Hittites
General Information
Hittites were nation which at the end of 3.millenium BC conquered middle and southern Asia (Turkey). In 2.millenium BC they made strong empire which in 1945 BC destroyed Babylon. Hittites took the writing from Babylonians and wrote many literature. About 1200 BC Hittite empire was ruined.
Religion
The Hittites adopted many of the gods of the Sumerians and Old Babylonians. The odd thing about the Hittites, though, is that they seemed to have recognised that all gods were legitimate gods. Whenever they conquered a people, they adopted that people's gods into their religious system.
As far as history is concerned, this has tremendous consequences for the history of the Hebrews. The Assyrians seem to have adopted the same tolerance towards other religions, which allowed the Jewish faith to persist after the Jewish state was decimated by the Assyrians. And the Assyrians seem to have adopted the same tendency to adopt the gods of conquered people, so the Assyrian conquerors of Palestine adopted the Hebrew god, Yahweh, into their religion. This eventually led to the only major religious schism in Hebrew history, the schism between Jews and Samaritans (there are still Samaritans alive today).
Language
Hittites have spoken a language from the Indo-European language family, which includes English, German, Greek, Latin, Persian, and the languages of India. Hittite tablets were excavated from the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital Hattusa located near the modern Turkish town of Boghazkšy about 210 km east of Ankara. Scientific excavation of these ruins were by a German expedition began in 1906. About 10,000 clay tablets script were recovered. Although some were written in the Akkadian language and could be read immediately, most were in an unknown language - Hittite language.
Within ten years the language had been deciphered. The number of common Hittite words were like one could translate with reasonable certainty increased steadily. Glossaries were published in 1936 by Edgar Sturtevant and in 1952 by Johannes. Today, seventy-five years after the decipherment, there still does not exists complete dictionary of the Hittite language.
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