The Hittites called their kingdom Hattusa (Hatti in Akkadian), a name received from the Hattians, an earlier people who had inhabited and ruled the central Anatolian region until the beginning of the second millennium BC, and who spoke an unrelated language known as Hattic.

[13][18] The first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the karum of Kanesh (now called Kültepe), containing records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a certain "land of Hatti".

Two of the letters from a "kingdom of Kheta"—apparently located in the same general region as the Mesopotamian references to "land of Hatti"—were written in standard Akkadian cuneiform, but in an unknown language; although scholars could interpret its sounds, no one could understand it.

[20] During sporadic excavations at Boğazköy (Hattusa) that began in 1906, the archaeologist Hugo Winckler found a royal archive with 10,000 tablets, inscribed in cuneiform Akkadian and the same unknown language as the Egyptian letters from Kheta—thus confirming the identity of the two names.

Archaeological expeditions to Hattusa have discovered entire sets of royal archives on cuneiform tablets, written either in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time, or in the various dialects of the Hittite confederation.

At its peak during the reign of Muršili II, the Hittite empire stretched from Arzawa in the west to Mitanni in the east, and included many of the Kaskian territories north as far as Hayasa-Azzi in the far north-east, as well as south into Canaan near the southern border of Lebanon.

[34] Analyses by David W. Anthony in 2007 concluded that steppe herders who were archaic Indo-European speakers spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BC, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.

[35] He thought their languages "probably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly preserved later in Anatolian,"[36] and that their descendants later moved into Anatolia at an unknown time but maybe as early as 3000 BC.

[41] However, Petra Goedegebuure has shown that the Hittite language has borrowed many words related to agriculture from cultures on their eastern borders, which is evidence of having taken a route across the Caucasus.

[42] David Reich, Iosif Lazaridis, Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. have demonstrated that the Hittite route must have been via the Caucasus and not the Balkans, since Yamnaya expansion into the Balkans carried a component of Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry that does not exist in any ancient Anatolian DNA samples, which indicates also that Hittites and their cousin groups split off from the Proto Indo Europeans before the formation of the Yamnaya which did admix with Eastern Hunter Gatherers.

But then strong rulers with their center in Hattusa (modern Boğazkale) succeeded in bringing these together and conquering large parts of central Anatolia to establish the Hittite kingdom.

[50] One set of tablets, known collectively as the Anitta text,[51] begin by telling how Pithana the king of Kussara conquered neighbouring Neša (Kanesh),[31] this conquest took place around 1750 BC.

[52] However, the real subject of these tablets is Pithana's son Anitta (r. 1745–1720 BC),[53] who continued where his father left off and conquered several northern cities: including Hattusa, which he cursed, and also Zalpuwa.

[59][60] The campaigns into Amurru and southern Mesopotamia may be responsible for the reintroduction of cuneiform writing into Anatolia, since the Hittite script is quite different from that of the preceding Assyrian colonial period.

This pattern of expansion under strong kings followed by contraction under weaker ones, was to be repeated over and over through the Hittite Kingdom's 500-year history, making events during the waning periods difficult to reconstruct.

The kings of the Empire period began acting as a high priest for the whole kingdom – making an annual tour of the Hittite holy cities, conducting festivals and supervising the upkeep of the sanctuaries.

Because of the importance of Northern Syria to the vital routes linking the Cilician gates with Mesopotamia, defense of this area was crucial, and was soon put to the test by Egyptian expansion under Pharaoh Ramesses II.

[72] The Assyrian king Shalmaneser I had seized the opportunity to vanquish Hurria and Mitanni, occupy their lands, and expand up to the head of the Euphrates, while Muwatalli was preoccupied with the Egyptians.

In response to increasing Assyrian annexation of Hittite territory, he concluded a peace and alliance with Ramesses II (also fearful of Assyria), presenting his daughter's hand in marriage to the Pharaoh.

This left the Hittite homelands vulnerable to attack from all directions, and Hattusa was burnt to the ground sometime around 1180 BC following a combined onslaught from new waves of invaders: the Kaskians, Phrygians and Bryges.

The Phrygians 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.

Ultimately, both Luwian hieroglyphs and cuneiform were rendered obsolete by an innovation, the alphabet, which 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.

[85] In the Central Anatolian settlement of Ankuwa, home of the pre-Hittite goddess Kattaha and the worship of other Hattic deities illustrates the ethnic differences in the areas the Hittites tried to control.

The usage of the term Kattaha over Hannikkun, according to Ronald Gorny (head of the Alisar regional project in Turkey), was a device to downgrade the pre-Hittite identity of this female deity, and to bring her more in touch with the Hittite tradition.

[citation needed] The language of the Hattusa tablets was eventually deciphered by a Czech linguist, Bedřich Hrozný (1879–1952), who, on 24 November 1915, announced his results in a lecture at the Near Eastern Society of Berlin.

[99] According to Craig Melchert, the current tendency is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European evolved, and that the "prehistoric speakers" of Anatolian became isolated "from the rest of the PIE speech community, so as not to share in some common innovations.

[105] In addition to the tablets, monuments bearing Hittite cuneiform inscriptions can be found in central Anatolia describing the government and law codes of the empire.

In some passages, the Biblical Hittites appear to have own kingdoms, apparently located outside geographic Canaan, and sufficiently powerful to put a Syrian army to flight.

The nature of this ethnic group is unclear, but has sometimes been interpreted as a local Canaanite tribe who had absorbed Hittite cultural influence from the Syro-Hittite kingdoms to the north.

[110][111] Other biblical scholars (following Max Müller) have argued that the Bronze Age Hittites appear in Hebrew Bible literature and apocrypha as "Kittim", a people said to be named for a son of Javan.