Hittite Empire Rediscovered: Babylon Sacked, Plague Rams, Kadesh Treaty

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Nineteenth-century scholars dismissed the Hittites as a minor biblical tribe. In 1834 Charles Texier, hunting a Roman city near Boğazköy in Turkey, found vast walls and lion and sphinx gates and guessed they were a temple of Jupiter. The Amarna letters then mentioned a great power called Hatti, and in 1906 Hugo Winckler dug up the royal archives of Hattusa, about 10,000 cuneiform tablets. In 1915 Bedřich Hrozný deciphered the language as Indo-European, the oldest known, showing the Hittites had migrated into Anatolia around 1900 BC. Hattusili I made Hattusa his capital, and in 1595 BC his grandson Mursili I sacked Babylon, left it to the Kassites, and was murdered by his brother-in-law at home.

In the Empire Period, Suppiluliuma I grew so powerful that Tutankhamun's widow asked him for a son to marry and make pharaoh, but the prince was killed on the way. A plague brought back from the Levant, likely tularemia, killed Suppiluliuma and his heir. Around 1274 BC the Hittites fought Ramesses II at Kadesh to a stalemate, and in 1258 BC both sides signed the earliest known surviving peace treaty. Around 1180 BC, after Assyrian wars, Sea Peoples raids and a drought from about 1198 to 1196 BC emptied the state's grain silos, Hattusa was burned.

• Mursili II sent tularemia-infected rams toward the Arzawan army, the first conclusively recorded use of biological warfare.
• The Treaty of Kadesh required extradition of fugitive nobles and mutual defense against third parties.
• A council of nobles called the pankus could judge cases and in theory hold the royal family to account.
• Hittite law favored compensation: thieves repaid stolen livestock and attackers paid medical bills and lost wages.
• Bronze Age iron was mostly meteoritic and ceremonial, so the Hittites' real edge was a heavy three-man chariot.