Fall of the Hittite Empire | Middle East And North Africa

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FALL OF THE HITTITE KINGDOM

Neo-Hittite states

From its position as a great world power, the Hittite Empire quickly collapsed before the 13th-century as an influx of Aegean peoples migrated into western Asia Minor. Many historians say the responsibility for this collapse lies mainly with the "Sea Peoples," who almost conquered Egypt and eventually settled the coastal plain of Palestine. [Source: J. E. Huesman,New Catholic Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia.com]

According to Reuters: Hattusa, the Hititte capital, enclosed by a monumental stone wall with gates adorned with lions and sphinxes, was burned and abandoned. Texts written on clay tablets using the cuneiform script common in the region — detailing Hittite society, politics, religion, economics and foreign affairs — went silent. It was a sudden end. Less than a century earlier, the Hittites under king Muwatalli II and the Egyptians under pharaoh Rameses II fought the famous and inconclusive Battle of Kadesh in 1274 B.C. — waged with thousands of chariots in Syria — and subsequently reached history's first recorded peace treaty. [Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, February 9, 2023]

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “ Under Tudhaliya IV (r. 1245–1215 B.C.), Hattusha was further strengthened and the king completed the construction of a nearby religious sanctuary. However, during his reign, the empire began to suffer setbacks. The Assyrians launched attacks against the eastern borders of the empire as well as in Syria, reducing Hittite territory in these regions. At the same time, Hittite dependencies in the west were being lost.

Sometime around 1200 B.C., Hattusha was violently destroyed and never recovered. Who destroyed the capital is unknown but it was apparently part of the wider collapse of Hittite power. The reasons for the rapid disappearance of the Hittites, who had dominated Anatolia for centuries, remain unexplained. However, Hittite traditions were maintained in northern Syria by a number of dynasties established under the empire, such as at Carchemish, which continued to flourish through the early centuries of the first millennium B.C. [Source: Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. "The Hittites", Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2002, metmuseum.org \^/]

Events Before Fall of the Hittite Empire

According to Crystal Links: “The Assyrians had seized the opportunity to vanquish Mitanni and expand to the Euphrates while Muwatalli was preoccupied with the Egyptians. Assyria now posed equally as great a threat to Hittite trade routes as Egypt had ever been. His son, Urhi-Teshub, took the throne as Mursili III, but was quickly ousted by his uncle, Hattusili III after a brief civil war. In response to increasing Assyrian encroachments along the frontier, he concluded a peace and alliance with Rameses II, presenting his daughter's hand in marriage to the Pharoah. The "Treaty of Kadesh", one of the oldest completely surviving treaties in history, fixed their mutual boundaries in Canaan, and was signed in the 21st year of Rameses (c. 1258 B.C.). [Source: Crystal Links +/]

“Hattusili's son, Tudhaliya IV, was the last strong Hittite king able to keep the Assyrians out of Syria and even temporarily annex the island of Cyprus. The very last king, Suppiluliuma II also managed to win some victories, including a naval battle against the Sea Peoples off the coast of Cyprus. But it was too late. +/

“The Sea Peoples had already begun their push down the Mediterranean coastline, starting from the Aegean, and continuing all the way to Philistia — taking Cilicia and Cyprus away from the Hittites en route and cutting off their coveted trade routes. This left the Hittite homelands vulnerable to attack from all directions, and Hattusa was burnt to the ground sometime around 1180 B.C. following a combined onslaught from Gasgas, Bryges and Luwians. The Hittite Empire thus vanished from the historical record. +/

Mass Migrations and States at the Time of the Hittite Empire Collapse

“By 1160 B.C., the political situation in Asia Minor looked vastly different than it had only 25 years earlier. In that year, the Assyrians were dealing with the Mushku pressing into northernmost Mesopotamia from the Anatolian highlands, and the Gasga people, the Hittites' old enemies from the northern hill-country between Hatti and the Black Sea, seem to have joined them soon after. The Mushku or Mushki had apparently overrun Cappadocia from the West, with recently discovered epigraphic evidence confirming their origins as the Balkan "Bryges" tribe, forced out by the Macedonians. +/

“A large and powerful state known as Tabal had occupied the region south of these. Their language appears to have been Luwian, related to Hittite, but usually written in hieroglyphics instead of cuneiform. Several lesser city-states extending from here to Northern Syria also used Luwian, although they are sometimes known as "neo-Hittite". Soon after these upheavals began, both hieroglyphs and cuneiform were rendered obsolete by a new innovation, the alphabet, that seems to have entered Anatolia simultaneously from the Aegean (with the Bryges, who changed their name to Phrygians), and from the Phoenicians and neighboring peoples in Syria. +/

“Ironically, the language of the Lydians, spoken in the West of Asia Minor until the 1st century B.C., was apparently a linguistic descendant of Hittite, and not Luwian. This and the fact that one of Lydia's kings known to the Greeks bore the Hittite royal name Myrsilis (Mursilis) may indicate that this state was the purest cultural and ethnic continuation of the former Hittites. The last trace of this language persisted until the 5th century AD, according to some Church Fathers, when it was known as the tiny dialect of Isaurian, spoken in only one or two villages.”+/

Late Bronze Age Collapse

The Late Bronze Age collapse refers to widespread societal and state collapse during the 12th century B.C. associated with mass migration, and the destruction of cities and believed to have been caused of exacerbated by environmental change. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, particularly Egypt, eastern Libya, the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and, to a lesser degree, the Caucasus. It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers, notably ushering in the Greek Dark Ages. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Late Bronze Age collapse triggered the collapse of Mycenaean Greek civilization and the Hittite Empire of Anatolia and the Levant. The Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the New Kingdom of Egypt survived but were weakened, Other cultures such as the Phoenicians enjoyed increased autonomy and power with the decline of Egyptian, Hittite and Assyria military presence in West Asia.In what is commonly known as the “Late Bronze Age collapse,” the Hittite Empire and the civilization of the Mycenaean Greeks, as well as many smaller powers and the trade networks that linked them, fell apart. It also led to anarchy, uprisings, civil wars, and rival pharaohs in Egypt, while Assyria and Babylonia suffered famines, outbreaks of disease, and foreign invasions.

Tom Metcalfe wrote in National Geographic: Scholars have struggled for 200 years to explain the collapse as a consequence of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes; piracy, migrations, or invasions; political or economic failures; diseases, famines, or climate change; or even of the spread of iron metallurgy throughout a region dominated by bronze. The historian Eric Clein said in his book "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" (2014), the reasons for the collapse aren't understood, but they may include a wars, social upheaval, invasions or famines caused by climate changes or triggered by natural disasters. The theories with the most support argue that the shift to a drier and colder climate in the eastern Mediterranean disrupted food production, leading to shortages that exacerbated the cultural and economic problems already occurring in the region.

Hittites and the Late Bronze Age Collapse

The fall of the Hittites in the 12th century B.C. coincided with the Late Bronze Age collapse, when several ancient civilizations in Greece, Crete, the Middle East and the Mediterranean were were shaken or decimated. The historian Eric Clein said in his book "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" (2014) the reasons for the collapse aren't understood, but they may include a wars, social upheaval, invasions or famines caused by climate changes or triggered by natural disasters. [Source: Live Science]

Tree Study Shows How Drought May Have Doomed the Ancient Hittite Empire

In February 2023, in a study published in Nature, researchers led by Sturt Manning of Cornell University said an examination of trees alive at the time of the Hittites showed that three consecutive years of severe drought may have caused crop failures, famine and political-societal disintegration that led to the Hittite Empire’s collapse. Reuters reported: The researchers examined long-lived juniper trees that grew in the region at the time and eventually were harvested to build a wooden structure southwest of Ankara around 748 B.C. that may have been the burial chamber for a relative of Phrygia's King Midas, who legend holds turned anything he touched into gold.[Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, February 9, 2023]

The trees offered a regional paleoclimatic record in two ways: patterns of annual tree-ring growth, with narrow rings indicating dry conditions; and the ratio of two forms, or isotopes, of carbon in the rings, revealing the tree's response to water availability. They detected a gradual shift to drier conditions from the 13th century B.C. into the 12th century B.C. More importantly, both lines of evidence indicated three straight years of severe drought, in 1198, 1197 and 1196 B.C., coinciding with the known timing of the empire's dissolution.

"There was likely near-complete crop failure for three consecutive years. The people most likely had food stores that would get them through a single year of drought. But when hit with three consecutive years, there was no food to sustain them," University of Georgia anthropology professor and study co-author Brita Lorentzen said. "This would have led to a collapse of the tax base, mass desertion of the large Hittite military and likely a mass movement of people seeking survival. The Hittites were also challenged by not having a port or other easy avenues to move food into the area," Lorentzen added.

The Hittite Empire quickly collapsed around the time of the drought, which likely would have led to widespread food shortages, Manning says, and those food shortages could have combined with factors like wars, social upheavals or outbreaks of disease to bring the Hittite empire to its end soon after 1200 B.C. “We can’t positively connect these things, because we have no eyewitness accounts,” Manning told Live Science. “But it seems an extraordinary coincidence that somewhere around the 1190s to the 1180s the whole empire disappears from history forever.”Manning said Hittite Empire probably could have survived a shorter drought, as it had in the past, but it couldn’t withstand this prolonged drought. “If you’re running a government in these areas, then you expect occasional droughts and you plan for that,” he says. “But what you don’t expect or plan for is to have year after year of drought.” [Source: Tom Metcalfe, National Geographic, February 9, 2023]

Tree Study That Showed the Drought in the Hittite Empire 3,200 Years Ago

Earlier studies indicated the Anatolia and eastern Mediterranean region’s climate became drier and cooler over the 300 years after 1200 B.C. The new research pinpoints a severe drought in Anatolia to 1198, 1197, and 1196 B.C. by examining the logs from trees buried for thousands of years ago. Tom Metcalfe wrote in National Geographic: To unravel what happened to the Hittite Empire, Manning’s team looked the kingdom of Phrygia, which arose in the same area centuries later. Some studies suggest the Phrygians were invaders from what are now the Balkans, but many archaeologists think they were descended from the Hittites. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, National Geographic, February 09, 2023]

Manning is a renowned expert in the field of dendrochronology, which can determine the exact year when the annual growth rings of trees were formed, and his team examined logs from beneath a giant burial mound near the Phrygian capital Gordion, about 50 miles southwest of Ankara. The mound is associated with the legendary King Midas — he of the “Midas touch” — and the royal tomb beneath it may be the world’s earliest-known wooden building, Manning says. It was made with over 100 logs from juniper trees felled in the eighth century B.C. which were then preserved beneath the mound. But because junipers can live so long — sometimes more than 1,000 years — the researchers identified 18 logs from trees that were alive when the area was a Hittite heartland.

The team measured the annual growth rings of the trees visible in the logs and examined the levels of the isotope carbon-13 in their cells, which indicates the moisture level of the air when they formed. Both types of evidence were incorporated to create a sort of high-resolution “dryness record” for central Anatolia between around 1500 and 800 B.C.

Historian and archaeologist Eric Cline at George Washington University wasn’t involved in the latest research. His 2014 book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed highlights 1177 as a key year when things fell apart, but he says the dates from the new study also make sense.“The Late Bronze Age collapse and the droughts definitely started before 1177 B.C.,” Cline says. “Having this new evidence for a drought taking place from 1198 to 1196 B.C. fits well within the general scenario of the collapse.”

Archaeologist and historian Lorenzo D’Alfonso of New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and Italy’s University of Pavia, who also wasn’t involved in the research, says there is evidence in ice cores from Greenland of an even earlier global drought that hit the Hittites around 1250 B.C. Ancient writings indicate the Hittite Empire implemented new techniques to store water after that; but they don’t seem to have cut back on their grain production — instead, they increased it, he says. As a result, the Hittite Empire would have been hit harder by this second severe drought about 50 years later.

Dark Ages After the Hittite Empire Collapse

After the Hittites disappeared from most of Anatolia some city-states — namely the so-called Neo-Hittite kingdoms in northern Syria — managed to survive. Among these were Carchemish, Milid (near the later Melitene), Zinjirli, and Karatepe, but they were greatly weakened. These Neo-Hittite Kingdoms were gradually conquered by the Assyrians, who claimed Carchemish during the reign of Sargon II in the late 8th century B.C., and Milid several decades later.” +/

According to Encyclopaedia Judaica: The downfall is followed by a dark age at the end of which the map of Anatolia had been redrawn. Small states known as Late Hittite or Neo-Hittite, because of the inscriptions written in the so-called Hittite hieroglyphs found in the areas they occupied, extended far into Syria, Hamath on the Orontes being the southernmost. In contrast to the small states of Anatolia, some — but not all — of those in Syria were taken over by Arameans: Till Barsip on the Euphrates became Aramean Bit Adini about 950 B.C.; shortly after, the Aramean Gabbar founded a dynasty at Sam'al (Zinjirli), similarly the region around Arpad became the Aramean Bit Agusi about 890, while Hamath fell to the Arameans as late as about 820 B.C. [Source: Hans Guterbock; S. Sperling; Ignace Gelb, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2000s, Encyclopedia.com]

In contrast, Carchemish on the Euphrates was ruled by "Late Hittites" (Luwians according to their language) until it became an Assyrian province in 717. The important point is that the Assyrians, who continually fought these small states until Sargon II finally incorporated them into his empire as provinces, continued to call the whole region Hatti, regardless of whether the people were Luwians or Arameans. Even more than a century after the last "Hittite" state had disappeared, the Babylonian chronicle introduces Nebuchadnezzar's first war against Jerusalem (598 B.C.) with the words "he went to atti." The name Hatti was now used in a vague sense for the entire Mediterranean littoral.

Great King Hartapu and Türkmen-Karahöyük

Benjamin Leonard wrote in Archaeology magazine: While conducting a surface survey of the ancient mound site of Türkmen-Karahöyük in southern Turkey, a team led by archaeologists James Osborne and Michele Massa of the University of Chicago made a surprising discovery in a canal not far from the mound: a stone stela bearing hieroglyphs in Luwian, a relative of the Hittite language. Based on the shapes of the glyphs, the inscription has been dated to the eighth century B.C. It records the military achievements of “Great King Hartapu,” a ruler previously known only from inscriptions found at two nearby hilltop sanctuaries. Those enigmatic monuments offer no details about the dates of his reign or the extent of his realm. [Source:Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology magazine, January-February 2021]

The new inscription, Osborne explains, establishes Hartapu as a Neo-Hittite leader who claims to have conquered the wealthy kingdom of Phrygia in west-central Anatolia and, in a single year, to have defeated a coalition of 13 kings. “We now know almost certainly that Hartapu’s capital city was Türkmen-Karahöyük and that he was allegedly powerful enough to defeat Phrygia in battle when it was at its height,” Osborne says. “Hartapu wasn’t a local yokel, he was apparently a major Iron Age player.”

“Based on the ceramics they recovered from the mound, the researchers have determined that, by around 1400 B.C., Türkmen-Karahöyük had grown from a small settlement to a regional center sprawling over more than 300 acres. During the succeeding centuries and throughout Hartapu’s reign, Osborne says, the city probably continued to be one of the largest in Anatolia. “Even in a country as archaeologically diverse as Turkey,” he says, “it’s not every day that an archaeologist finds a massive Bronze and Iron Age city that has never been touched.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum, Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated June 2024