Near Eastern HistoryWhen, at the beginning of this century, the great kingdom
centered at Boghazkoy was discovered, it was called by its
proper name—the kingdom of Hatti (this term had been
known from Egyptian and Assyrian records and was legible in
the Akkadian tablets from Boghazkoy). "Hatti," of course, was
a geographical term and, at least initially, referred to the re-
gion of central Anatolia. Scholars also supposed, however, that
they were dealing with a nation, and for the people of this
supposed nation they used the name "Hittites," a name already
familiar among the Bible-reading public. Historians in the be-
ginning of the twentieth century had a rather different under-
standing of a nation than had the author of the Table of Na-
tions. For the modern historian, a man's nationality was
evident not in his religion, which was a matter of individual
choice, but in his physical appearance and in his language (the
early worshipers of Yahweh, in contrast, saw nothing diagnos-
tic in physical characteristics or in the language one spoke: they
themselves looked like Canaanites and by their own admission
spoke "the language of Canaan"). Thus, in modern parlance,
"Hittites" was not simply an equivalent for "the people of
Hatti." If there had once been Hittites, these Hittites should
have had their own physical and linguistic identity. As it hap-
pened, philologists chose to use the name "Hittite" for the
principal language found in the archives at Boghazkoy. Thus
the Hittites were the people whose "ancestral" language was
the language of these tablets and who presumably were physi-
cally distinguished from other national stocks in Anatolia. Too
late it was discovered that, at least at the outset, most of the
people of Hatti may have spoken a language other than "Hit-
tite." That other language was called, by the tablets them-
selves, "the language of Hatti," and scholars had little choice
but to call it "Hattic." All of this meant that—at least in the
early days of the "Hittite" Old Kingdom—many of the people
of Hatti may not have been Hittites. Did the Hittite nation
grow geometrically during the period of the Old Kingdom?
And then, since documents in Hittite are not found from the