Hattusa: Capital of the Hittite Empire in Central Anatolia

Hattusa was the capital of the Hittites, the people who ruled much of Anatolia and northern Syria in the Late Bronze Age. From around 1650 BC until its abandonment around 1200–1180 BC it was the seat of kings who fought Egypt and negotiated with Babylon and Assyria as equals. Its ruins near Boğazkale in central Turkey, with their massive walls, carved gates and archives of about 30,000 tablets, are the main source for Hittite history.

Before the Hittites: Hattush

The site lies on a rugged slope in the bend of the Kızılırmak River, well supplied with springs and protected by deep gorges. People lived there long before the Hittites. In the early second millennium BC it was a town called Hattush, belonging to the Hattians, an older population of central Anatolia whose language was unrelated to Hittite.

Hattush also hosted a quarter of merchants from Ashur in Mesopotamia, part of the trading network centred on the Anatolian city of Kanesh. Around the eighteenth century BC, King Anitta of Kussara captured and destroyed Hattush. According to a later copy of his inscription, he sowed weeds on the site and cursed any king who resettled it.

Founding of a royal capital

Despite the curse, a king of the following century made Hattusa his capital. Around 1650 BC by the commonly used middle chronology, a ruler named Labarna, or a successor using that title, moved the royal seat there and took the name Hattusili, “the man of Hattusa”. Hattusili I campaigned in northern Syria and western Anatolia, and his grandson Mursili I led the famous raid that sacked Babylon around 1595 BC.

The period that followed, known as the Old Kingdom, was marked by palace murders and civil wars. Mursili I was murdered soon after his return from Babylon, and several of his successors died violently or were driven out. Around 1525 BC King Telepinu issued a proclamation that recalled this bloodshed and laid down rules for royal succession. Hattusa remained the capital throughout, and the court gradually built up its archive of laws, rituals and historical texts, including the collection known as the Hittite Laws.

Between the Old Kingdom and the empire, Hittite power shrank for a time. In the early fourteenth century BC enemies attacked the heartland from several sides, and a later text says that the Kaska from the north even burned Hattusa. The city recovered and was rebuilt, and its fortifications were repeatedly strengthened afterwards.

The imperial city

The greatest age of Hattusa came in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, the period of the Hittite Empire. Kings such as Suppiluliuma I, who destroyed the kingdom of Mitanni and made Syria a Hittite province, turned Hatti into one of the great powers of the age alongside Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Mitanni.

The city then covered around 1.8 square kilometres. It had two main parts. The older Lower City in the north held the royal citadel and the largest temple. The Upper City, a huge extension to the south, was filled with temples. Earlier excavators dated it to the thirteenth century BC, but more recent work suggests that much of it, including its walls, goes back to the sixteenth century BC.

Hattusa was a centre of government and religion rather than a large commercial city. Most of its space was taken by palaces, temples, storerooms and defences, and the size of its permanent population is uncertain, with modern estimates varying widely.

Walls and gates

The city was enclosed by walls several kilometres long, built on a sloping earth rampart and strengthened by towers at regular intervals. In the Upper City the rampart was faced with stone and pierced by gates designed both for defence and for ceremonial processions.

The Lion Gate on the south-west side takes its name from two lions carved from huge stone blocks that flank the outer entrance. The King’s Gate on the east side was decorated with a relief of an armed figure in a horned helmet, now thought to be a warrior god rather than a king; the original is in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.

At the highest point of the city, the Sphinx Gate stood above a stone-lined tunnel, or postern, about 70 metres long that ran under the rampart. The gate’s sphinxes were taken to museums in Istanbul and Berlin in the early twentieth century and were returned to Turkey in 2011, where they are displayed at the site museum in Boğazkale.

Temples, palace and archives

The Great Temple in the Lower City, whose construction date is debated, was a massive complex surrounded by rows of storerooms. It is often thought to have been dedicated to the Storm God of Hatti and the Sun Goddess of Arinna, the chief deities of the state. In the Upper City archaeologists have found around thirty smaller temples.

The royal citadel of Büyükkale stood on a rocky ridge above the Lower City. It held the palace, administrative buildings and libraries. Large stores of clay tablets were kept in the citadel and in the storerooms of the Great Temple.

The archives found at Hattusa contain about 30,000 tablets and fragments. Most are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language, but there are also texts in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, and in Hattic, Luwian, Palaic and Hurrian. They include laws, treaties, letters to foreign kings, royal annals, prayers, festival instructions and myths. Among them is the Hittite copy of the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty concluded with Ramesses II.

About two kilometres north-east of the city lies the open-air sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, where rock reliefs show processions of gods and the thirteenth-century king Tudhaliya IV.

Key people

• Hattusili I (c. 1650 BC): made Hattusa the royal capital and expanded Hittite power into Syria.
• Suppiluliuma I (c. 1350–1322 BC): turned Hatti into an empire, conquering Mitanni and much of Syria.
• Muwatalli II (c. 1295–1272 BC): fought Egypt at the Battle of Kadesh and briefly moved the capital to Tarhuntassa in the south.
• Hattusili III (c. 1267–1237 BC): restored Hattusa as capital and made peace with Egypt.
• Suppiluliuma II (from c. 1207 BC): the last known Hittite king, ruling as the empire collapsed.

A city of gods and festivals

Hittite kings were also the chief priests of the state, and much of the court’s year was taken up by religious festivals. Texts from Hattusa describe long ceremonies such as the spring festival and the autumn festival, during which the king and queen travelled between the capital and nearby holy cities, making offerings to dozens of gods.

The Hittites called their land the land of a thousand gods. They adopted deities from the Hattians, Hurrians, Luwians and Mesopotamians, and the temples of Hattusa reflected this mixture. Tablets record the cult equipment, offerings and staff of the temples in great detail, giving one of the fullest pictures of an ancient state religion.

Abandonment around 1200 BC

Hattusa was not destroyed in a single dramatic sack, as earlier scholars believed. Excavations since the 1990s, especially under Jürgen Seeher, suggest that the royal court and much of the population left the city around 1200–1180 BC, taking valuables with them. Public buildings such as the citadel and some temples were burned afterwards, but many parts of the city show no signs of fire.

The departure took place during the wider Late Bronze Age collapse, when drought, famine, internal conflict, the loss of trade routes and attacks by enemies weakened states across the eastern Mediterranean. The Kaska, hostile peoples from the north who had threatened Hattusa for centuries, may have contributed. Where the last king went is unknown.

The move of the capital to Tarhuntassa under Muwatalli II, around 1273 BC, had already shown that Hattusa could be left. Muwatalli’s son Mursili III, also called Urhi-Teshub, brought the court back, but he was overthrown by his uncle Hattusili III, and the rivalry between branches of the royal family weakened the state in its final decades.

After the empire fell, a small settlement occupied part of the site in the Iron Age, and the Phrygians later built a fortified town there. Hittite traditions survived in the Neo-Hittite city-states of south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria.

Rediscovery and decipherment

The French traveller Charles Texier visited the ruins in 1834, but did not know what they were. In 1906 the German scholar Hugo Winckler and the Ottoman archaeologist Theodore Makridi began excavations and found thousands of tablets, including Akkadian letters that identified the site as Hattusa.

In 1915 the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný showed that the main language of the tablets was Indo-European, related to Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. This made it possible to read the Hittite archives. German excavations led by Kurt Bittel from 1931, followed by Peter Neve, Jürgen Seeher and Andreas Schachner, have continued for most of the period since.

UNESCO inscribed Hattusha on the World Heritage List in 1986. Its tablet archives were added to the Memory of the World Register in 2001.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 1750 BC: Anitta of Kussara destroys the Hattian town of Hattush and curses the site.
• c. 1650 BC: Hattusili I makes Hattusa the Hittite royal capital.
• c. 1595 BC: Mursili I raids Babylon from Hattusa.
• c. 1350–1322 BC: Suppiluliuma I builds the Hittite Empire.
• c. 1274 BC: Muwatalli II, ruling from Tarhuntassa, fights Egypt at Kadesh.
• c. 1259 BC: Peace treaty between Hattusili III and Ramesses II.
• c. 1200–1180 BC: The court abandons Hattusa; parts of the city burn.
• 1834: Charles Texier visits the ruins.
• 1906: Excavations begin and the royal archives are discovered.
• 1915: Bedřich Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language.

Why it matters

Hattusa is the key to a civilisation that was almost forgotten for three thousand years. Its walls and gates show the power of a Bronze Age empire, and its archives preserve the oldest written Indo-European language and some of the earliest treaties and diplomatic letters in history. Without Hattusa, the Hittites would be known mainly as a name in the Bible and in Egyptian inscriptions.