[ml/nj]

Velikovsky, in Ages in Chaos, says the Hittites never exisitied. ("the history of the 'Hittitie Empire' is entirely invented.") When I first read this, I thought, "This is lunacy." So I went to my bookshelf where I found Durant's Our Oriental Herritage (Story of Civilization Vol I). Durant doesn't say that the Hittites never exisited, but he does say, "The Hittites disappeared from history almost as mysteriously as they entered it." Lines like this intrigue me.

ML/NJ

[blam]

[Verginius Rufus]

Velikovsky is generally regarded as a crackpot, I think. I remember one of his claims, that a comet turned into the planet Venus, which is scientific nonsense. Will Durant was not an expert on this period of history either. There are a lot of good books dealing with the ancient Near East which cover the Hittites. Their kingdom did collapse rather suddenly, about the same time several other states were destroyed.

I heard a lecture once by an archaeologist about a Hittite site in Syria or Turkey. The speaker described how they had found some sculptures and that they knew immediately that they had to be Hittite, because they were so ugly.

[Billthedrill]

Not sure about Velikovsky on that one - the Egyptians certainly thought the Hittites existed, Ramses II having fought an epochal battle (Kadesh) with them about 1299 BC. There are extensive diplomatic correspondences involving a relationship between them, the Egyptian empire, Assyria, and Babylon that were found in Egypt in the 19th century - the El Amarna letters.

The Hittite empire was certainly ephemeral, though, ranking in importance and obscurity with the Hurrian/Mitanni and the Lydians. It'd be nice to be able to dig more information up without the danger of being shot, but it doesn't look like that area's going to be stable enough for scholarly research for a very long time to come.