Origins Series: The Hittites 2000 BC Roots & Empires @RootsAndEmpires

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:14]There is a people mentioned in the Hebrew Bible — Uriah the Hittite, husband of Bathsheba; the daughters of Heth; the Hittite kings listed among Solomon's trading partners — whose identity was, for centuries, a complete mystery.

[00:00:24]No one knew who the Hittites were. No physical trace of their civilisation had been found.

[00:00:28]Then, in 1906, excavations at a remote site in north-central Anatolia — modern Bogazkoy in Turkey — uncovered a royal archive of over thirty thousand clay tablets.

[00:00:35]Within a decade, a Czech scholar named Bedrich Hrozny had cracked the language. It was not Semitic.

[00:00:39]It was not Sumerian. It was Indo-European — related to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and ultimately to English.

[00:00:44]The Hittites had been hiding in plain sight. This is their story: the forgotten superpower of the ancient world.