Hittites

The Hittites (/ˈhɪtaɪts/) were an Anatolian people who played an important role in establishing an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Anatolia as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

N

 * The location of the Anatolian branch of IE (Hittite and its sisters) is a problem, or at least a puzzle, for IE homeland studies. The Anatolian languages are attested very early in Asia Minor, removed from Europe and far from the steppe... Accounting for the locations of both Hittite and Tocharian is usually presented, at least rhetorically, as a major problem.
 * Johanna Nichols, 1998. The Eurasian spread zone and the Indo-European dispersal. in : Blench, R., & Spriggs, M. (2012). Archaeology and Language II: Archaeological Data and Linguistic Hypotheses. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

P

 * Where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people? When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites here? Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittite in New York City.
 * Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (1975), p. 6

W

 * The Hittites were from the earliest times exposed to the influence of other languages each of which had literary tradition… [They] were profoundly influenced by Mesopotamian culture as mediated through the peripheral Akkadian.. and by the contact with the Assyrian merchant colonies of the 19th and 18th centuries... The major cultural influence, at least in religion and cult came from Hurrian... [resulting in] the Hurrianization of the Hittite pantheon.
 * Watkins C. 2001 How to kill a Dragon: Aspects of IE Poetics Oxford, OUP (1995). (1995: 52-53).
 * quoted in Kazanas, N. (2003). Final reply: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European studies, 31(1-2), 187-240.