The Hittites: An Empire's Capital, Found at Boğazköy in 1906

A people on the map before the spade

From Abraham buying the cave of Machpelah from "Ephron the Hittite" (Genesis 23) to Uriah the Hittite in David's army to the Syrians of 2 Kings 7:6 who fear Israel has hired "the kings of the Hittites and of the Egyptians," the Old Testament treats the Hittites as a familiar people -- a nation large enough to field kings on the scale of Pharaoh. By the 1880s, Egyptian diplomatic letters and Assyrian trade texts already referred to a people called "Kheta" or "Hatti," and hieroglyphic inscriptions at Carchemish, Aleppo, and Hama had been linked to the same civilization. Archibald Sayce assembled this non-biblical evidence into a case for a real, substantial "lost Hittite empire" and published it in 1888. Still missing was the empire's own capital, its royal archive, and direct proof that it rivaled Egypt at the scale Scripture describes.

Winckler's spade at Boğazköy

In 1906, German Assyriologist Hugo Winckler, building on soundings from the year before, began full excavations at Boğazköy (Boğazkale) in central Turkey for the German Orient Society. Digging into the citadel of Büyükkale, his team uncovered a royal archive of thousands of cuneiform tablets -- ultimately some 10,000, growing to roughly 30,000 across later campaigns -- written in Akkadian and in a then-unread language soon identified as Hittite. The ruins were Hattusa: the capital of an empire that had once rivaled Egypt and Assyria across Anatolia and northern Syria.

The clincher: a treaty that matched

Among the tablets, Winckler found the peace treaty between Hittite king Hattusili III and Pharaoh Ramesses II, sealed after the Battle of Kadesh (c. 1259 BC). Egyptologists already knew this treaty from hieroglyphic inscriptions at Karnak and the Ramesseum; its Hittite side now turned up independently, in Akkadian, in the enemy capital's own archive -- and the two versions matched. That is genuine, secular, mutually independent confirmation of the empire itself and its dealings with Egypt: two records, kept on opposite sides of a peace table, agreeing without ever having consulted one another.

From Hattusa to 2 Kings

The Boğazköy archive is Late Bronze Age evidence; the empire it documents collapsed around 1180 BC, roughly three centuries before the scene in 2 Kings 7:6. That later plural, "the kings of the Hittites," points to the Neo-Hittite city-states of northern Syria -- Carchemish, Hamath, and others -- that carried the Hittite name forward after Hattusa's fall and that Assyrian sources continued to call "the land of Hatti" into the eighth century BC. Together, the two bodies of evidence span the biblical use of the name: the Boğazköy archive anchors the empire behind Genesis 23's Ephron, and the Neo-Hittite successor states anchor the plural kings of 2 Kings. Winckler's 1906 discovery is what took the Hittites from a name on a handful of Egyptian and Assyrian texts to a fully excavated capital, archive, and language of their own.

Keep digging

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattusa
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian%E2%80%93Hittite_peace_treaty
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syro-Hittite_states
• https://www.magisterium.com