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The Hittites () were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in north-central Anatolia in the early 2nd millennium BC. There they formed a series of Polity, including the kingdom of Kussara (before 1750 BC), the Kanesh or Nesha Kingdom (–1650 BC), and an empire centered on their capital, Hattusa (around 1650 BC). Known in modern times as the Hittite Empire, it reached its peak during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, bordering the rival empires of the Hurri-Mitanni and Assyrians.
Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC, the Hittites were the most dominant powers of the Near East, coming into conflict with the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Middle Assyrian Empire, and the Empire of Mitanni. By the 12th century BC, much of the Hittite Empire had been annexed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, with the remainder being sacked by newcomers to the region. From the late 12th century BC, during the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Hittites splintered into several small independent states, some of which survived until the 8th century BC before succumbing to the Neo-Assyrian Empire; lacking a unifying indigenism, their descendants scattered and ultimately merged into the modern populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia. "Sea Peoples". Ancient History Encyclopedia. September 2009.
The Hittite language—referred to by its speakers as , "the language of Nesa"—was a distinct member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family; along with the closely related Luwian language, it is the oldest historically attested Indo-European language. The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in their former territories, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in the various archives of Assyria, Babylonia, Ancient Egypt and the broader Middle East; the decipherment of these texts was a key event in the history of Indo-European studies.
Scholars once attributed the development of iron-smelting to the Hittites, who were thought to have monopolized ironworking during the Bronze Age. This theory has been increasingly contested in the 21st century, with the Late Bronze Age collapse, and subsequent Iron Age, seeing the slow, comparatively continuous spread of ironworking technology across the region. While there are some iron objects from Bronze Age Anatolia, the number is comparable to that of iron objects found in Egypt, Mesopotamia and in other places from the same period; and only a small number of these objects are weapons.Waldbaum, Jane C. (1978). From Bronze to Iron. Gothenburg: Paul Astöms Förlag. pp. 56–58. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry suggests that most or all irons from the Bronze Age are derived from . The Hittite military also made successful use of chariots.
Modern interest in the Hittites increased with the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The Hittites attracted the attention of Turkish archaeologists such as Halet Çambel and Tahsin Özgüç. During this period, the new field of Hittitology also influenced the naming of Turkish institutions, such as the state-owned Etibank ("Hittite bank"), and the foundation of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, built west of the Hittite capital of Hattusa, which houses the world's most comprehensive exhibition of Hittite art and artifacts.
As the discoveries in the second half of the 19th century revealed the scale of the Anatolian Hittite kingdom, Archibald Sayce asserted that, rather than being compared to Judah, the Anatolian civilization "was worthy of comparison to the divided Kingdom of Egypt", and was "infinitely more powerful than that of Judah".The Hittites: the story of a forgotten empire By Archibald Henry Sayce Queen's College, Oxford. October 1888. Introduction Sayce and other scholars also noted that Judah and the Hittites were never enemies in the Hebrew texts; in the Book of Kings, they supplied the Israelites with cedar, chariots, and horses, and in the Book of Genesis were friends and allies to Abraham. Uriah the Hittite was a captain in King David's army and counted as one of his "mighty men" in 1 Chronicles 11.
The first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the karum of Kanesh (now called Kültepe), containing records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a certain "land of Hatti". Some names in the tablets were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but clearly Indo-European.
The script on a monument at Boğazkale by a "People of Hattusas" discovered by William Wright in 1884 was found to match peculiar logogram scripts from Aleppo and Hama in Northern Syria. In 1887, excavations at Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son, Akhenaten. Two of the letters from a "kingdom of Kheta"—apparently located in the same general region as the Mesopotamian references to "land of Hatti"—were written in standard Akkadian cuneiform, but in an unknown language; although scholars could interpret its sounds, no one could understand it. Shortly after this, Sayce proposed that Hatti or Khatti in Anatolia was identical with the "kingdom of Kheta" mentioned in these Egyptian texts, as well as with the biblical Hittites. Others, such as Max Müller, agreed that Khatti was probably Kheta, but proposed connecting it with Biblical Kittim rather than with the Biblical Hittites. Sayce's identification came to be widely accepted over the course of the early 20th century; and the name "Hittite" has become attached to the civilization uncovered at Boğazköy.
During sporadic excavations at Boğazköy (Hattusa) that began in 1906, the archaeologist Hugo Winckler found a royal archive with 10,000 tablets, inscribed in cuneiform Akkadian and the same unknown language as the Egyptian letters from Kheta—thus confirming the identity of the two names. He also proved that the ruins at Boğazköy were the remains of the capital of an empire that, at one point, controlled northern Syria.
Under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute, excavations at Hattusa have been under way since 1907, with interruptions during the world wars. Kültepe was successfully excavated by Professor Tahsin Özgüç from 1948 until his death in 2005. Smaller scale excavations have also been carried out in the immediate surroundings of Hattusa, including the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, which contains numerous portraying the Hittite rulers and the gods of the Hittite pantheon.
To the west and south of the core territory lay the region known as Luwians in the earliest Hittite texts. This terminology was replaced by the names Arzawa and Kizzuwatna with the rise of those kingdoms.John Marangozis (2003) A Short Grammar of Hieroglyphic Luwian Nevertheless, the Hittites continued to refer to the language that originated in these areas as Luwian language. Prior to the rise of Kizzuwatna, the heart of that territory in Cilicia was first referred to by the Hittites as Adana. Upon its revolt from the Hittites during the reign of Ammuna, it assumed the name of Kizzuwatna and successfully expanded northward to encompass the lower Anti-Taurus Mountains as well. To the north lived the mountain people called the Kaskians. To the southeast of the Hittites lay the Hurrian empire of Mitanni.
At its peak during the reign of Muršili II, the Hittite empire stretched from Arzawa in the west to Mitanni in the east, and included many of the Kaskian territories north as far as Hayasa-Azzi in the far north-east, as well as south into Canaan near the southern border of Lebanon.
The Hittites are first associated with the kingdom of Kussara sometime prior to 1750 BC.
Hittites in Anatolia during the Bronze Age coexisted with Hattians and Hurrians, either by means of conquest or by gradual assimilation... In archaeological terms, relationships of the Hittites to the Ezero culture of the Balkans and Maykop culture of the Caucasus had previously been considered within the migration framework.
Analyses by David W. Anthony in 2007 concluded that steppe herders who were archaic Indo-European speakers spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BC, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe. He thought their languages "probably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly preserved later in Anatolian," and that their descendants later moved into Anatolia at an unknown time but maybe as early as 3000 BC.
J. P. Mallory also thought it was likely that the Anatolians reached the Near East from the north either via the Balkans or the Caucasus in the 3rd millennium BC. According to Parpola, the appearance of Indo-European speakers from Europe into Anatolia, and the appearance of Hittite, was related to later migrations of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamnaya culture into the Danube Valley at c. 2800 BC, which was in line with the "customary" assumption that the Anatolian Indo-European language was introduced into Anatolia sometime in the third millennium BC.
However, Petra Goedegebuure has shown that the Hittite language has borrowed many words related to agriculture from cultures on their eastern borders, which is evidence of having taken a route across the Caucasus.
A team at the David Reich Lab demonstrated that the Hittite route must have been via the Caucasus and not the Balkans, since Yamnaya expansion into the Balkans carried a component of Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry that does not exist in any ancient Anatolian DNA samples, which indicates also that Hittites and their cousin groups split off from the Proto Indo Europeans before the formation of the Yamnaya which did admix with Eastern Hunter Gatherers.
The dominant indigenous inhabitants in central Anatolia were Hurrians and Hattians who spoke non-Indo-European languages. Some have argued that Hattic was a Northwest Caucasian language, but its affiliation remains uncertain, whilst the Hurrian language was a near-language isolate (i.e. it was one of only two or three languages in the Hurro-Urartian family). There were also colonies in the region during the Old Assyrian Empire (2025–1750 BC); it was from the Assyrian speakers of Upper Mesopotamia that the Hittites adopted the cuneiform script. It took some time before the Hittites established themselves following the collapse of the Old Assyrian Empire in the mid-18th century BC, as is clear from some of the texts included here. For several centuries there were separate Hittite groups, usually centered on various cities. But then strong rulers with their center in Hattusa (modern Boğazkale) succeeded in bringing these together and conquering large parts of central Anatolia to establish the Hittite kingdom.
Zalpuwa first attacked Kanesh under Uhna in 1833 BC. And during this kārum period, when the merchant colony of the Old Assyrian Empire was flourishing in the site, and before the conquest of Pithana, the following local kings reigned in Kaneš: Ḫurmili (prior to 1790 BC), Paḫanu (a short time in 1790 BC), Inar (–1775 BC), and Waršama (–1750 BC).Kloekhorst, Alwin, (2021). "A new interpretation of the Old Hittite Zalpa-text (CTH 3.1): Nēša as the capital under Ḫuzzii̯a I, Labarna I, and Ḫattušili I" , in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol.141, No. 3, p. 564.
One set of tablets, known collectively as the Anitta text,ed. StBoT 18 begin by telling how Pithana the king of Kussara conquered neighbouring Neša (Kanesh), this conquest took place around 1750 BC.Kloekhorst, Alwin, (2021). "A new interpretation of the Old Hittite Zalpa-text (CTH 3.1): Nēša as the capital under Ḫuzzii̯a I, Labarna I, and Ḫattušili I" , in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 141, No. 3, p. 564: "...Around 1750 BCE, Pitḫāna, king of Kuššara, conquered Nēša and took over power. He was succeeded by his son Anitta..." However, the real subject of these tablets is Pithana's son Anitta ( BC), who continued where his father left off and conquered several northern cities: including Hattusa, which he cursed, and also Zalpuwa. This was likely propaganda for the southern branch of the royal family, against the northern branch who had fixed on Hattusa as capital. Another set, the Tale of Zalpuwa, supports Zalpuwa and exonerates the later Ḫattušili I from the charge of sacking Kanesh.
Anitta was succeeded by Zuzzu ( BC); but sometime in 1710–1705 BC, Kanesh was destroyed, taking the long-established Assyrian merchant trading system with it. A Kussaran noble family survived to contest the Zalpuwan/Hattusan family, though whether these were of the direct line of Anitta is uncertain.
Meanwhile, the lords of Zalpa lived on. Huzziya I (the "elder" Huzziya), descendant of a Huzziya of Zalpa, took over Hatti. His son-in-law Labarna I, a southerner from Hurma usurped the throne but made sure to adopt Huzziya's grandson Ḫattušili as his own son and heir. The location of the land of Hurma is believed to be in the mountains south of Kussara.Joost Blasweiler (2020), The kingdom of Hurma during the reign of Labarna and Hattusili. Part I. academia.edu
Hattusili was king, and his sons, brothers, in-laws, family members, and troops were all united. Wherever he went on campaign he controlled the enemy land with force. He destroyed the lands one after the other, took away their power, and made them the borders of the sea. When he came back from campaign, however, each of his sons went somewhere to a country, and in his hand the great cities prospered. But, when later the princes' servants became corrupt, they began to devour the properties, conspired constantly against their masters, and began to shed their blood.
This excerpt from The Edict of Telepinu, dating to the 16th century BC, is supposed to illustrate the unification, growth, and prosperity of the Hittites under his rule. It also illustrates the corruption of "the princes", believed to be his sons. The lack of sources leads to uncertainty of how the corruption was addressed. On Hattusili I's deathbed, he chose his grandson, Mursili I (or Murshilish I), as his heir.
Mursili continued the conquests of Hattusili I. In 1595 BC (middle chronology) or 1587 BC (low middle chronology), Mursili I conducted a great raid down the Euphrates River, bypassing Assyria and sacking Mari and Babylon, ejecting the Amorite dynasty of the Old Babylonian Empire in the process. Rather than incorporate Babylonia into Hittite domains, Mursili seems to have instead turned control of Babylonia over to his Kassites allies, who were to Kassite dynasty for the next four centuries. Due to fear of revolts at home, he did not remain in Babylon for long. This lengthy campaign strained the resources of Hatti, and left the capital in a state of near-anarchy. Mursili was assassinated by his brother-in-law Hantili I during his journey back to Hattusa or shortly after his return home, and the Hittite Kingdom was plunged into chaos. Hantili took the throne. He was able to escape multiple murder attempts on himself, however, his family did not. His wife, Harapsili and her son were murdered. In addition, other members of the royal family were killed by Zidanta I, who was then murdered by his own son, Ammuna. All of the internal unrest among the Hittite royal family led to a decline of power. The Hurrians, a people living in the mountainous region along the upper Tigris River and Euphrates River rivers in modern south east Turkey, took advantage of the situation to seize Aleppo and the surrounding areas for themselves, as well as the coastal region of Adaniya, renaming it Kizzuwatna (later Cilicia). Throughout the remainder of the 16th century BC, the Hittite kings were held to their homelands by dynastic quarrels and warfare with the Hurrians. The Hurrians became the center of power in Anatolia. The campaigns into Amurru kingdom and southern Mesopotamia may be responsible for the reintroduction of cuneiform writing into Anatolia, since the Hittite script is quite different from that of the preceding Assyrian colonial period.
The Hittites entered a weak phase of obscure records, insignificant rulers, and reduced domains. This pattern of expansion under strong kings followed by contraction under weaker ones, was to be repeated over and over through the Hittite Kingdom's 500-year history, making events during the waning periods difficult to reconstruct. The political instability of these years of the Old Hittite Kingdom can be explained in part by the nature of the Hittite kingship at that time. During the Old Hittite Kingdom prior to 1400 BC, the king of the Hittites was not viewed by his subjects as a "living god" like the of Egypt, but rather as a first among equals. Only in the later period from 1400 BC until 1200 BC did the Hittite kingship become more centralized and powerful. Also in earlier years the succession was not legally fixed, enabling "War of the Roses"-style rivalries between northern and southern branches.
The next monarch of note following Mursili I was Telepinu (), who won a few victories to the southwest, apparently by allying himself with one Hurrian state (Kizzuwatna) against another. Telepinu also attempted to secure the lines of succession.
It segues into the "Hittite Empire period" proper, which dates from the reign of Tudhaliya I from .
One innovation that can be credited to these early Hittite rulers is the practice of conducting treaties and alliances with neighboring states; the Hittites were thus among the earliest known pioneers in the art of international politics and diplomacy. This is also when the Hittite religion adopted several gods and rituals from the Hurrians.
During his reign (), King Tudhaliya I, again allied with Kizzuwatna, then vanquished the Hurrian states of Aleppo and Mitanni, and expanded to the west at the expense of Arzawa (a Luwian state).
Another weak phase followed Tudhaliya I, and the Hittites' enemies from all directions were able to advance even to Hattusa and raze it. However, the kingdom recovered its former glory under Šuppiluliuma I (), who again conquered Aleppo. Mitanni was reduced to vassalage by the Assyrians under his son-in-law, and he defeated Carchemish, another Amorite city-state. With his own sons placed over all of these new conquests and Babylonia still in the hands of the allied Kassites, this left Šuppiluliuma the supreme power broker in the known world, alongside Assyria and Egypt, and it was not long before Egypt was seeking an alliance by marriage of another of his sons with the widow of Tutankhamen. That son was evidently murdered before reaching his destination, and this alliance was never consummated. However, the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365–1050 BC) once more began to grow in power with the ascension of Ashur-uballit I in 1365 BC. Ashur-uballit I attacked and defeated Shattiwaza the Mitanni king despite attempts by the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I, now fearful of growing Assyrian power, attempting to preserve his throne with military support. The lands of the Mitanni and Hurrians were duly appropriated by Assyria, enabling it to encroach on Hittite territory in eastern Asia Minor, and Adad-nirari I annexed Carchemish and northeast Syria from the control of the Hittites.
While Šuppiluliuma I reigned, the Hittite Empire was devastated by Hittite plague of tularemia. The epidemic afflicted the Hittites for decades and tularemia killed Šuppiluliuma I and his successor, Arnuwanda II. After Šuppiluliuma I's rule, and the brief reign of his eldest son, Arnuwanda II, another son, Mursili II, became king (). Having inherited a position of strength in the east, Mursili was able to turn his attention to the west, where he attacked Arzawa. At a point when the Hittites were weakened by the tularemia epidemic, the Arzawans attacked the Hittites, who repelled the attack by sending infected rams to the Arzawans. This was the first recorded use of biological warfare. Mursili also attacked a city known as Millawanda (Miletus), which was under the control of Ahhiyawa. More recent research based on new readings and interpretations of the Hittite texts, as well as of the material evidence for Mycenaean contacts with the Anatolian mainland, came to the conclusion that Ahhiyawa referred to Mycenaean Greece, or at least to a part of it.
Hattusili's son, Tudhaliya IV, was the last strong Hittite king able to keep the Assyrians out of the Hittite heartland to some degree at least, though he too lost much territory to them, and was heavily defeated by Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria in the Battle of Nihriya. He even temporarily annexed the island of Cyprus, before that too fell to Assyria. The last king, Šuppiluliuma II also managed to win some victories, including a naval battle against Alashiya off the coast of Cyprus.Horst Nowacki, Wolfgang Lefèvre Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture: A Cross-Disciplinary Comparison Brill, 2009 Bryce sees the Great Kingdom's end as a gradual disintegration. Pointing to the death of Hattusili as a starting point. Tudhaliya would have to put down rebellions and plots against his rule. This was not abnormal. However the Hittite military were stretched thin, due to a lack of manpower and hits to the population of the Empire. Putting down revolts and civil wars with brute force was not something Hatti could do to the same extent anymore. Every soldier was also a worker away from the economy, such as food production. Thus, casualties from war became ever more costly and unsustainable.
The Sea Peoples had already begun their push down the Mediterranean coastline, starting from the Aegean Sea, and continuing all the way to Canaan, founding the state of Cilicia and Cyprus away from the Hittites en route and cutting off their coveted trade routes. This left the Hittite homelands vulnerable to attack from all directions, and Hattusa was burnt to the ground sometime around 1180 BC following a combined onslaught from new waves of invaders: the Kaskians, Phrygians and Bryges. The Hittite Kingdom thus vanished from historical records, much of the territory being seized by Assyria. Alongside these attacks, many internal issues also led to the end of the Hittite Kingdom. The end of the kingdom was part of the larger Bronze Age Collapse. (2026). 9781111342142, Wadsworth Cengage Learning. ISBN 9781111342142 A study of tree rings of juniper trees growing in the region showed a change to drier conditions from the 13th century BC into the 12th century BC with drought for three consecutive years in 1198, 1197 and 1196 BC.
Although the Hittite Kingdom disappeared from Anatolia at this point, there emerged a number of so-called Syro-Hittite states in Anatolia and northern Syria. They were the successors of the Hittite Kingdom. The most notable Syro-Hittite kingdoms were those at Carchemish and Melid. With the ruling family in Carchemish believed to have been a cadet branch of the then defunct central ruling Hittite line. These Syro-Hittite states gradually fell under the control of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–608 BC). Carchemish and Melid were made vassals of Assyria under Shalmaneser III (858–823 BC), and fully incorporated into Assyria during the reign of Sargon II (722–705 BC).
A large and powerful state known as Tabal occupied much of southern Anatolia. Known as Greek Tibareni (), Latin Tibareni, Thobeles in Josephus, their language may have been Luwian,Barnett, R.D., "Phrygia and the Peoples of Anatolia in the Iron Age", The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II, Part 2 (1975) p. 422 testified to by monuments written using Anatolian hieroglyphs.The Georgian historian Ivane Javakhishvili considered Tabal, Tubal, Jabal and Jubal to be ancient Georgians tribal designations, and argued that they spoke Kartvelian languages, a non-Indo-European language This state too was conquered and incorporated into the vast Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Ultimately, both Luwian hieroglyphs and cuneiform were rendered obsolete by an innovation, the alphabet, which seems to have entered Anatolia simultaneously from the Aegean (with the Bryges, who changed their name to Phrygians), and from the and neighboring peoples in Syria.
Egyptian monarchs engaged in diplomacy with two chief Hittite seats, located at Kadesh (a city located on the Orontes River) and Carchemish (located on the Euphrates river in Southern Anatolia).
The Pankus established a legal code where violence was not a punishment for a crime. Crimes such as a murder and theft, which at the time were punishable by death, in other southwest Asian kingdoms, were not under the Hittite law code. Most criminal penalties involved restitution. For example, in cases of thievery, the punishment of that crime would to be to repay what was stolen in equal value.
In theory the land was owned by the gods, while in practice the King controlled the best lands, with a variety of other ownership forms after this. Land could be granted by the King to individuals in exchange for military service. The workforce working in food production was critical to the economy, thus wars taking men away from this could impact the food output of the Great Kingdom. Temples were an important part of the economy.
Shekels, minas and talents were the standard form of 'currency'. They were weights in either, copper, bronze, silver or gold. With the ratio being 40 Shekels equaling 1 Mina, which is different from other great kingdoms where it could be 60 to 1. One shekel being 8.3 gram. A silver shekel being worth 150l of wheat, you could buy 3,600 square meters land plot for 2-3 shekels silver, with an similar sized vineyard going up to 40 shekels of silver. A male laborer could earn one silver shekel per month, with women half that. They could also be paid in kind, taking a part of the harvest, which could be better than a wage. Bryce notes that men also did the most physically demanding work.
The language of the Hattusa tablets was eventually deciphered by a Czech linguist, Bedřich Hrozný (1879–1952), who, on 24 November 1915, announced his results in a lecture at the Near Eastern Society of Berlin. His book about the discovery was printed in Leipzig in 1917, under the title The Language of the Hittites; Its Structure and Its Membership in the Indo-European Linguistic Family.Hrozný, Bedřich, Die Sprache der Hethiter: ihr Bau und ihre Zugehörigkeit zum indogermanischen Sprachstamm: ein Entzifferungsversuch (Leipzig, Germany: J.C. Hinrichs, 1917). The preface of the book begins with:
The present work undertakes to establish the nature and structure of the hitherto mysterious language of the Hittites, and to decipher this language ... It will be shown that Hittite is in the main an Indo-European language.
The decipherment famously led to the confirmation of the laryngeal theory in Indo-European linguistics, which had been predicted several decades before. Due to its marked differences in its structure and phonology, some early philology, most notably Warren Cowgill, had even argued that it should be classified as a sister language to Indo-European languages (Indo-Hittite), rather than a daughter language. By the end of the Hittite Empire, the Hittite language had become a written language of administration and diplomatic correspondence. The population of most of the Hittite Empire by this time spoke Luwian, another Indo-European language of the Anatolian family that had originated to the west of the Hittite region.
According to Craig Melchert, the current tendency is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European evolved, and that the "prehistoric speakers" of Anatolian became isolated "from the rest of the PIE speech community, so as not to share in some common innovations." Hittite, as well as its Anatolian cousins, split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage, thereby preserving archaisms that were later lost in the other Indo-European languages.
In Hittite there are many loanwords, particularly religious vocabulary, from the non-Indo-European Hurrian language and Hattic language languages. The latter was the language of the Hattians, the local inhabitants of the land of Hatti before being absorbed or displaced by the Hittites. Sacred and magical texts from Hattusa were often written in Hattic, Hurrian, and Luwian, even after Hittite became the norm for other writings.
Weather god were prominent in the Hittite pantheon. Tarhunt (Hurrian's Teshub) was referred to as 'The Conqueror', 'The king of Kummiya', 'King of Heaven', 'Lord of the land of Hatti'. He was chief among the gods and his symbol is the bull. As Teshub he was depicted as a bearded man astride two mountains and bearing a club. He was the god of battle and victory, especially when the conflict involved a foreign power. Teshub was also known for his conflict with the serpent Illuyanka.
The Hittite gods are also honoured with festivals, such as Puruli in the spring, the nuntarriyashas festival in the autumn, and the KI.LAM festival of the gate house where images of the Storm God and up to thirty other idols were paraded through the streets.
Cases in which capital punishment is recommended in the articles most often seem to come from pre-reform sentences for severe crimes and prohibited sexual pairings. Many of these cases include public torture and execution as punishment for serious crimes against religion. Most of these sentences would begin to go away in the later stages of the Hittite Empire as major law reforms began to occur.
At some point in the 16th or 15th century BC, Hittite law codes move away from torture and capital punishment and to more humanitarian forms of punishments, such as fines. Where the old law system was based on retaliation and retribution for crimes, the new system saw punishments that were much more mild, favoring monetary compensation over physical or capital punishment. Why these drastic reforms happened is not exactly clear, but it is likely that punishing murder with execution was deemed not to benefit any individual or family involved. These reforms were not just seen in the realm of capital punishment. Where major fines were to be paid, a severe reduction in penalty can be seen. For example, prior to these major reforms, the payment to be made for the theft of an animal was thirty times the animal's value; after the reforms, the penalty was reduced to half the original fine. Simultaneously, attempts to modernize the language and change the verbiage used in the law codes can be seen during this period of reform.
Not all laws prescribed in the tablets deal with criminal punishment. For example, the instructions of how the marriage of slaves and division of their children are given in a group of articles, "The slave woman shall take most of the children, with the male slave taking one child." Similar instructions are given to the marriage of free individuals and slaves. Other actions include how breaking of engagements are to be handled.
Other biblical scholars (following Max Müller) have argued that the Bronze Age Hittites appear in Hebrew Bible literature and apocrypha as "Kittim", a people said to be named for a son of Javan.
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