Near Eastern History
ing people whose language was related to the Indo-European
family, affected the central and north central region of Asia
Minor (known during the Bronze Age as "Hatti") during the
third millennium. The evidence for this we shall need to look
at in some detail, since questionable assumptions about a "Hit-
tite invasion" of central Anatolia have long muddied the schol-
arly waters. It has often been supposed that a Hittite nation,
the first to splinter off from the Indo-European community,
made its way southward and "invaded" Asia Minor some time
late in the third millennium or early in the second. In his val-
uable work, The Hittites, Oliver Gurney wrote without quali-
fication that "the Indo-European Hittite language was super-
imposed on the non-Indo-European Hattian by an invading
people," and suggested that this invasion had already occurred
by the time of Naram-Sin (ca. 2250 B.C.). 4 Other authorities
place the purported invasion ca. 2000 B.C., or even later. 5 Let
- O. Gurney, The Hittites (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 18;
at page 69 Gurney suggests that according to the linguistic evidence "a
group of Indo-European immigrants became dominant over an aboriginal
race of'Haitians.'
- H. A. Hoffner, "The Hittites and Hurrians," in Peoples of Old
Testament Times, ed. D. J. Wiseman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), states that
"the immigrant Indo-Europeans... arrived about 2000 B.C. on the cen-
tral plateau of Asia Minor" (p. 197). H. Otten, "Das Hethiterreich," in
Kulturgeschichte des Alien Orients, ed. H. Schmokel (Stuttgart: Kroner,
1961), concludes that the invasion had taken place by the eighteenth cen-
tury B.C., but notes that it is uncertain whether the Wanderweg of these first
Indo-Europeans had been by way of the Dardanelles or the Caspian Gates
(p. 333). Mellaart, CAH I, 2: 703, will have none of this: "The general
opinion that Hittites, Luwians, Palaeans all migrated simultaneously into
Anatolia at the end of the Early Bronze Age, c. 1900 B.C., a theory not
disputed until 1958, is flatly contradicted by archaeological evidence."
Mellaart, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, placed a Luwian inva-
sion of Anatolia ca. 2300 B.C., and he argued that the Luwians came to
Anatolia from Thrace; as for the Hittites, Mellaart concluded (on archaeo-
logical grounds) that they came to central Anatolia from the east, and that
they arrived between 2000 and 1950 B.C. Mellaart's theory is in turn (and
in the same CAH volume) roughly handled by Grassland, who argues (CAH
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