there probably went back many hundreds if not thousands of years.
One of their kingdoms was called Hatti, and its capital Hattus.
Towards the end of the Assyrian colony period, conflicts broke out
in the region. In one of these, a king called Anitta campaigned
against and defeated the king of Hatti and destroyed Hattus.
He ordered that the site be sown with weeds and never again
resettled. Anitta’s own base was at Nesa, where his father Pithana
had shifted the seat of his kingdom from a place called Kussar,
perhaps located in the anti-Taurus mountains. Increasingly
turbulent conditions in the region where the Assyrian merchants
traded were almost certainly responsible for the abrupt end of this
trade around the middle of the eighteenth century. There followed
a period, lasting several decades or more, of which we have very
little knowledge, and no written records.
AKINGDOM EMERGES
That brings us to the dawn of the Hittite era. What do we know
about the emergence and early development of the Hittite
kingdom? Most of our information comes from later surviving
copies of the oldest texts, copies written in what we have called
‘Hittite’, an Indo-European language. (Many if not all of the early
texts wereoriginallywritten in Akkadian, a Semitic language.) In
fact, the Hittites themselves called their language‘the language of
Nesa’. This designation goes back to the colony period when the
language was presumably the predominant one spoken in Nesa.
It was almost certainly spoken by Nesa’s ruling class. So strictly
speaking, we should call the Hittite language‘Nesite’.It’s only by
modern convention that we call it‘Hittite’.
From a fairly early period in Hittite history, the administrative
elite of the kingdom used this Indo-European language as their
official one. It’s therefore generally assumed that at least the top
layer of Hittite society was of Indo-European origin. But there’sa
bit of a problem here. The old assumption that an Indo-European
people we call the Hittites swept through north-central Anatolia
and imposed their rule upon the region’s indigenous inhabitants,
called Hattians, is no longer tenable. Indo-European and Hattian
THE DAWN OF THE HITTITE ERA 23