Fwd: Kings of the Hittites :

[Guest guest]

The first column of dates at left is from O.R. Gurney, The Hittites

[Penguin Books, 1952, 1962, p.216]. The second column of dates is

from Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq [Penguin Books, 1964, 1992, pp.507-9]

and/or Am�lie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC [Routledge,

1995, 2000, p.230]. In the table for the " Empire " period below,

Gurney, Roux, and Kuhrt have been separated into three columns, with

Kuhrt's column giving alternative dates in itself. The uncertainties

of Hittite dating are still so great that Kuhrt also gives the Kings

in a different sequence, as can be seen from the dates.

 

In the earlier chronologies, there is the inconvenience that the

events of the reign of Ramesses II do not match up with the

corresponding Hittite dates for these events. Thus, Roux gives 1300

as the date for the battle of Qadesh, while none of the Egyptian

references has Ramesses coming to the throne before 1290. Kuhrt's

latest dates allow a match for the Battle of Qadesh given with

Egyptian chronology, 1275.

 

The earlier histories usually give the names of the Hittite Kings

with a final " s. " Kuhrt drops this, without discussion. Presumably

the " s " is not actually in the texts. I would imagine that when it

was discovered that Hittite was an Indo-European language, it may

have become customary to assume the same nominative ending that is

found from Latin to Greek to Sanskrit, i.e. " s. " Apparently, the

custom has lapsed.

Although the Kingdom of the Hittites in central Anatolia was wiped

out by the obscure migrations of the 12th century, small Hittite

(nor " Neo-Hittite " ) states continued in Northern Syria, to which

references to the Hittites in the Bible refer. These small states are

still commemorated in the name " Hatay " given to the province of

Turkey containing Antioch. Although any Hittites are long gone, the

Turkish name is a political claim to tie the province to Anatolia,

while the population was actually overwhelmingly Arab when France

ceded the area from Syria to Turkey in 1939 -- a perhaps a vindictive

act to punish the Syrians for not appreciating French rule.

 

The discovery of the Hittite Kingdom and its language was an

archaeological sensation at a time when the only Hittites anyone was

aware of were those of the small states in the Bible. The

decipherment of the Hittite language created another sensation, when

it turned out to be an Indo-European language. Even better, it was an

evidently archaic dialect which contained sounds in positions that

comparative theory had predicted should have been " pharyngeal " sounds

(perhaps like Arabic 'ayn) in Proto-Indo-European, but which had not

hitherto been found in attested languages.

 

Ironically, it was the Hittites who then brought to an end the

Kingdom of the Mitanni, which may have been ruled by a noble elite

with Indo-Aryan affinities, speaking or influenced by another Indo-

European language from the same family as Persian and Sanskrit, and

who worshiped gods obviously identical to those of the Vedas. The

Indo-Aryan influence on Mitanni had clearly come in across Iran, but

where the Hittites originally came from, if not autochthonous, is as

mysterious as ever.

 

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