The Empire the Critics Said Never Existed

Through the nineteenth century, biblical scholars dismissed the dozens of Hittite references scattered across the Old Testament as anachronistic or fabulist. The Hittites, as a named and historically significant people, had vanished from all known records. No inscriptions, no ruins, no testimony from the ancient world outside the Bible made mention of them. The texts that named them—Genesis 23, 2 Kings 7, and others—seemed to critics to be evidence of the Bible's unreliability.

In 1906, German archaeologist Hugo Winckler began excavations at the site of Boghazkoy in modern Turkey, known in antiquity as Hattusa. There he uncovered the capital city of a major imperial power. The royal archives, inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform, contained thousands of documents spanning centuries. They revealed an empire that had ruled much of Anatolia and the Levant, that had diplomatic relations with Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria, and that stood as a genuine superpower of its era.

Among these archives were copies of the Egyptian-Hittite treaty concluded after the Battle of Kadesh in the thirteenth century BCE. Identical versions of this treaty exist also in the temples of Egypt—at Karnak—showing both powers had preserved the document. The Hittite texts name their kings, their battles, their vassal states, and their religious practices. They corroborate no doctrine and settle no theological question. But they establish beyond dispute that the Hittites were a real civilization, documented and studied by modern archaeology.

The tablets are held today in the museums of Ankara and Istanbul. The archival find transformed not only ancient Near Eastern studies but also the credibility of the biblical text as a historical document.