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Hattusa (modern Boguskoy) in north-central Turkey was the power center of the Hittite empire.
Before 2000 BCE a settlement of the apparently indigenous Hatti people was established on sites that had been occupoied even earlier. In the 19th and 18th centuries BCE, merchants from Ashur in Assyria established a trading post here, setting up in their own separate quarter of the city. The center of their trade network was located in Kanesh (Nesha), the archaeological site known as Kültepe near Kayseri. Business dealings required record-keeping: the trade network from Ashur introduced writing to Hattusa, in the form of cuneiform.
A carbonized layer in the excavations records the burning and ruin of the city of Hattush around 1700 BC. Responsible was King Anitta from Kushar (a city that has not yet been rediscovered), who took credit for the act and erected an inscribed curse for good measure:
- At night I took the city by force; I have sown weeds in its place. Should any king after me attempt to resettle Hattush, may the Weathergod of Heaven strike him down.
The city of Hattusa featured a royal precinct on the height, overlooking the city sloping away below it, all surroundedcby massive fortifications with several great gateways.
From about 1650 to 1200 BC, the Great Kings of Hattusha ruled an empire that reached across the broad lands of Anatolia, extending at times even into the north of Syria; they briefly conquered Babylon, and Troy was apparently one of their vassal city-states. Once they had eliminated their rivals in northern Mesopotamia, the Mitanni, the Hittite kings found themselves directly facing the outermost northern province of Pharaonic Egypt. Strife between the great powers was perhaps inevitable, leading to the famous Battle of Khadesh ca 1299 BCE on the Orontes River in Syria, where the army of the Great King Muwattalli II fought that of the Pharaoh Ramses II to a draw. The battle led to a lasting peace, concluded with a treaty, ca 1283. On a wall in the New York headquarters of the United Nations hangs an enlarged copy of a clay tablet from Hattusha setting out the conditions of the agreement as an example of one of the earliest international peace treaties. Hittite power was coming to an end, nevertheless. The time around 1200 BCE was marked with unrest from Troy to Egypt. Coastal populations were suffering piratical attacks at the hands of the Sea Peoples. When marauders torched the capital, it was already all but deserted. For hundreds of years during the "Dark Age" illiterate squatters haunted the ruins of Hattusa, people who didn't even have the potter's wheel. There was a power vacuum in Anatolia.
The decline of the Hittite power has not yet been well accounted for. The Hittites themselves left virtually no history. As a general rule, when temple structures are allowed to fall into decay, and ramshackle residential structures infiltrate their precincts, it is a sign of a culture in crisis and collapse.
The cuneiform royal archives of clay tablets unearthed at Hattusa include official correspondence and contracts, as well as legal codes, procedures for cult ceremony, oracular prophecies and literature of the ancient Near East. Although the 30,000 or so clay tablets recovered from 1906 onwards in the archives of Hattusha form the main corpus, archives have since appeared at other Hittite centers in Anatolia, at Tabigga/Maşat Höyük (in Tokat province) and at Shapinuwa/Ortaköy. They are now divided between the archaeological museums of Ankara and Istanbul.
Hattusha is also one of nine sites in Turkey currently included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
