Hattusa, the Archives and a Rediscovered Empire

The Hittites were entirely lost. They survived as a name in the Hebrew Bible and in Egyptian and Assyrian references and nothing more, until excavation at Bogazkoy in central Anatolia from 1906 uncovered the capital, Hattusa, and its archives of clay tablets. The demonstration in 1915 that the language was Indo-European made the empire readable, and Hittite remains the oldest attested Indo-European language.

The archives are why so much religious material survives. They preserve festival calendars specifying who stood where and what was said, ritual texts credited to named practitioners including a number of women, oracle enquiries conducted by several independent methods and then checked against each other, and the treaties whose divine witness lists are the fullest pantheon catalogues to survive from the ancient Near East.

The rock sanctuary at Yazilikaya, a natural cleft outside the capital, carries the pantheon in relief with the Hurrian names of the gods beside them, and it is the clearest surviving statement of what the imperial cult had become by the thirteenth century BCE. The empire collapsed around 1180 BCE in the wider Bronze Age breakdown, and the smaller Neo-Hittite states of southern Anatolia and northern Syria carried the name and the hieroglyphic script on for several centuries afterwards.