatolia the Hittites began establishing a Middle Eastern empire in the 17th-century
BC.[2] They sacked Babylon, seized Assyrian cities and fought the Egyptian Empire to a standstill at
the Battle of Kadesh, the greatest chariot battle of the ancient world.[2] Their empire disappeared with
the Late Bronze Age collapse in the 12th-century BC. As Hittite was a language of the elite, the language
disappeared with the empire.[2]
Another Anatolian group were the Luwians, who migrated to south-west Anatolia in the early Bronze
Age.[9] Unlike Hittite, the Luwian language does not contain loanwords from Hattic, indicating that it was
initially spoken in western Anatolia.[2] The Luwians inhabited a large area and their language was spoken
after the collapse of the Hittite Empire.[2]