The Rise of Hatti
Hatti, the empire of the Hittites, was the first Near Eastern empire to emerge outside of the great river valleys. Its Anatolian heartland was a high plateau of hills, woods, and grasslands, populated by an ethnically and linguistic…
The Rise of Hatti
Hatti, the empire of the Hittites, was the first Near Eastern empire to emerge outside of the great river valleys. Its Anatolian heartland was a high plateau of hills, woods, and grasslands, populated by an ethnically and linguistically diverse population dwelling in towns and villages rather than large cities, with a mixed pastoral and agrarian
economy. Our sources for Hittite history and life are good, thanks to the discovery of the royal archives in the capital of Hattusas. The Hittites created their first empire during the Old Hittite period in the mid-2nd millennium B.C., during the reign of Hattusilis I. The zenith of its power came with Mursilis I’s destruction of Babylon in 1595. After his assassination, though, chaos reigned on the throne of Hatti, and the Hittite empire disintegrated, beginning a pattern of rise and decline that was to characterize the rest of Hittite history.
The Government of Hatti
The structure of the Hittite empire resembled the feudalism of the subsequent Middle Ages, built around mutual obligations of loyalty between the Great King and his subjects. The king was the supreme judicial, religious, and military authority. All major criminal cases lay under the jurisdiction of his judges; he was the high priest of all the gods of Hatti (though not divine himself); and he was the commander in chief of the army, typically taking the field in person. Overseeing the empire in the king’s name were several viceroys—usually members of the royal family— as well as provincial governors and, at the local level, town mayors and village headmen, all served by an extensive bureaucracy. But most of Hatti consisted of vassal states, whose rulers were bound in loyalty to the Great King by feudal-style personal oaths.
Robert L. Dise Jr. has taught at the University of Northern Iowa since 1992; prior to joining its faculty, he taught at Clinch Valley College (now the University of Virginia’s College at Wise). He received his B.A. in History from the University of Virginia (at Charlottesville), concentrating on the history of the ancient world, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, specializing in the history of Rome.
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