CHAPTER 9
Hittites and Anatolian
Ethnic Diversity
Trevor R. Bryce
Hatti and the Hittites
The kingdom of Hatti, of the people we call the Hittites, spanned the period known as
the Late Bronze Age. It emerged in the early decades of the seventeenth century and
ended 500 years later in the early decades of the twelfth. Hatti’s power and influence in
the Near Eastern world waxed and waned frequently throughout its history, but at its
height in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, it controlled an empire of administra-
tive regions and vassal states stretching through Anatolia and northern Syria, from the
Aegean coast in the west to the fringes of Mesopotamia in the east. Southward, in Syria,
it extended to the northern borders of Damascus, a vassal state of Egypt. The rulers of
Hatti ranked among the Great Kings of the Near Eastern world, a status they shared
with their “royal brothers,” the kings of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria. Their royal seat
was located at Hattusa (modern Bogazköy/Bo ̆ gazkale) in north-central Anatolia about ̆
160 km east of Ankara. Hatti’s core region, commonly referred to now as the Hittite
homeland, lay within the curve of the Kızıl Irmak (“Red River”), called the Marassantiya
in Hittite texts, the Classical Halys.
The term “Hittite” has been adopted by modern scholars from biblical tradition, where
it refers to persons and peoples who lived in Palestine during the Iron Age, in the cen-
turies following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age kingdoms. Whether or not there is
any connection, ethnic or cultural, between the biblical Hittites and the Late Bronze Age
people(s) now called by this name is still debated. What clearly influenced the adoption
of the name in modern scholarship was the fact that the Late Bronze Age kingdom’s
core region was called Hatti in contemporary sources, a name eventually applied to all
regions subject to Hattusa, and later used of many parts of Syria and southeastern Ana-
tolia during the Iron Age. The question of whether or not the similarity of the biblical
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.