A. First Indo-Europeans to rise to level of civilization.
B. May have come from Europe or across the Caucasus.
A. Several societies having different chronology, geographic locations, and racial makeup
The Hittites are considered one of the major peoples of the second millennium B.C. They have particularly interested historians because they are the first Indo-European group to rise to the level of civilization and their civilization is able to be understood with some clarity. Until recently, however, the Hittites were a people who remained almost unknown, although they are mentioned briefly in the Bible, in the Amarna tablets, and in other Near Eastern sources. They were first discovered in 1906 when a ridge of north-central Asia Minor, called Boghazkoy in Turkish, was excavated. This excavation continues through the present time and has revealed the city of Hattusas, as it was called in ancient times. This city had massive walls, temples, palace, and state archives of more than 10,000 cuneiform tablets belonging to the Hittites. Some of the tablets are in Akkadian, Hurrian and others were in an Indo-European language. Besides the Hittite language of the governing class, two other Indo-European languages, Luvian and Palaic, were also used.
Since the Hittites did not learn to write until after they had begun to borrow from the Mesopotamian civilizations, their earlier history can be reconstructed only on the basis of archeological hints and linguistic distributions. Historians generally agree that the Hittites came into Asia Minor from either Europe or across the Caucasus mountains. This movement seems to have been a part of a great migration of Indo-Europeans at the turn from the third to the second millennium B.C., although the Hittites were in Asia Minor before 2000 B.C.
Ancestors of the Aryans of India, of the Medes, and of the Persians, the Hittites were fierce warriors. They occupied a land ...