This book presents a comprehensive history of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of the Hittites, and the role it played within the context of the ancient Near Eastern world. From their capital, Hattusa, in central Anatolia, the Hittite kings ruled a vast network of subject territories and vassalstates reaching from the Aegean coast of Anatolia through Syria to the river Euphrates. In the fourteenth century BC the Hittites became the supreme political and military power in the Near East. How did they achieve their supremacy? How successful were they in maintaining it? What brought abouttheir collapse and disappearance? In seeking to answer these questions, the book begins with an account of the Hittites predecessors in Anatolia, particularly in the early centuries of the second millennium, traces the rise and development of the Hittite kingdom over a period of some five hundredyears, and ends with the events which followed in the wake of the kingdoms collapse. Translations from the original texts are a particular feature of the book; thus on many issues the Hittites and their contemporaries are allowed to speak to the modern reader for themselves.

Translations from the original texts are a particular feature of the book. Thus on many issues the Hittites and their contemporaries are allowed to speak to the modern reader for themselves."--BOOK JACKET.

In dealing with a wide range of aspects of the life, activities, and customs of the Late Bronze Age Hittite world, this book complements the treatment of Hittite military and political history presented by the author in The Kingdom of the Hittites (OUP, 1998). It aims to convey to the reader a sense of what it was like to live amongst the people of the Hittite world, to participate in their celebrations, to share their crises, to meet them in the streets of the capital or in their homes, to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a healing ritual, to attend an audience with the Great King, and to follow his progress in festival processions to the holy places of the Hittite land. Through quotations from the original sources and through the word pictures to which these give rise, the book aims at recreating, as far as is possible, the daily lives and experiences of a people who for a time became the supreme political and military power in the ancient Near East.

Lost to history for millennia, the Hittites have regained their position among the great civilizations of the Late Bronze Age Near East, thanks to a century of archaeological discovery and philological investigation. The Hittites and Their World provides a concise, current, and engaging introduction to the history, society, and religion of this Anatolian empire, taking the reader from its beginnings in the period of the Assyrian Colonies in the nineteenth century B.C.E. to the eclipse of the Neo-Hittite cities at the end of the eighth century B.C.E. The numerous analogues with the biblical world featured throughout the volume together represent a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the varied and significant contributions of Hittite studies to biblical interpretation.

Bryce's volume gives an account of the military and political history of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms, moving beyond the Neo-Hittites themselves to the broader Near Eastern world and the states which dominated it during the Iron Age.