Hittite is the oldest written Indo-European language
Anatolian Indo-Europeans built a Bronze Age superpower at Hattusa, matching Egypt and Assyria for influence. Their tongue, nešili, sits with Luwian as the earliest historically attested Indo-European speech—yet English "Hittites" still echoes a biblical name scholars debate matching to the same people.
The Hittites were an Anatolian Indo-European people who created one of West Asia's first major Bronze Age civilizations. Possibly arriving from beyond the Black Sea, they settled north-central Anatolia early in the second millennium BC and built polities culminating in the kingdom of Hattusa. Between the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries BC they ranked among the Near East's dominant powers, clashing with New Kingdom Egypt, Middle Assyria, and Mitanni. By the twelfth century BC much of the empire had fallen to Middle Assyria as the Late Bronze Age order collapsed.
Speakers called their language nešili, "the language of Nesa"; with related Luwian it is the oldest historically attested Indo-European language. Older textbooks credited the Hittites with inventing and monopolizing iron smelting; twenty-first-century work increasingly disputes that monopoly, seeing iron's spread as a slower post-collapse process. They called their land Hattusa (Akkadian Hatti), inheriting the name from earlier Hattians who spoke unrelated Hattic. The modern English label "Hittites" comes via the Hebrew Bible, whose references may or may not name the same Anatolian kingdom.
Before archaeology revealed Anatolian ruins, the Bible was the only widely known source using the name. As nineteenth-century finds revealed an imperial scale, Archibald Sayce argued the civilization deserved comparison with divided Egypt, not tiny Judah. French scholar Charles Texier saw the first Hittite ruins in 1834 without recognizing them. Modern Turkey's republic (1923) fueled national archaeological interest through figures such as Halet Çambel and Tahsin Özgüç and even institutional names reflecting Hittitology.
Source: Hittites
