The Hittites

The Akkadian name for the land of the Hittites, Ḫatti, the form in which the Mesopotamian and diplomatic world knew the Anatolian empire. It is the Ḫatti of the Amarna letters, where the king of Ḫatti writes as a Great King among the powers of the fourteenth century BCE, and of the Assyrian royal annals that record campaigns to its frontiers. Because Akkadian was the diplomatic lingua franca of the age, even the Hittites’ own foreign correspondence used this Akkadian Ḫatti, the same name as their native one, written in the same cuneiform.

Akkadian Ḫatti is the name’s afterlife as much as its present, because it outlasted the empire it first denoted. After Hattusa fell around 1180 BCE, Assyrian and Babylonian usage kept Ḫatti alive but slid its meaning westward: by the early first millennium “the land of Ḫatti” meant the Neo-Hittite and Aramaean states of Syria, and eventually Syria and the Levant at large, a sense in which the Assyrian kings still used it in the seventh century BCE. The name of a vanished Anatolian power thus became, in Akkadian mouths, a general word for the West, drifting from a specific kingdom to a whole region in the same way that Akkad drifted to mean Babylonia and Aššur to anchor the name of Syria.

The name the Hittites gave their own land, Ḫatti, written KUR URU Ḫatti, “the land of the city Ḫatti,” with the determinatives for land and city. They did not coin it: Hatti was the name of central Anatolia under the Hattians, the non-Indo-European people who held the region before them, and the incoming Hittites took over the country together with its name, its capital Hattusa, and much of its religion. It is the name in their state correspondence and treaties, the realm of the Great King whom Egypt and Assyria addressed as their brother. Their own language they called something else entirely, Nešili, “the speech of Neša,” after the city of Kaneš.

Ḫatti is the rare endonym that is itself a borrowing, a people naming their kingdom after the people they had supplanted. The result is a double displacement that makes “the Hittites” almost entirely a misnomer: they ruled a land called Hatti after the Hattians, spoke a tongue they called Nešili, and are known to us by neither, but by a third name taken from the Hebrew Bible. Of the whole tangle, Ḫatti is the one piece that the empire actually used of itself, and even it had belonged to someone else first. The name outlived the empire by centuries, surviving in Assyrian usage as a term for Syria and the Neo-Hittite states down to the seventh century BCE.

The Biblical Hebrew name behind the English word “Hittite,” the gentilic Ḥittî, “descendant of Ḥēt,” from Ḥēt (חֵת), the second son of Canaan in the Table of Nations at Genesis 10:15. In the Hebrew Bible the Ḥittî are one of the peoples of Canaan: the “sons of Ḥēt” from whom Abraham buys the cave of Machpelah in Genesis 23, the highland dwellers listed among Israel’s neighbors, and the people of Uriah the Hittite in the story of David. This is a people of the southern Levant, not of Anatolia, and the Bible never connects them with a northern empire.

Ḥittî is the source of one of the most consequential misnamings in the modern study of antiquity. The name has no demonstrable connection to the Anatolian Ḫatti; the two may be related, or the resemblance may be pure coincidence, and scholars remain divided. But when the Anatolian empire was recovered from the ground around 1900 and its land was read as Ḫatti, the existing biblical word Ḥittî, already long in English Bibles, was applied to it, and the empire has been called “Hittite” ever since. So the people who built Hattusa bear, in every modern language, the name of a Canaanite tribe from the book of Genesis, fixed to them by a guess about a similar-sounding word. It is the Hebrew Ḥittî, not the Anatolian Ḫatti, that English actually inherited.

The Greek name for the biblical Hittites, Khettaîos, the Septuagint’s transliteration of the Hebrew Ḥittî. When the Hebrew scriptures were rendered into Greek at Alexandria from the third century BCE, the translators carried the gentilic across with a Greek ending, Χετταῖος, and so the sons of Heth entered the Greek-reading world. The form belongs wholly to the biblical tradition: it names the Canaanite people of Genesis, not the Anatolian empire, which the Hellenistic Greeks did not know under any related name, the kingdom of Hattusa having fallen a thousand years before the Septuagint was made.

Khettaîos is the middle link in the chain that delivered “Hittite” to the modern languages. The Hebrew Ḥittî passed into Greek as Khettaîos, and from the Greek into the Latin Hethaeus of the Church, and from there, through the vernacular Bibles of the Reformation, into English. The Greek form is also the reason the modern word begins with an aspirate stop rather than the Hebrew pharyngeal: the Septuagint heard the Hebrew ḥet and wrote it with chi, and that Greek consonant, not the original Semitic one, is what every later European form preserves. The empire of Hatti owes the very first sound of its modern name to a choice made by Jewish translators in Ptolemaic Egypt.

The Latin name for the biblical Hittites, Hethaeus, the form used in the Latin Bible for the sons of Heth. It reflects the Greek Khettaîos of the Septuagint and the Hebrew Ḥittî behind it, naturalized into Latin with the adjectival ending -aeus, and it became the standard Latin term through the Vulgate of Jerome around 400 CE. Like its Greek parent, Hethaeus names the Canaanite people of Genesis; the Latin world had no independent knowledge of the Anatolian empire of Hatti, which it never encountered and whose records would not be read for another fifteen centuries.

Hethaeus is the form from which the English word was built, and it left a visible fork in the spelling. The Vulgate’s Hethaeus gave English its older “Hethite,” the form in every English Bible before the Geneva Bible of 1560; the Geneva translators changed it to “Hittite,” and that doubled-t spelling is the one that prevailed and that nineteenth-century scholars later fixed to the Anatolian empire. So the modern “Hittite” preserves the Latin Heth- stem with a Reformation-era respelling, the last Latin link in a chain running from a Canaanite eponym in Genesis to the name of an Indo-European empire in Anatolia that no one in the ancient Latin world ever knew existed.

The Geʿez name for the biblical Hittites, Kēṭi, the form in which Heth and his descendants reached the Ethiopian church through scripture. The Ethiopic Old Testament was translated from the Greek Septuagint between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries CE, and it renders the Septuagint’s Khettaîos of the Table of Nations as Kēṭi, Heth among the sons of Canaan in Genesis 10. It names the biblical people, with no reference to the Anatolian empire, which Ethiopia had no contact with and no separate knowledge of.

Kēṭi shows the Greek route of the name written into the very first consonant, exactly as the Geʿez name for Babylon does. The form opens with k, not the pharyngeal ḥ of the Hebrew Ḥittî, because Geʿez took the name from the Greek Khettaîos, where the Hebrew sound had already been replaced by chi, rather than from the Hebrew directly. It is the farthest-flung member of the biblical Ḥēt family, a Canaanite eponym carried by way of Greek scripture to a church on the far side of the Red Sea, and a small confirmation of the route the whole family travelled: from a Hebrew gentilic, through the Greek Bible, to every later tongue that learned the name from Christendom rather than from Anatolia.