The Hittites

For most of a century, Egypt had no rival worth the name. Then a kingdom in the mountains of central Anatolia destroyed the kingdom of Mitanni, fought the largest recorded battle of the Bronze Age to a draw at Kadesh, and negotiated with the pharaoh as an equal. The peace they signed is the oldest surviving treaty between two great powers, and a copy of it still hangs in the United Nations.

The Hittites wrote everything down: laws, treaties, letters, rituals, inventories, the margins of school exercises. Their archive at Hattusa is one of the richest in the ancient world, and it has been read only since 1915, when a Czech scholar recognized that the language on the tablets was related to Greek, Latin, and English. This book follows that archive from the first Assyrian merchants in Anatolia to the last Neo-Hittite kings, through the courtroom, the temple, the chariot stable, and the royal marriage that made peace between Hatti and Egypt.

It also asks why a civilization this well documented could vanish from memory for three thousand years, and what the evidence actually shows about the Late Bronze Age collapse that ended it.