Let’s look briefly at our time- and space-frames. The period
covered by the Hittite civilisation spans half a millennium, from
the seventeenth to the early twelfth century BC. In modern
archaeological terminology, Hittite history starts towards the end
of the Middle Bronze Age and lasts until the end of the Late Bronze
Age. The chronological table in Appendix 2 gives you more details.
Unfortunately, we don’t have kinglists (as we do for several other
ancient civilisations) to give us precise lengths of the reigns of
Hittite kings. So we can only assign approximate dates to their
reigns, linking these dates, on the few occasions where this is
possible, with the reigns of Egyptian and Babylonian kings. But that
too is not without its complications. I won’t go into what these are,
beyond simply noting that three chronologies have been proposed
for Hittite history–a High, Middle and a Low Chronology. The
Middle Chronology is the one I’ve used in this book.
What about the term‘Anatolia’, which pops up frequently in the
following pages? This term actually originates from a Greek word–
anatole,‘rising’. It is used to refer to the region where, from a Greek
perspective, the‘rising (of the sun)’takes place. First attested in the
Map I.1 Anatolia (NASA satellite image).
4 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA