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.

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.

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.

The Hittites were an Indo-European-speaking people who established a kingdom in Anatolia (modern Turkey) almost 4,000 years ago. They rose to become one of the great powers of the ancient Middle Eastern world by conquering Babylon - and were destroyed in the wake of the movements of the enigmatic Sea Peoples around 1180 BC. Macqueen's study investigates such intriguing topics as the origins of the Hittites, the sources of the metals which were so vital to their success, and their relations with their contemporaries in the Aegean world, the Trojans and the Mycenaean Greeks.

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.

This is the tale of Lukka, the Hittite soldier who traveled across Greece in search of the vicious slave traders who kidnapped his wife and sons. He tracks them all the way to war-torn Troy. There he proves himself a warrior to rank with noble Hector and swift Achilles. Lukka is the man who built the Trojan horse for crafty Odysseus, who toppled the walls of Jericho for the Isrealites, who stole beautiful Helen--the legendary face that launched a thousand ships--from her husband Menaleus after the fall of Troy and fought his way across half the known world to bring her safely to Egypt.