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Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

The Hittites were one of the largest empires in the ancient world, but up until the last two centuries, the only proper documentation of them was in the Bible, which is why many historians suspected that they were a fictional civilization.

In 1834, French archaelogist Texier found the ruins of their capital Hattusa in modern day Turkey. But he assumed it was Pteria, a city mentioned in ancient Greek documents.

It took another ~ 70 years for German archaelogist Winckler to realize that this was the Hittite capital, based on clay tablets.

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The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.

> All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries

I don't see how this would invalidate the legitimacy of the documentation. The Hittites were large enough to be visible to contemporary historians and scriptures were used for information preserval. Even if our knowledge was only preserved through written documents, we'd have a good grasp of history 300 years ago, especially of major societies. People weren't primitive back then, they even had state archives with historical records which the Bible mentions in a few places for further reading.

We're talking about a Levantine Iron Age text discussing Bronze Age peoples where civilization collapsed in the interim. In the case of Ḫattuša, the state archives were almost certainly unreadable by the time the Biblical texts were written, evidenced by the lack of any Hittite cuneiform texts being produced or copied in the Iron Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia maintained texts and the ability to read those texts across the collapse. The same cannot be said about Syria-Anatolia and the Levant.

That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.

> 300 years ago

Try 500 to 700 years. (Hittites collapsed around 1200 BC, the Old Testament was penned between the 700s and 500s BC.)

That is right but nonetheless the Old Testament includes material that was heavily edited and modified (to match both the conception of the editors about what is sinful and what is not, and also the political propaganda that was mandatory, i.e. that the Persians are the good guys while the Egyptians are the bad guys), whose origin was in much older stories, older by centuries and even millennia, e.g. the Gilgamesh Epic and other Babylonian literary works.

So some references from the Old Testament may correspond to people or places from many centuries earlier than the time when it was assembled, similarly to works like the Iliad and the Odyssey.

This is not correct because we don't know what the Hittites called themselves. This civilization, when it was found, was named after the Biblical tribe. There is no relation established between the two.

We know how they called their own language: "nešili", while they called "hattili" the language of the previous Non-Indo-European inhabitants of the place where the capital of the Hittite Empire was located. The "hattili" language does not have any certain affinities with other known languages, but it has some resemblances with certain North-Caucasian languages.

So the Hittites would better be called something like "Nessites".

Thus our name comes actually from the name of the people conquered by them (Hatti).

While the Hittites were originally identified with the people mentioned in the Bible, it is also possible that some or all of the references from the Bible are not to what we call Hittites, but to some "Hatti" people.

The Bible does not refer to the Hittite Empire but only to some people of Hittite origin that are encountered in the present territory of Israel, so they could have very well been of Hatti origin.

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