The Hittite Empire transformed the world—and then the world forgot it

At its height, the ancient city of Hattuşa, capital of the Hittite civilization, must have been awe-inspiring. Built into a steep hillside in what is today central Türkiye, the city was ringed by tall brick walls. It was home to as many as 7,000 people, vast temple complexes, and an imposing stone rampart visible from miles away. Today the hillside is home to a mystery.

No pillars or high walls mark the ruins of the palace and temples that once stood—just stone foundations half-covered by dry grass. Some of the city’s gates still stand, guarded by statues of lions, sphinxes, and an axe-wielding god. But much is gone. The mud-brick walls have crumbled over the centuries; floods and snowmelt have eroded the original hillside, sending buildings full of clay tablets cascading down the slopes. Fainter still are the clues that might explain what happened to the powerful Hittite people—a lost empire that researchers are now beginning to understand with greater clarity.

The disappearance of the Hittites, around 1180 B.C., was a vanishing act with few parallels in history. For at least 450 years, the Hittites controlled much of modern-day Türkiye and beyond—from close to the shores of the Black Sea to the rivers of Mesopotamia and the waters of the Mediterranean. They built sophisticated cities, impressive temples, and an elaborate palace in the rugged countryside of Anatolia. They authored massive archives of cuneiform tablets containing numerous ancient languages and sacred rituals. Their kings benefited from trade routes that reached far beyond the Hittite homeland.Their armies once even penetrated deep into Mesopotamia. Their tangle with Egypt’s Ramses the Great at the Battle of Kadesh resulted in the world’s first peace treaty.

(3,200-year-old trees reveal the collapse of an ancient empire.)

“They were able to fight the Egyptians, and the Babylonians and Assyrians had to treat them as equals,” said Andreas Schachner of the German Archaeological Institute, which has been carrying out digs at the Hattuşa site for nearly a century. Yet “the Egyptians, the Assyrians—they were all part of historical memory. The Hittites were extinguished completely.”

Scholars didn’t register the Hittites’ existence until 3,000 years later, when carvings at ancient Egyptian temples and diplomatic correspondence discovered on clay tablets set off an international hunt for the location of their capital. Little remained at the suspected site besides monumental foundations, but digs there in the early 1900s unearthed a trove of clay cuneiform tablets confirming suspicions that Hattuşa was the lost Hittite capital.

From what they’ve continued to unearth at Hattuşa—a once vibrant center of commerce, culture, and conquest—researchers have compiled an eloquent record of life in the empire. They have assembled details on everything from royal squabbles and religious ceremonies to the proper punishment for killing a dog. Yet the causes for the empire’s collapse remain mysterious. How did the mighty Hittites vanish without a trace—and what can their sudden end teach us today?

Between early June and late October, Schachner spends seven days a week crisscrossing Hattuşa and overseeing a team of Turkish and German archaeologists, as well as scores of local workers. He traverses the city’s hills in a battered passenger van, his black dog, Nox, routinely at his side. As director of the German Archaeological Institute’s excavations, he’s been making sense of the site’s jumbled ruins since 2006. “Nothing is in its original place,” Schachner said with a sigh. “There’s so much destruction.”

One day not long ago, I joined him at the city’s Great Temple complex, a hub of ritual spaces, courtyards, storerooms, and secret chambers not far from what were Hattuşa’s northern gates. I followed him as he wound his way through waist-high stone blocks, gesturing upward now and again to refer to the plastered and possibly painted walls that would have towered 30 feet above our heads. He took me to a space once considered the center of the Hittite universe: the Great Temple, dedicated to the storm god Tarhunna and his partner, the sun goddess of Arinna. Foundations surrounding the temple preserve the outlines of 80 storerooms that previously contained vessels full of wine, water, and grain. Researchers have discovered inventories hinting at the riches stored in the temple’s treasury. “When the king came back from a campaign, all the booty was for the storm god,” Schachner told me. “He would have brought it here.”

One question that Schachner hopes to resolve is why the Hittites situated their capital here. There are worse places than central Anatolia to base an empire, but not many. Halfway between the Black Sea and the deserts of Syria, Hattuşa sits in a land of unlikely extremes. Freshwater springs are abundant in the rocky, virtually unfarmable mountains nearby. The region’s few plains, on the other hand, are bone-dry most of the year—unless they’re submerged by seasonal floods.

Close reading of Hittite texts, combined with environmental data, shows that droughts gripped the region every few decades, regularly pushing populations to the brink of starvation and beyond. Archaeologist Bülent Genç, who works with Schachner at Hattuşa, frames the mystery of why the city was built here with bemused admiration. “Considering the climate and surroundings, it’s mind-blowing that they had all this here,” said Genç, who teaches at Türkiye’s Mardin Artuklu University. “The real question is, how did they build an empire in the middle of this central Anatolian hell?”

The answer: a combination of resilience, adaptation, and planning. For the centuries that they reigned, the lords of Hattuşa managed to squeeze just a little more out of the land than anyone before or since. Based on what we know of herding practices—and the myriad animal bones found at Hattuşa—Schachner thinks the surrounding hills supported tens of thousands of sheep and goats, providing a four-footed alternative to the irrigation-dependent farms that supported Egypt and Mesopotamia.

To supply water for industrial and agricultural uses, the Hittites cut storage ponds into Hattuşa’s hillsides. Dug into clay soil to be filled by groundwater, some were longer than an Olympic swimming pool and up to 26 feet deep. Immense, airtight underground pits, meanwhile, contained enough grain to feed their animals in periods of drought.

All of this infrastructure was surrounded by strong walls that ran for an astonishing four miles along the city perimeter, engineered to contend with the hilly terrain’s steep slopes and deep ravines. Between 2003 and 2006, a 71-yard-long segment of it was reconstructed using only materials that would have been available to the Hittites, including wood, rock, and 3,000 tons of mud brick. Based on this experiment, researchers calculated that building just a half mile of wall would have taken a thousand men a year, a stunning feat of logistics.

Touring the site with Schachner, I rode along as he piloted his van up a twisting, one-lane road to reach Hattuşa’s highest spot. Here, the city’s most impressive building project survives: Yerkapı, an elongated rampart standing 130 feet high and 820 feet long. The white stone embankment features a narrow gate decorated with sphinx statues. Adding to its imposing visual impact, a portion of the city’s protective wall ran across the top.

On a clear day this monumental structure is visible from 12 miles away, gleaming white amid the green and gray mountaintops. “Imagine the ambassador of Babylonia, who’s seen everything,” said Schachner, “and then he turns this corner and sees this building that’s as spectacular as anything in Mesopotamia or Egypt. I’ve seen a lot of sites and can’t think of any that are as spectacular from a long way away as this one. This is how they executed control over the landscape.”

Amazingly, Hattuşa is still yielding new discoveries. The day after my trip up the mountain with Schachner, I returned to the summit to meet Genç at Yerkapı and found him at the mouth of a tunnel that passes underneath the rampart. He stood in an arched passageway that’s about nine feet tall, 230 feet long, and wide enough to accommodate two people walking side by side.

As I entered the unlit tunnel, I became acutely aware of the hundreds of tons of dirt and rock above our heads. Genç, the grandson of a stonemason, wasn’t worried. “This all interconnects, like a tapestry made of stone,” he said, gesturing to the tunnel walls. “It takes really fine masons to make this.”

Halfway down the passageway, we stopped. Bending low, Genç showed me a pinkish, palm-size painting on the stone wall—a symbol, one of 249 that he discovered in the tunnel in 2022. With each glyph representing a word, the symbols had somehow gone unnoticed by the hundreds of archaeologists—and hundreds of thousands of curious tourists—who have passed through the tunnel since it was rediscovered in 1834.

Since Genç’s find, made with the light of his cell phone, Schachner has worked with imaging specialists to scan the tunnel’s interior, creating a 3D model that might help scientists fathom the symbols’ significance. For example, some marks appear in threes, like the glyphs for “mountain” and “path” and the symbol representing the holy mountain Tudhaliya, as well as the god by the same name. “Maybe it’s meant to say ‘the path through Mount Tudhaliya,’ ” Schachner said.

Far from the tunnel, symbols on a very different wall have provided critical information on the reach and power of the Hittites. When archaeologists in Egypt uncovered the funeral temple of Pharaoh Ramses II—also known as Ramses the Great—they found references to a battle that remains perhaps the Hittites’ most enduring contribution to history.

In his temple complex along the Nile River, Ramses, one of Egypt’s strongest rulers, documented the most memorable moments of his reign, including his 1274 B.C. battle with the forces of Hittite king Muwatallis II at Kadesh, an ancient city not far from modern-day Damascus. A floor-to-ceiling relief depicts the pharaoh’s heroics in the face of what he claimed were nearly 50,000 Hittite warriors. Egyptian and Hittite chariots wheel and charge as a larger-than-life Ramses surveys the bloody chaos.

(The Hittites’ fast war chariots threatened mighty Egypt.)

Today many historians consider the Battle of Kadesh the biggest chariot battle ever fought. Rather than a resounding victory for Ramses, though, the clash was probably more of a stalemate: In the aftermath, the frontier separating the two empires barely shifted.

Relations between the two powers remained unresolved for 15 years, until Ramses and Muwatallis’s successor worked out the world’s oldest known parity treaty. Inscribed on tablets of silver, with copies made in clay, the 1259 B.C. accord promised mutual assistance against invaders and “a good peace and a good fraternity between the land of Egypt and the land of Hatti forever.”

The agreement marked a pivotal shift in the annals of statecraft. “Up until that moment, the rule was winner take all. Peace treaties were the winner dictating to the losers,” Schachner pointed out. “The Hittites and the Egyptians decided not to continue that way.” The Treaty of Kadesh describes the two rulers as equals and peace as an end in itself. It’s the beginning of modern diplomacy—one reason a copy of the agreement hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. (A fragmented clay original, found at Hattuşa in 1906, is on display at the Istanbul Airport Museum.)

Diplomacy and religion were crucial tools for the Hittites, who referred to their empire as the Land of a Thousand Gods. When they conquered or took control of a group of people, they permitted the subjugated to keep their religious practices. Rather than wiping out local deities, they folded them into the Hittite Empire and pantheon. Holy statues from temples, thought to embody the gods themselves, were transported to Hattuşa’s temple district and worshipped there the way they were at home.

(These pharaohs’ private letters expose how politics worked 3,300 years ago.)

Temple archives record the problems with this approach, like gods who didn’t speak Hittite. In one example, after a new god was brought from the island of Lesbos, the Hittites realized that no one knew how to talk to it. A sheep was sacrificed, and its innards were examined to determine if the new god could accept being worshipped Hittite style (yes, was the answer discerned in the sheep’s intestines). “They didn’t want to anger the gods,” Willemijn Waal, a Hittitologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told me. “But at the same time, they’re very pragmatic. It’s kind of adorable.”

It was also a key to their success. “They were able to bring people together not by brutal despotism but by persuasion, using religion and beliefs,” Schachner said. “That is unique. That is what makes them so special.”

What we know about the Hittites is, by the standards of ancient history, incredibly new. Hittite writing wasn’t unlocked until 1915, when a linguist in Prague named Bedřich Hrozný realized that the unearthed tablets were written in an Indo-European language—the earliest known example of a family that today includes everything from English to Sanskrit. Over the past century, more than 30,000 remnants of clay tablets have been recovered from Hattuşa and other Hittite cities. More are found every year. That constant flow of brand-new information makes Hittitology one of the most dynamic, fast-moving fields of ancient history.

Late one afternoon, I found Daniel Schwemer, a researcher from Germany’s University of Würzburg, seated at a table in the German Archaeological Institute’s “dig house” in Boğazkale, the village next to Hattuşa’s ruins. Schwemer is part of a small community of scholars who specialize in reading and translating Hittite texts. Every autumn he comes to Hattuşa to see what’s been found during the summer’s excavations. “It’s a bit like unpacking Christmas presents,” Schwemer said. “You really never know what you’ll get.”

Each new find has the potential to change what we know about Bronze Age empires. It’s “an area where history is still in the process of being written,” Schwemer said. “Documents are coming out of the ground nobody has seen for thousands of years.”

Of course, answers to a question at the heart of Hittite research remain elusive: What happened to them? Theories abound, from political unrest to climate change, but a lone explanation seems unlikely to be found. “There’s no single reason why such a complex society disintegrates and completely disappears from history,” Schachner said. Instead, a “perfect storm” of factors probably pushed the Hittites to the limits and then beyond.

Raiders were a constant threat, for example. Tribes known as the Kaska living along the Black Sea coast show up in tablets, destroying temples and desecrating statues before dividing up “the priests, the holy priests, the priestesses, the anointed ones, the musicians, the singers, the cooks, the bakers, the plowmen, and the gardeners, and [making] them their servants.”

Natural disasters, too, strained the Hittite Empire from time to time. Recent finds from a site called Şapinuva suggest powerful earthquakes regularly rocked the Hittite heartland. About 40 miles northeast of Hattușa, at Şapinuva’s palace and temple complex, excavations revealed walls and floors that rippled like waves. Archaeologists discovered buildings and storehouses consumed in a huge fire—all clues the city was hit by a devastating quake.

The Hittites successfully handled these and different challenges for years—until, suddenly, they didn’t. By about 1250 B.C., the tablets begin to show the strains of the empire’s final century. Palace infighting and royal assassination attempts grew rampant, making it hard for Hattuşa’s leaders to maintain control over their subjects. Epidemic diseases were a problem too: The tablets contain prayers to ward off plagues. And changes in language and writing styles in the empire’s final decades may be signs of social strife or upheaval, signs their multiethnic state was under strain.

The latest findings suggest climate change and a series of natural disasters helped accelerate the empire’s decline. In a 2023 study, researchers analyzed preserved wood recovered from Gordion, a city on the western outskirts of the Hittite Empire. By measuring tree rings, they could tell nearby forests were unusually stressed between 1198 and 1196 B.C., evidence of a punishing, three-year drought right around the time the Hittite Empire was ending.

The drought may have sparked famine. Archaeologists found empty grain depots at Hattuşa, Şapinuva, and other abandoned Hittite cities. Letters reflect the desperation of Hittite kings, who begged foreign leaders to send barley and wheat as “a matter of life and death.” And invaders referred to as Sea Peoples in Egyptian chronicles caused chaos that rippled all across the Mediterranean, weakening old alliances and prompting mass migrations. “That was the salt and pepper on the dish,” said Genç.

Around 1180 B.C., the Hittites methodically abandoned their capital. There are no signs of battle or conquest; no mass graves, no toppled towers or buildings. Temple storehouses full of gold and silver vessels, gilded spears, and booty from successful military campaigns—elaborately described in festival instructions and inventory lists but missing today—must have been packed up and evacuated.

Afterward, the city burned. But in a final irony, the flames that destroyed Hattuşa preserved its story: Too heavy to move from their archives, the thousands of clay tablets the Hittites amassed over the course of roughly four centuries were left behind. Fire baked them into hard bricks, helping them survive the ensuing centuries intact. “The advantage—for us—is that all these clay tablets were left behind when everyone fled the capital,” Schwemer said. “What remained was the paperwork.”

Until a tablet emerges inscribed with an account of Hattuşa’s last days, the mystery abides. The Hittites managed to adapt to a harsh environment and grow into a mighty empire despite their surroundings, until circumstances beyond their control upset their delicate balancing act. The Hittites’ collapse, and their recent rediscovery, is a testament to the importance of resilience—and good recordkeeping.