speakers had begun intermingling centuries before the establish-
ment of the Hittite kingdom, and we can no longer talk in terms of
racially based conflicts leading to its genesis. The best we can say at
present is that a family group which maintained its Indo-European
heritage established a kingdom in north-central Anatolia during
the early seventeenth century, and founded a royal dynasty which
held sway over Hatti for the rest of the Bronze Age.
Initially at least, the population over which this dynasty ruled
may have been predominantly Hattian. Remnants of the Hattian
language survive in a number of passages embedded in Hittite
texts, generally of a ritual nature and labelled by the termhattili
(‘in the language of Hatti’). But the name‘Hatti’was perpetuated
throughout Hittite history on a much broader, more public level.
What we call the‘Hittite kingdom’was referred to as‘the Land of
Hatti’in Hittite and other Near Eastern texts. And the people we
call‘Hittites’were known simply as‘the people of the Land of
Hatti’. That is to say, the inhabitants of the kingdom defined
themselves not by the ethnic identity of their ruling class but by the
traditional name of the region in which they lived,^2 their numbers
swelled by an increasingly multi-ethnic population. Our own
persistence in using the terms‘Hittite kingdom’and‘Hittites’–
when we now know better – is simply a reflection of the old
assumption that the subjects of our book were linked to the biblical
people calledHittîm, rendered in English as‘Hittites’. If there’s
any link between the Bronze Age and biblical‘Hittites’it’s a very
tenuous one.^3
We’ve also noted the presence of two other Indo-European
groups in Anatolia. Like the Nesite-speakers, they are already
attested in the texts of the Assyrian colonists–the Palaians and the
Luwians. Passages written in their languages, often of a ritual
nature, are incorporated into certain Hittite (Nesite) texts, where
the languages are identified by the termsluwili(i.e.‘in the language
of Luwiya’) andpalaumnili(‘in the language of Pala’). Palaian-
speakers occupied part of the mountainous region south of the
Black Sea called Paphlagonia in Classical times. Luwians were very
much more widespread. Indeed by the end of the Hittite empire
Luwian-speakers were almost certainly the largest of all population
24 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA