Shortly afterwards the Assyrian lines of communication with Cappadocia were broken, by the incursion of folk from the north into Upper Mesopotamia. About 2000 B.C. we have ample evidence of a great ethnic movement which sent various peoples from the highland zone north of the Fertile Crescent into the lands within and around the Crescent: soon after that date the Indo-European Hittites appear in Asia Minor, the Hurrians (the Biblical Horites) in Upper Mesopotamia, the Kassites (the Biblical Cush of Gen. x. 8) in Babylonia. How far back the pressure started and what ultimately caused it are matters for speculation; it may have been the result of famine in the steppe-lands of South Russia; but it is important in that it brought the Indo-European speakers for the first time on to the stage of history. Not only do we meet the Indo-Europeans who invaded the territory of the Anatolian Khatti and took over their name; we have the related Luwians farther west; and among the Hurrians and Kassites we have clear evidence of a ruling caste bearing names which are not simply Indo-European but Aryan in the proper sense (i.e. Indo-Iranian), although the main mass of the Hurrians and Kassites were linguistically neither Indo-European nor Semitic.¹⁰ The importance of this movement for the history of civilization is very great; it was these northern peoples, to mention but one contribution, who introduced the horse and horse-drawn chariot to the Middle East.¹¹

The Indo-European Hittites seem to have entered Asia Minor from the Caucasus region. The monuments depict them as retaining their snow-shoes even after they came to lower-lying country. Their western neighbours, the Luwians, speaking a kindred tongue, probably came across the Bosporus and Dardanelles at a somewhat earlier date and mingled with the aboriginal Khatti. The people with whom we are concerned settled among the Khatti and established themselves in city-states. They soon assumed the name Khatti themselves (at least as a territorial designation), but they called their own Indo-European language nasili or nesumnili (“Nesian”)—after Nesas, one of their chief city-states. The language of the original Khatti they continued to call khattili. Nowadays we conventionally call the language of the Indo-European invaders Hittite, and the language of the older population Proto-Hittite.¹²

The earliest “kings” of some of these Hittite city-states lived before the disappearance of the Assyrian colonies in Cappadocia. They fought against each other, and the ruling house of Kussar proved strongest. Pitkhanas of Kussar captured the city of Nesas (probably one of the four Anatolian cities known to classical writers as Nysa or Nyssa), and his son Anittas enlarged it and made it his capital. Anittas was the first Hittite ruler to assume the title “Great King”.

This dynasty became more powerful still. About 1650 B.C., King Labarnas, having united the Hittites under his sway, and extended his realm to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, carried the Hittite arms beyond the frontiers of Asia Minor into Syria. He enjoys the distinction of having his name used by succeeding kings as a title in the sense of “King” or “Emperor”,¹³ while the name of his wife Tawanannas came to be used as a title meaning “Queen” or “Queen-mother”.

Khattusilis I, the son of Labarnas, continued his father’s military enterprise in Syria, and increased his domains at the expense of the kingdom of Aleppo (Khalpa). Mursilis I,¹⁴ his successor, shifted the imperial capital to Khattusas (“Silver City”), which occupied a strong strategic position east of the Halys. Continuing his predecessors’ campaigns, he captured the city of Aleppo itself, and in a lightning raid down the Euphrates he sacked Babylon and carried away the image of Marduk among the other spoil. This raid so weakened Babylon that it immediately afterwards fell an easy prey to the Kassites, who already dominated the eastern provinces of Babylonia, and established a dynasty which lasted until c. 1150 B.C.¹⁵

But Mursilis had to deal with domestic strife and was unable to consolidate his position in Syria and Mesopotamia. While he and his successors dealt with trouble at home, the Hurrians made themselves the dominant power in those parts, and founded the kingdoms of Khanigalbat and Mitanni in Upper Mesopotamia (c. 1500 B.C.).

Some degree of stability was restored to the Hittite kingdom by King Telepinus, whose name is associated with the codification of the Hittite constitution and system of law.¹⁶ The Hittite king was not an absolute monarch; his authority was limited by a council called the pankus (like the Greek boul»), consisting of the feudal nobles. He had the right to nominate his successor, but his nomination must be ratified by the pankus. The king was head of the state in matters civil, military, and religious alike. The succession passed normally to his son or son-in-law. The queen (tawanannas) retained her authority for life; not until the death of the queen-mother did the king’s wife acquire the title. Her rôle was chiefly a religious one.

In some of these provisions we see traces of a matriarchal system, originating probably not with the Indo-European ruling caste but with some of the native Anatolian elements in the Hittite population. In religious matters the Indo-European Hittites largely took over the worship of the earlier Khatti (“the manner of the gods of the land”); and from the Khatti, too, the matriarchal elements were likely derived.¹⁷

The laws of the Hittites were, generally speaking, humane as compared with those of Babylonia and Assyria; no degrading mutilations were imposed as penalties. Regard for the sanctity of treaties and respect for women are marked features of their system.

The reign of Tudkhalias II (c. 1450 B.C.) marks the beginning of a new period of Hittite imperial expansion. He resumed the old warfare against Aleppo, which had accepted the suzerainty of the kingdom of Mitanni. But the southward advance of the Hittites was blocked not only by the new Hurrian kingdoms but even more by the Egyptian kings of Dynasty XVIII, who, after driving the Hyksos into Asia, extended their empire into Syria. Tudkhalias judged it wise to send an embassy with gifts to Thothmes III who, after his decisive victory at Megiddo in 1468 B.C., had reached Carchemish on the Euphrates in 1462 and taken Kadesh on the Orontes in 1455.

The next two kings continued Tudkhalias’s activity in North Syria, but it was his great-grandson Suppiluliumas (1395-1350) who first succeeded in penetrating the barrier which hemmed the Hittites in on the south. It is at this time that the Iron Age begins in the Middle East, when a process for the economical smelting of iron was devised in Kizwatna, a province of the Hittite Empire. Suppiluliumas overthrew the Mitanni state and added most of it to his empire, but left the portion beyond the Euphrates as a vassal kingdom to serve as a buffer-state against the rising power of Assyria.

Westwards he carried his arms as far as Lebanon. In the year when the kingdom of Mitanni fell (1370 B.C.) he could boast: “From Lebanon to the Euphrates in less than one year I have added these lands to my dominion.”

Between the Hittites and Egyptians the petty kings of Syria found themselves in an embarrassing position. Some who had formerly been vassals of Pharaoh now transferred their loyalty to the Hittite king, especially when the Egyptian grip weakened in the reign of Akhnaton.

In spite of the friendly terms of the letter in which Suppiluliumas congratulated Akhnaton on his accession, relations cannot have been too cordial. The Mitanni dynasty which the Hittite had reduced to vassalage was closely linked to the Egyptian royal house, and the Hittite was too near the Egyptian territory and too powerful to be comfortable. Yet the Hittite and Egyptian crowns might have been united; it is interesting to speculate on what might have been the course of events if this had happened. The widow of an Egyptian king (whether of Akhnaton himself or of his successor Tutankhamon is not certain) wrote to Suppiluliumas expressing a desire to marry one of his sons. A Hittite prince was accordingly sent to Egypt, but met a violent end (we may guess that the new king of Egypt had no wish to welcome a Hittite rival so near the throne). Suppiluliumas declared war on Egypt, and his son Arnuwandas led an army into Egyptian territory in Syria. But the other frontiers of the Hittite Empire were in a state of great unrest, and when Suppiluliumas died in the course of his last campaign, his sons Arnuwandas I and Mursilis II were hard put to it to consolidate their father’s conquests. There were hostile tribes in Asia Minor and North Syria, and in the east there was the growing might of Assyria. The Assyrians had once been subject to Mitanni, but with the reduction of that kingdom by Suppiluliumas, the Assyrians threw off their yoke and soon established themselves as overlords of the remnant of Mitanni which Suppiluliumas had left; they took it over altogether c. 1250 B.C.

Muwatallis, the son and successor of Mursilis II, made a treaty with the king of the Akhiyawa (identified by many with the Achaeans), whose territory lay in the south-west of Asia Minor.¹⁸ But he is best known as “the wretched king of Khatti” against whom Rameses II fought at the Battle of Kadesh (1297 B.C.). Kadesh on the Orontes, frontier-city of the Hittite Empire, had been captured by Seti I, but was quickly retaken by the Hittites. Rameses II, in the fifth year of his reign, led his army to the attack against the Hittites, but while he claims an overwhelming victory, the sequel makes it plain that the issue was a draw. The battle was followed after sixteen years by a treaty between Rameses and Khattusilis III, the brother of Muwatallis, on an uti possidetis basis. In addition to the Egyptian version of the treaty already mentioned, an Akkadian text has been found at Bögaz-köy. It has been called the first non-aggression pact in history. The agreement was further cemented in 1269 B.C. when the daughter of Khattusilis came to Egypt as one of the wives of Rameses.

From this time onwards the Egyptian and Hittite Empires alike grew weaker. The Assyrian menace led Khattusilis to seek an alliance with Babylonia as well as with Egypt. But a greater menace loomed much nearer on the west. The Akhiyawa pressed harder, and there was greater pressure behind them. The downfall of the Minoan Empire about 1400 B.C. and a fresh wave of folk-migrations from the lands north of the Balkan Peninsula led to the filling of the Mediterranean with “the peoples of the sea", wanderers uprooted from their homes, driven to make a living by piracy and coastal raids, and seeking new lands to settle in. The Egyptian records tell of their attempts on Egypt in the reigns of Merenptah and Rameses III, which were beaten off. But the Hittite land fared otherwise; the Bögaz-köy records come to a sudden end about 1200 B.C., when Khattusas was burned. To this wave of migrations belong the arrival of the Phrygians from Europe in Asia Minor, the wandering of the Etruscans from Asia Minor to Italy, the Philistine settlement in Canaan. The Fall of Troy, celebrated in classical epic, was an incident in this great crisis.¹⁹ Homer may even bring the Hittites into his story, if they are the mysterious K»teioi whom he mentions in Odyssey xi. 521, as was suggested in 1876 by W. E. Gladstone in his Homeric Synchronisms (pp. 171-183).

⁹ It was not, however, from these Assyrian-merchants that the Hittites appear to have taken over the cuneiform script, but through the Hurrians as intermediaries. See E. A. Speiser, Introduction to Hurrian (1941), pp. 13 f.

¹⁰ In a treaty between the Hittite king Suppiluliumas and the Mitanni king Mattiwaza, among the gods of Mitanni invoked are Mitrashil, Arunashil, Intara, and Nashatiyana; these are obviously the same as the Indian deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatya twins. Among the Mitanni kings we have such typically Aryan names as Artatama, Artashuwara; among the Kassite kings, Burnaburyash, Nazi-bugash, Nazi-maruttash.

¹¹ Among the Bögaz-köy records is a treatise on the care of horses and chariot-racing, written by a man named Kikkuli, who belonged originally to Mitanni. Although composed in Hittite, it contains the following Aryan technical terms: aikawartanna, terawartanna, panzawartanna, shattawartanna, and nawartanna (by haplology for nawa-wartanna), meaning “one turning", “three turnings", “five turnings", “seven turnings", and “nine turnings” respectively. The numerals correspond to Sanskrit eka, tri, pañca, sapta, and nava (but that for “seven” has already reached the Prakrit stage with the assimilation of p to t); the second element in the compounds corresponds to Sanskrit vartana, “turning.” In Syria at this time we find an equestrian warrior-caste called mariannu, with which we may compare Sanskrit marya, “young man.” Hebrew sûs, “horse,” is very likely an Aryan loanword; cf. Sanskrit açva(s). It should be noted that Sayce’s theory that Hebrew pa|ra|sh, “horse,” is a word of Hittite origin is quite erroneous; see O. R. Gurney, in PEFQ. 1937, pp. 194f. E. A. Speiser suggests that one of the Egyptian words for “chariot” may be of Hurrian origin (Ethnic Movements in the Near East [1933], pp. 49 f.).

¹² Proto-Hittite has been connected with the North-West Caucasian language-group (R. Bleichsteiner in Ebert’s Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte vi [1926], pp. 260-63). Such connections are in the nature of the case precarious. Among ancient tongues Proto-Hittite shows contacts with Hurrian, Elamite, and Kassite; i.e., it belongs to the language-group to which the late N. Marr and his school give the name “Japhetic”. It was a prefixing language; e.g., binu, “child,” has a plural lebinu, “children.”

¹³ The title appears as Tabarnas. Actually the word is Proto-Hittite, having as its initial sound an unvoiced l which is represented now as l, now as t, and sometimes as tl. The same sound appears in Elamite. Compare the Aztec unvoiced l which the Spaniards represented in writing as tl, as in Quetzalcoatl, Popocatapetl. The unvoiced Welsh ll, which some English speakers try to represent by lth or thl, is a similar sound.

¹⁴ The name Mursilis survived for long in Asia Minor. According to Herodotus (i. 7) Myrsilos was the name by which the Lydian king Kandaules was known to the Greeks; he implies that it was a patronymic, Kandaules being the son of Myrsos. Cf. Myrsilos, tyrant of Mytilene in the seventh century B.C., whose death is celebrated by Alcæus (fragment 39): —

νυν χρή μεθύσθην κάι τινα πρός βίαν

πώνην, έπειδή κάτθανε Μύρσιλος

¹⁵ The end of the First (Amorite) Dynasty of Babylon, which was precipitated by this raid, is given by Sidney Smith as 1595 B.C., by W. F. Albright as 1550.

¹⁶ The idea that Telepinus extended his influence as far south as Damascus has been based on a doubtful identification of the Damaskhunas of the Hittite records.

¹⁷ The matriarchate in Asia Minor is of course closely connected with the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods in that area.

¹⁸ See F. Sommer, Die Ahhijavā-Urkunden (1932).

¹⁹ The date of the Trojan War was, according to Eratosthenes, 1193-1184 B.C.; according to the Parian Marble,1218-1209 B.C. This traditional dating accords remarkably closely with archæological evidence.