The Coming of the Greeksthere are, quite simply, "the people of Hatti." The scribes of
course had names for languages, and so might refer to one text
as written hattili ("in the language of Hatti," that is, our "Hat-
tic") and to another as written ties Hi (that is, our "Hittite"; the
word apparently meant "in the language of Kanesh," perhaps
indicating that by the seventeenth century "Hittite" was the
language most widely spoken in the streets of Kanesh [Kiil-
tepe?]). Similarly, the scribes could write of "the people of
Hatti" or of "the people of Arzawa." For the scribe, "Hittites"
(that is, "the people of Hatti") included all those who lived in
Hatti, regardless of the language they spoke. A person living
in second-millennium Hatti did not see the world in ethnic
terms and did not perceive himself, or his countrymen, as be-
longing to this or that nation. As he saw it, although barbari-
ans might have nothing but a national identity, civilized peo-
ple were identified by their city or by their land, and above all
by the gods of the city or the land in which they lived. It is an
eloquent fact that our "Hittites" had no name for themselves,
and therefore—we may assume—no conception of a "Hittite
nation." They saw themselves only as "the people of Hatti."
The concept of nationalism, on the other hand, derives from
the tribal world to which the early worshipers of Yahweh be-
longed. The author of the Table of Nations at Genesis 10 re-
garded mankind as consisting of several dozen nations, each
nation being the lineal descendants of a single ancestor. As he
understood it, a man must worship only the god or gods of his
ancestors and must not add to his cult the deities of the city or
the land in which he happened to live. In this tribal Weltan-
schauung, Canaanites (descended from Canaan) were or ought
to be as distinct from Moabites (descended from Moab) or from
Israelites (descended from Israel) as one animal species was
from another. So too, in the world of the ancient Hebrew
writer there were Hittites (Khittim), descended from a primal
ancestor named Heth. Our word for, and our concept of "Hit-
tites" come from the translation of the Bible authorized by
King James I.
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