Draft:Hittites

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The Hittites are an Indo-European people possibly mentioned in the Bible. They form part of the larger Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family. The decipherment of their language was instrumental in determining that the Laryngeal theory proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure was indeed true.

History

The Hittites arrived into Anatolia where they displaced a group known as the Hattians in the 3^rd-4^th millennia BCE. Some people also claim that the Indo-Europeans were native to Anatolia, but this is rejected by most scholars. The Hittites were first just a group of tribes, but around the 18^nd century BCE, after the collapse of the Old Assyrian Empire they unified and established an empire that controlled most of central Anatolia and Syria. The Hittite empire went through a period of decline, before rebounding in the 1500s BCE. In the 13^th century BCE they rebuilt their empire and fought the Ancient Egyptians over Syria, with their most famous clash being at Kadesh. The Hittites underwent a period of decline and were then destroyed during the Bronze age collapse. However, some Hittites survived in Syria and south-eastern Anatolia. These were later conquered by the Neo-Assyrian empire, then the Neo-Babylonian empire, then the Achaemenid empire then by Alexander the great in his Macedonian empire.

In the Bible

The Bible mentions "Hittites" , but portrayal is inconsistent. In some passages they are a small hill tribe that is indistinguishable from the Canaanite tribes around them., and some were under Solomons rule. In others they are extremely powerful,, on par with the Egyptians.

Nonsensical claims

Some people think that Hittites were the ancestors of the Turks. This and similar claims are utterly nonsensical. Just because you live in the same place as a group or person does not mean that they are "one of us" or your ancestors, at least anymore than any other ethnic group that can lay claim to Anatolian ancestry.

Bibliography

• Anthony, David W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel and Language. How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. 
• Bryce, Trevor R. (2005). The Kingdom of the Hittites (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199279081. 
• Bryce, Trevor R. (2006). The Trojans and their neighbours. Taylor and Francis. ISBN 9780199279081. 
• https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3210199