The Hittites — Sleep Podcast

They are the people of a name that was invented for them — named, by an Egyptian scribe, after the marauders of his nightmares — and yet for a time they were the empire that everyone else had to reckon with. In the highlands of what is now Turkey, on a wide dry plain at the great slow bend of a river, there stood the city of Hattusa: capital of a kingdom that fought the pharaohs to a draw at Kadesh, that sealed its wars in silver, that ruled by law and assembly, and that kept the oldest surviving peace treaty between two great powers. A slow bedtime history of the people of Hatti, the iron, and the chariots.

About an hour and a quarter, in the voice of the show. We lie down on the plain at dusk; we learn the name we invented for them, and the trading post in the highlands that taught the empire its business; we go up with the man from Hattusa, and stand in the city on the bend, where the storm god and the queen share the throne; we sit in on the law and the assembly; we watch the chariot turn the battle, and the battle of Kadesh run out of both armies’ arrows; we read the silver treaty, word for word; we follow the long legend of iron through the fire that killed the age of it; and we come, at the end, to the letters of the great powers, the fire, and the things that survived.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About seventy-five minutes. Dates in the Bronze Age carry their usual scholarly uncertainty; where the record hedges, the narration hedges with it.

Sources (a selection): Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (2005); Bryce, The Hittites (2005, 2nd ed. 2014); the treaty of Kadesh, Egyptian and Hittite versions (British Museum EA 19568; Boğazkoy tablet); the Kadesh letters (Egyptian–Hittite correspondence, Amarna archive EA 148+); Hawkins, The Language and Culture of the Hittites; the Anatolian legal collections (Laws of Hattusa); Cuneiform digital library editions of the Hittite treaty corpus; Wikipedia and World History Encyclopedia entries (Hittites, Hattusa, Hattusili I, Battle of Kadesh, Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty, Sun goddess of Arinna, Chariot) consulted for dates and framing.