I've lately been having trouble sleeping through the night. I'm still getting a good eight hours of sleep every night, but usually around 3 a.m. I'll wake up not just slightly but fully awake. During these nocturnal hours, I've been listening to long-form YouTube videos about ancient history. Last night, I listened to one about the Hittites.
I'll be honest: you really don't need to know about the Hittites. To me, they are only interesting for a few reasons. They are the first historical example of a constitutional monarchy, they reached their zenith before the Bronze Age collapse, and they were once considered a "lost" civilization, existing only in biblical references for a long time.
I loved ancient history as a kid. When it was Career Day in school, I went as an archaeology professor. I'm not sure why I didn't just pick "archaeologist." In lieu of a clear memory of things, I think it's safe to assume it was related to an awareness of hierarchy, an ignorance of how miserable academia is, and an insecurity about my own intelligence. Regardless, my history obsession was supported by two main things: my older brother's copy of the Age of Empires video game and my mom buying me a steady supply of young adult historical fiction books in a desperate attempt to get me to stop playing video games as much. Recently, I came across some of those books my mom bought, including The Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence. I loved this series as a child—it's essentially Nancy Drew set in Roman times. It really is a great series—it has a cast of characters that, in today's media landscape, would be more appropriate in a Dave Chappelle skit: a rich Roman girl, her best friend/African slave girl, a Jewish boy who was a closeted Christian, and a mute beggar boy (the early 2000s were a different time for young adult literature).
Anyway, the Hittites were a civilization that existed in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) in the 2nd millennium BC. During the several centuries of their existence, they were particularly bad at ruler succession. From the limited documents we have, it seems there was pretty much a murder/assassination free-for-all after a ruler died. These succession feuds significantly weakened the Hittites and allowed their neighbors to attack them without any coordinated defense. To solve this quandary, the Hittites attempted to implement the earliest form of constitutional monarchy that would (in theory) both limit the power of the king—to make regicide less appealing—and formalize the succession order (with the eldest son of the king taking over). While this did help reduce internal conflict, it also resulted in many firstborn sons perishing under mysterious circumstances.
The Hittites existed during the Bronze Age and sat at the crossroads of the major empires of that period, which meant they had a lot of trade flowing through their territory, and taxing that trade was a major source of revenue for the government. It also meant that any political instability they experienced would threaten the trade that enabled the Bronze Age. The Hittite legal system imposed more significant penalties for crimes committed against traders. My speculation is that traders had a significant influence on Hittite politics and were partly responsible for developments such as its constitutional monarchy, and neighboring empires all had a vested interest in keeping trade through their lands unencumbered.
Finally, the Hittites were considered a "lost" civilization because there were numerous biblical references to them but no archaeological evidence. It wasn't until the late 19th century, through the translation of ancient Egyptian and Assyrian texts, that references to a "Land of Hatti" emerged. It wasn't until modern Turkey began trying to manufacture a nationalistic identity that meaningful excavation and preservation of Hittite archaeological sites began (using ancient ruins and texts to justify territorial claims was quite popular in the Levant during the 1950s).
What about the biblical Hittites? Well, the biblical time period comes long after the Bronze Age collapse and the decline and fall of the Hittite empire in Anatolia. So, the Hittites mentioned in the Bible are most likely a diaspora and descendants of the old Hittites. It could also be that the authors of the Old Testament had a superiority complex based on a persons ethnicity and were obsessed with differentiating people who weren't like them, even if that differentiation was only a tenuous connection to an empire that hadn't existed for almost 1,000 years. Who can say? Food for thought.
As I'm getting older and more jaded, the interest I had as a kid in what life would be like in ancient times is slowly being replaced by a cynicism about government, legal, and economic systems. The ancient Hittites were just as smart as we are and had the benefit of living in simpler systems that were more transparent about who had power and who didn't. Today, we're no smarter; we have more facts, but our raw mental processing power is not meaningfully better, and we live within complicated governmental, legal, and economic systems that obfuscate much of what was obvious to people in ancient times.