It is because of the fact that much of the Hittites’ royal archives remain today that historians and archeologists have been able to put together facts and stories about theur past. At their earliest, the Hittites were the people living in a small city-state named Kussara, which has not been identified by archeologists as yet. Their king was named Anittas, and under his leadership, the state expanded to include the cities of Kanesh and Hattush (also known as Hattusas). This was the capital of the Hittite kingdom when the Hittite power was at its peak. It is located near the Turkish village of Bogazk and can be visited today (Gurney, 1990).

It was when Hattusilis I conquered the plain south of Hattush and all the land up to wht is today Aleppo in Syria that he Hittite Empire was born. Once the Hittites had a firm foothold on their land and empire, they made Boghazkoy their capital. This state became a prime center for administration, business and trade activities.
The people of the Hittite Empire also developed its own particular law code, symbols of which when found were very similar to the code of Hammurabi. It was when Boghazkoy was excavated that around 10,000 clay tablets were found. There were lexicons which provided the Hittite word, as well as its Sumerian and Assyrian equivalents, and facilitated the task of translators (Gurney, 1990).

The heir of Hattusilis I, Mursilis I, continued to follow in his footsteps and continued with the conquests of Hattusilis, even reaching to Mesopotamia and threatening Babylonia. But what he had not accounted for was the terrible strain this campaign had proved to be for the nation’s resources and soon, the capital had reached a state close to anarchy. After some time, Mursilis was assassinated and the Hittite Empire’s days of glory were over. Their successors were the Hurrians, a tribe residing in the mountainous region along the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, who saw the chaos prevalent in the Hittite Empire and captured Aleppo and the surrounding areas for themselves (Lehmann, 1975).

The true end for the Hittite kingdom however, came when Northern nomadic warrior tribes started attacking their territories and capturing them. The fall of the Hittities was as fast and rapid as had been their rise. Each of their great cities one by one became the target of their enemies. This was largely due to the fact that their enemies had gained hold over what was previously the Hittities’ prime secret weapon – iron.

The Hittites were the very first people to gain perfection in the craft of iron smelting, and they were the only ones able to do so for a number of centuries. Iron was cheap to produce and the Hittites armed themselves with superior weapons and defeated their enemies (Lehmann, 1975).

The last of their great cities, Carchemesh was captured by the Assyrians in 717 BC. Their people contined living in small discrete holdings in Central and southeastern Anatolia and their language and culture remained as late as the 5th century AD (Lehmann, 1975).

Link with Archeology
For centuries, the Bible was considered a source of true historical stories. It was considered true and authentic, and no one dared to cast a shadow of doubt about what was transcribed in the Holy Book. Events such as ones in the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the construction of the tower of Babel, the deeds of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt – people had no doubt that all these had happened exactly as was written in the scripture. But it was in the era of ‘Enlightenment’, also called the Age of Reason of the 17th and 18th centuries that European intellectuals started claiming that it was only when human, scientific reason was applied that true knowledge was acquired, and never without that. Hence, the scriptural accounts were no longer believed without doubt, rather, the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of biblical events were for the first time considered.

What further aggravated debate and controversy was the 19th century theory of evolution, which gave another twist to the existence of man. This alternative version had no mention of God and the Bible was completely left out of the picture (Archeologists are digging up bible stories; Gaalyah, 1976). Soon a lot of scholars began to complete disregard the Scripture as an authentic account of events and started considering it unhistorical. They began to consider biblical history the same as ancient Greek and Roman myths. The Bible came to be viewed by skeptics as a collection of myths, rather than anything with authenticity and verifiability. Hence, in the same vein, even though the Bible refers to the great Hittite Empire more than 40 times, scholars did not believe in the existence of such a kingdom as no archaeological evidence had ever been found in its proof (Archeologists are digging up bible stories).

Archaeology has however, helped a lot in correcting the impression that the Bible and the history associated with it could not be trusted at all times. At many times, archeological findings have shown that the Bible should be trusted in what it says. The case with The Hittites is similar. It was n 1906 that Hugo Winckler, as part of a German expedition, uncovered a library of around 10,000 clay tablets. These historical records fully documented the ancient Hittite Empire and were a complete proof of the reliability of the Bible. The excavations which were carried out after this time even uncovered Boghazkoy, which was the capital city of this so-called mythical empire (Gaalyah, 1976).

This is what makes this topic interesting – how scholars vehemently denied the existence of any such Empire, but were proved wrong when the Bible was in fact proved correct by modern archeology. These discoveries not only lent authenticity to the Scripture, but also shed light on many aspects of biblical culture. For example, the following quotation recounts the scenario of Abraham’s purchase of Ephron’s field: “So Ephron’s field, which was in Machpelah, which faced Mamre, the field and cave which was in it, and all the trees which were in the field, that were within all the confines of its border, were deeded over to Abraham for a possession in the presence of the sons of Heth” (Genesis 23:17). This illuminates a common Hittite practice of counting the trees involved in any purchase or sale of land. Also, it should be noticed that the witnesses to this purchase were the “son's of Heth”, that is, the Hittites (Jenkins, 2001; Oglesby, 2003).

Critics and scholars might have continued to treat the Bible and its events with skepticism and disbelief had excavations not been conducted. It was in the latter half of the 19th century that the first Hittite remnants were uncovered at Carchemish on the Euphrates River in Syria, which sufficiently supported the Bible account. Then, as was said earlier, the 1906 excavations at Boghazkoy (which is another name for ancient Hattusas, capital of the Hittite empire) in Turkey led to the discovery of uncountable Hittite documents, which provided a lot of information about the history and culture of this tribe. Some of the tablets had vocabularies with Sumerian, Babylonian and Hittite equivalents, and others were with regard to the administration of government. Still others were written in Akkadian and contained laws and codes. As was said in the Bible, these people had a lot of power and were once the dominant peoples of Asia Minor and the Near East. All this was proven true as the documents justified these accounts (Jenkins, 2001).