The Dark Lords of Hattusha Lost Cities of the Ancients

WOMAN SCREAMS

A mysterious new army has struck Babylon without warning.

Spreading terror throughout the city.

With ruthless efficiency, these dark warriors of Hattusha

would go on to destroy anything in their way.

Their mission -

to become the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

Yet once they had succeeded,

this ruthless army - and the vast empire they created - simply disappeared,

as mysteriously as they had emerged.

For 3,000 years, all trace of them was lost

from all the history books, and even from myth and legend.

Till one by one, fragments from this lost world began to emerge.

These fragments opened up a world of mysteries and secret codes.

A fortress city, built to last forever...

An unstoppable war machine...

And a mighty empire, even greater than that of Egypt.

This is the story of how a civilisation built to last forever,

could simply vanish from history.

At the turn of the 20th century,

explorers were setting off on one of archaeology's great quests -

to test the truth of the ancient myths.

The earliest historians had told of a world before the Bible was written,

ruled by just three mighty empires - Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.

The explorers now confirmed those accounts.

These three great empires, all centred on the Middle East,

had left behind fabulous cities and monuments.

So the notion there could be a fourth great empire,

of which there was no trace, seemed impossible.

Yet fragments of a mysterious language, seemingly spoken across large areas of the ancient world,

were beginning to emerge.

And some even dared to believe this language, which no-one could understand,

could be evidence of a fourth vast empire -

one completely lost to history.

Hugo Winckler, a German professor,

was one of those who believed there might be a fourth empire.

But he lacked the proof.

He could read several ancient languages, including Babylonian and Assyrian.

But now he was scouring the world for examples of that lost language -

a language no-one could understand.

Because he believed it could lead him to the lost fourth empire.

He asked his contacts to bring him any unusual writings that turned up.

Theodor Macridi was Curator at the Ottoman Museum in Istanbul.

KNOCK ON DOOR

Professor, take a look at this.

It has ended up in my department at the museum.

A tablet with cuneiform writing on it. Macridi, couldn't one of your people deal with it?

That's just it. No. No-one can make any sense of it.

We hoped you could. What do you think?

It's fascinating.

-Why?

-Because I don't understand a word of it.

Not a single word.

This single tablet would be the vital clue that would lead him to his lost empire.

Right, where does it come from?

There. Some ruins in Bogazkoy, central Anatolia.

Anatolia? But there's nothing important up there. Nothing.

Winckler and his team set off to investigate,

and headed for the wilds of Anatolia in central Turkey.

Following in the footsteps of earlier explorers, he went in search of this remote site,

and the source of those strange writings.

But the further he travelled, the more absurd it seemed that a missing empire could be so far away

from the other named centres of the ancient world.

And then, in the middle of nowhere,

he saw something remarkable.

A massive gateway adorned with lions.

The shape and style of the carvings differed to anything he'd ever seen.

The size of the gateway and the quality of the craftsmanship, breathtaking.

Everywhere, the signs of a major civilisation.

And it all led into a vast city.

Who built this place?

As Winckler examined the ruins further, he could see the city stretched out for miles.

Here, in the mountains of Anatolia,

nearly 1,000 miles from the three key capitals of the ancient world,

were the remains of a vast city, forgotten by history.

A civilisation about which he and the rest of the world knew nothing.

The team set up camp.

They were looking for anything to tell them who had built this extraordinary city,

and if it was connected to the missing fourth empire.

They discovered clay tablets across the site.

Each was covered in the same mysterious language Winckler had seen in the library.

But in order to unlock the secrets of this lost civilisation,

Winckler now needed to find one tablet in a language he could actually understand.

For weeks, the team searched, but he just couldn't make sense of any of them.

The tablets were indecipherable.

And then, at last, something appeared that did make sense.

A tablet written in a language he could understand.

Babylonian. The diplomatic language of the ancient world.

Macridi. Macridi!

Something?

Look, it's in Babylonian.

"Re mah ce sa.

"Shari ra bi."

The treaty which Ramesses the great king,

the King of Egypt... made with Hattusili,

Great King, King of the Hatti,

in order to establish a great peace

and great brotherhood between them forever.

Only the kings of the three great empires -

of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon - were referred to as "Great King".

And yet here in this peace treaty was named a fourth Great King.

Hattusili, King of the mysterious land of Hatti.

Macridi, I think we've found our lost empire.

The peace treaty, dated to 1259BC,

was proof there had indeed been a missing fourth empire.

And here...

Yet Winckler was to die before he could solve the real mystery.

..is the capital city.

How did such a vast empire disappear so completely from history?

It was a question that would take nearly 100 years to answer.

Archaeologists would need to examine the city carefully,

analyse in detail everything recovered,

and then decipher two seemingly impenetrable codes -

one of them in hieroglyphs.

They called the city Hattusha.

In the land of Hatti.

They called its people the Hittites,

even though they were completely different

to the famous Hittites of the Bible.

The Hittites of Hattusha had built their capital in the strangest of places.

A place where no capital of an empire should ever be.

For a great city, it is just so remote.

It's totally cut off. You can't get in or out.

All major cities of the time were crossroads to the rest of the world.

Close to the trade routes or rivers or the sea.

But not Hattusha.

Hattusha was 50 miles from a major river,

locked in behind towering mountain ranges,

it was hundreds of miles from the sea,

and perched high up on the barren hills where the climate was harsh.

The whole region is landlocked.

It's cut off from the Black Sea, it's some 250 miles from the eastern Mediterranean.

There's the other factor too, because of its height, the region's snowed in for a number of months of the year.

So it's totally cut off.

It seemed impossible to imagine

how or why the Hittites built their capital city here.

But archaeologists were to discover it was precisely these difficulties

that made it the perfect site for Hittite ambitions.

Every detail of their city was deliberately planned.

A permanent stronghold, able to withstand any attack.

The Hittites began by exploiting the natural defences of the mountains.

They built in the most extreme places.

Carved into sheer rock faces...

And built across steep ravines.

They hauled huge stones up hundreds of metres.

They drilled holes into solid granite.

And built thick walls along the edges of sheer cliffs.

Everywhere were feats of death-defying engineering,

as they forged a city out of the granite mountains.

One massive outer wall enclosed the entire city.

It was more than four miles long,

and crossed every obstacle.

An unbreakable ring

to protect the Hittites from the outside world.

The Hittites then turned every part of Hattusha into an impregnable fortress.

They were clearly obsessed with their own security.

These walls were among the thickest in the ancient world,

with unique features to strengthen them even further.

We found these large walls around the whole city,

which, at some places, reach a width of more than eight metres.

The most surprising feature of the walls are these puzzling compartments

which make the walls unique in the ancient world.

These compartments gave the walls an incredible strength.

The Hittites filled them with a special watertight mix of earth and sand.

When it was pounded...

it set hard, like concrete.

And on top of these super-strong foundations,

scientists calculated that Hittite builders added eight-metre-high mud brick walls.

And images on pottery show that, at every 12 metres,

they built watchtowers, 30 metres high,

and turned gateways, normally the weak point of any defensive system, into deadly traps.

Any enemy which did break through would be caught,

powerless against Hittite defenders on the massive defensive towers looming above them.

The unique features of the wall meant that the Hittites were able to build a fortification system

which was unbreakable for any weapon of its time.

But the city didn't stop there.

Cutting through the site was an inner wall even thicker than the first.

And here they'd added another defensive innovation -

secret tunnels. Eight of them.

Anyone who did break through the outer ring faced an even greater danger -

ambush.

A surprise counter-attack by the Hittite army hidden in the tunnel.

This was a city bristling with layer upon layer of defensive rings.

Hattusha was home to more than 50,000 people.

The Hittites had deliberately chosen a remote mountainous location, well out of reach of their enemies.

And then transformed this impossible site into an impregnable fortress.

But the dry, barren mountains of Anatolia still presented the Hittites

with what seemed an insurmountable problem.

The lack of water.

And so they devised an ingenious way to provide themselves with continuous, fresh water,

even if they were under siege.

At the heart of their system

were the strangest looking objects ever found at the site.

Although, at first, it wasn't clear exactly what they were.

Luckily, while digging the upper city we were able to find,

um, a row of them, and it was understood that this narrowing of the cylinder

was just used to stick them together to form a row, so then it became obvious, it's a pipe.

The Hittites had discovered natural springs in the hills above Hattusha.

Using the pressure of the water, they then ran it across the neighbouring hills

and down into vast storage pools within the city walls.

It became clear that the Hittites were rather clever

in bringing water from the natural springs to the highest point of the city, to where they built the ponds.

These seven ponds were huge.

One alone held enough to meet the needs of 10,000 people for a year.

They ran the fresh water down through miles of pipes into the city's buildings.

It is a masterpiece of ancient engineering.

Um, the Hittites were able to use the landscape very cleverly.

The Hittites had imposed themselves on this strange remote place,

and forced it to meet their needs.

As archaeologists mapped out the city,

it confirmed just how impressive this civilisation had once been.

As soon as the Hittites had made their city impregnable,

they decided to show the world just how powerful they were.

They designed monuments to be the envy of the world

and stand forever as evidence of their power and strength.

One of the buildings had monumental doorways

and 200 rooms surrounding a vast central courtyard.

Inside were a number of ritualistic objects.

This was the great temple of Hattusha -

the most holy place in the entire empire.

At the highest point of the city, there was even a massive pyramid.

250 metres wide, with 100 steps leading to the top.

It was magnificent.

The outer city wall ran across the top of it.

In the centre, a gateway adorned with sphinxes,

facing south, to Egypt.

The first sight of the city for most visitors.

A symbol of the power of the Hittite empire.

But it was on a hill, right in the centre of the city,

that the Hittites built the most important building of all -

a castle for the king.

This was the beating heart of the city.

Around the castle, yet another massive fortified wall

to keep the king safe.

From here, every corner of the city could be observed.

A central passageway ran up through the castle, denying access to all but the most important.

At the top, were the king's own private apartments,

at the heart of the city and its massive defences.

And laid out beneath, a wonder of the ancient world.

This truly was a city built on a monumental scale.

Every detail of its defences and survival had been ingeniously designed.

The Hittites, it seemed, has planned for Hattusha to be here forever.

But still there was nothing to explain how they'd emerged

from their isolated city to build a great empire.

And how they'd disappeared so completely from history.

For this, archaeologists would need to continue searching for clues.

They uncovered the sacred places of the kings.

They found images of the Hittites themselves.

And others that revealed their obsession with warfare.

And with death.

But strangely, throughout the city, they discovered few precious objects.

None of the things normally found among the remains of an ancient capital.

It was if Hattusha had been mysteriously stripped clean,

leaving nothing behind to reveal the fate of the Hittite empire.

But ancient Hattusha did have one wonderful treasure just waiting to be discovered by archaeologists.

Not gold or jewels, but something far more precious.

Hidden away in a labyrinth of rooms are five enormous libraries.

In them, beautifully filed and catalogued, were 30,000 tablets.

It was one of the largest and oldest libraries ever discovered.

Recorded here, the thoughts and deeds of this mysterious people.

The inside story of a lost civilisation laid out in neat rows,

just waiting to be read.

There was only one problem.

They were written in a language no-one could understand.

Cracking this code was to absorb some of the greatest linguistic minds.

The Hittite language was written in a series of triangular-shaped signs

called cuneiform, one of the world's oldest writing systems.

Because it was used for writing several ancient Middle Eastern languages,

the cuneiform signs themselves were known, and could be easily read.

It was the Hittite language that was impossible to understand.

It's like being able to read the sounds of Latin, because it's written in our familiar alphabet,

without being able to understand the meaning of any of the words.

The key to cracking an unknown language is to find a language that's similar.

It's then possible, using shared words and grammar, to begin the decipherment.

But Hittite baffled everyone.

It seemed to be a language all on its own.

There was no other Middle Eastern language like it.

But the code was finally cracked

with the discovery of just one sentence among thousands.

A Czech scholar came across the sentence that starts right here

and ends at the end of the column.

You can see it much better on a hand copy that we have right here.

It's this sentence.

HE READS THE DIALECT

I have here the same sentence written out again, first in cuneiform,

then in our own alphabet.

He could see the sign for bread. Something common to many ancient languages.

"NINDA-an".

But then he saw something that stopped him dead. Something no-one could have expected -

a word in English.

So, here, one of the words...

jumped out at him at first.

Er, "wa-a-tar."

Well, that is, of course, very much like our own English "water".

And in a similar way, "ez-za" reminded him very much of the old High German for "to eat".

"Etzum", which sounds very much the same.

So, in combination, he seemed to have a sentence here,

a complete sentence that he might now be able to translate,

so he might have written out the words, like I've done here,

and the "nu" reminded him of Latin "nunc", for example, which means "now".

The "NINDA-an"

he recognised as "bread".

"E-ez-za-at-te-ni" - we already saw was "to eat".

"Wa-a-tar" could be the "water" word,

and the "e-ku-ut-te-ni", at the very end,

the "e-ku" part reminded him very much of Latin "aqua". Water.

So that might be "to drink" if it is a verb,

in common, used in combination with water.

So, here he recognised a sentence that could be translated as,

"Now you eat bread and you drink water."

And with this, he had the first full Hittite sentence translated in 30,000 years.

The breakthrough surprised everyone.

It meant Hittite was not a Middle Eastern language, as everyone expected,

but an Indo-European language, just like English.

The Hittites were unlike all their rivals in the ancient world,

because they were not from the Middle East, but from some part of Europe.

The Hittites must have migrated to Turkey

and then chosen the barren mountains of Anatolia to build their fortress city.

Now, finally, the world of the Hittites was laid bare for all to read.

Each word revealing more and more of this mysterious lost civilisation.

And so, for the first time in 3,000 years,

the fabulous story of the fourth great empire of the ancient world could be told.

It was a story of how the Hittites carefully planned and executed a strategy

to become a great superpower.

And it all began with control.

Theirs was a world obsessed by order and riddled with fear.

From the tablets, it was clear that every aspect of Hittite life was tightly regulated.

From working on state farms, to the payment of taxes.

And even to people's sex lives.

The texts revealed the population was tightly controlled by harsh penalties.

"Execute the entire family of he who disobeys the King.

"Cut off the nose and ears of the slave who starts a fire...

"Kill the man who steals a bronze spear.

"He shall be put to death.

"Take away the land of the man who refuses to pay..."

The commandments of the Hittites, it appears, were duty, discipline and sacrifice.

And then, to ensure total obedience,

oaths were sworn to the gods who could themselves inflict terrible punishment.

The anger...of the gods would be inflicted on you when you broke an oath.

And these oaths would also be very often, sort of, enforced, strengthened by rituals.

But the most important oath was loyalty to the King.

According to the texts, a ruling elite,

the lords of Hattusha, executed his will.

These close members of the King's own family

were the real power in Hattusha.

Bound together by a sacred bond of unity in the service of the King.

The Storm God will destroy anyone who dishonours the King.

All must stand united with the King.

To break this bond of brotherhood was the most terrible act a Hittite could commit.

The gods will always come back at you if you kill a family member,

and that was a real taboo in Hittite society.

The brothers burned effigies of their enemies.

Rituals like this strengthened the sacred bond of brotherhood that held Hattusha together

in this hostile environment.

This bond was the rock upon which Hittite success was built.

The texts revealed just how efficiently the Hittites imposed order on Hattusha.

The libraries held detailed accounts of the administration,

recorded the treaties and alliances with other kings

and compiled a detailed history of the Hittites themselves.

Everything seemed designed for a greater purpose.

A plan to impose Hittite power on the world.

And at the heart of their strategy was the plan to build an unstoppable war machine.

They began by developing

a very effective military machine, and I think

that's the core of Hittite success - very highly disciplined.

Training manuals dictated how to turn raw recruits into ruthless warriors.

Specialist training sergeants imposed punishing schedules and absolute obedience.

And trained them in the deadly arts of war.

Officers who don't obey immediately will be blinded.

We expect soldiers to spy on their comrades.

Missing targets will be punished.

The king orders him killed.

The best warriors specialised in chariot fighting, the most powerful weapon of the ancient world.

The horses were force-fed a special diet

and pushed to the limits of their endurance. The weakest were killed.

It seemed the Hittites had one ambition - to create a military force that could win at any cost.

They then unleashed their war machine on the world.

According to the texts, for hundreds of years,

the great cities and kingdoms of the ancient world surrendered, or were crushed by the Hittites.

From the Arzawa and Uliwanda in the west, to Niya, Arahtu and Qatna in the south.

The mighty kingdoms of Aleppo and Mitanni, and even the lands of the Kaska as far as Hatenzuwa.

The Hittites showed no mercy.

This text tells about a Hittite king who destroyed a city,

and, at the end, after the city had been plundered and razed to the ground,

sowed poisonous weeds, simply to make sure that it would never be resettled again.

So we can see this as a very early form of biological warfare.

In just one line, the texts record how the Hittites marched nearly 1,000 miles

to the great city of Babylon,

destroyed it and marched home.

Some kingdoms fought back, and at times even won.

But nothing could stop the relentless Hittites.

Their mission was to build the world's greatest empire.

And now only one power stood in their way -

Egypt.

By 1279BC, Ramesses the Great,

one of the most powerful leaders in Egyptian history, was pharaoh.

And he knew the Hittites now threatened Egypt itself.

His own empire stretched from the Nile to where Syria is today.

All the ancient empires vied to control this strategically vital area.

And at the heart of the region was the town of Kadesh.

Whoever controlled Kadesh might well claim to be

the most powerful king in the whole near-eastern region.

So that was the bone of contention between Egypt and the Hittites.

War between the world's two great superpowers was inevitable.

Its outcome would decide the fate of the whole of the Middle East.

The stakes could not be higher.

Ramesses commanded more resources and now added extra divisions,

making his the largest army in Egyptian history.

Prince Hattusili was the Hittite general with the largest Hittite army ever assembled -

more than 47,000 men.

And crucially, the Hittites had ruthlessly prepared for the inevitable clash.

They now unveiled something that would give them that vital edge.

A new super-weapon.

Some time before the Battle of Kadesh, the Hittites introduced an innovation in chariot warfare.

What they did was to transfer the wheel from the back of the car to the centre.

And that was associated with a very significant change.

This Hittite innovation revolutionised ancient warfare.

Moving the wheels from the rear to the centre of the car

made the chariot stronger, and so capable of carrying an extra man.

And that gave the chariot greater weight and firepower.

This changed the battle tactics, in that these three-man vehicles

could be used rather more like a, say, a small modern tank, for charging into the enemy

right at the beginning of a battle, so presumably creating as much mayhem as possible,

getting deeper into enemy ranks.

The Battle of Kadesh in 1274BC was the greatest battle the world had ever seen.

Thousands of Hittite chariots smashed into the Egyptian lines.

The Egyptians claimed victory.

But we now know from the texts found in Hattusha,

that in fact the Hittites had won the war.

A peace treaty in the Hittite library shows that their commander, Prince Hattusili,

actually conquered all the territory around Kadesh and drove the Egyptians hundreds of miles south.

The new super-weapon, together with superior tactics,

had won the day.

Kadesh was a great victory for the Hittites.

Back in Hattusha, the king was finally one of the most powerful men in the world.

His uncle, Prince Hattusilis, had defeated the armies of the pharaoh and returned home a hero.

Remote Hattusha was now the capital city of a vast empire.

Soon after, Ramesses agreed an everlasting peace.

In it, the Hittite ruler was called "Great King",

the title reserved for the head of a great superpower.

The Hittite's mission was complete.

A small band of brothers had appeared,

and within just a few hundred years, had forged a mighty empire.

The future belonged to them.

And yet, within decades of the triumphant return from Kadesh of Prince Hattusili,

this mighty empire vanished from history.

And still no-one knew why.

Every word in the five great libraries of Hattusha was carefully re-examined for answers.

Somewhere here had to be the final dramatic chapter of the Hittites.

Surely, only the greatest of catastrophes

could bring the fourth great empire of the ancient world crashing down.

But they found nothing.

Not one word.

The archives seem to run out,

er, right before the end.

There's nothing that sheds any light on the very last days of the empire.

It was now clear the archive would never reveal

what disaster had overwhelmed the Hittites 3,000 years ago.

And erased all trace of them.

And that's how things remained, until archaeologists uncovered something that had lain buried

in the heart of Hattusha for more than 3,000 years.

At first sight, it looked like the tomb of a king.

But inside, there was no body.

Instead, the walls were covered in strange symbols.

Hieroglyphs.

A second impossible Hittite code.

These symbols would one day help unravel the fate of this empire -

a fate brought about not by mighty armies,

but by an all-too-human tragedy of greed and revenge.

TRANSLATED: We didn't know what it was at first,

but later when we saw the hieroglyphs on the walls,

we realised this must be an important place.

But no-one there could read them.

And they would take years to fully decipher.

"Amu-u-vah-pah-la-va-sa..."

There are only a handful of people who can read Hittite hieroglyphs,

and two of them are married to each other.

Professor Dincol and his wife, Belkis,

have devoted their lives to understanding these strange symbols.

They knew from hieroglyphs already discovered around the empire,

that this code was increasingly important to the last Hittite kings.

And so now, together with colleagues around the world, they got to work.

Hieroglyphs are notoriously difficult to decipher.

They start off simply enough.

If you draw a figure pointing to himself,

this means, "I am".

But things become more complicated with the expression of abstract thoughts.

Such a hieroglyph in English could be created like this.

For example, an eye and a dear,

this would mean "eye deer".

Idea.

The same sign can have more than one meaning.

But, to make matters worse, some Hittite hieroglyphs had evolved

until the picture signs no longer looked like anything recognisable.

The experts needed something to help them unlock the code.

That came with a number of intriguing finds, including hundreds of tiny lumps of clay.

They were name seals, a kind of ancient business card

with the name and rank of the owner inscribed into the clay.

Around the edge, words were written in cuneiform, which could be understood.

And in the centre,

the same words, but in hieroglyphs.

So now the code breakers could begin to match the two.

One by one, the hieroglyphs were deciphered.

The first hieroglyph from the cave was also the most exciting.

It was a symbol of the last known king of the Hittites.

Well, here are the signs of "Great King"

and, here, "hero".

The hieroglyphs told the story of his last great military campaign.

Surely, here also would be the name of the mighty foreign power

that had finally brought about the downfall of the Hittites.

But as the names of his enemies were deciphered,

everyone was stunned.

Because the enemy that was named was not foreign,

but came from within the Hittite empire itself.

That could only mean civil war.

The hieroglyphs had revealed an unexpected story.

In the last years of the Hittite empire,

the great king was desperately suppressing a rebellion deep inside Hittite territory.

Now, piece by piece, everything began to fall into place.

Prince Hattusili's return from the triumph at Kadesh

had, in fact, sparked a bitter family feud with the king, his nephew.

The king appears to become increasingly nervous

about the great power which Hattusili wielded.

Suspected his intentions, started stripping him of his powers

and once that happened, Hattusili realised that his days were numbered unless he retaliated.

Hattusili acted quickly.

He broke the most sacred oath of the Hittites - the oath of brotherhood.

He arrested the king and sent him into exile.

The loyalty at the heart of Hittite unity was shattered.

Brother turned against brother,

and for the next three generations, the civil war spiralled out of control.

Until Hattusha, at the heart of the empire, lay dying.

The civil war slowly drained the great city of Hattusha of life.

The city was designed to withstand attack from any foreign invader,

but not from within the brotherhood itself.

The civil war brought about the collapse of the rigid order that had kept the kingdom together,

and the empire began to fragment.

Food no longer reached Hattusha, and the great capital began to starve.

Now, one of the texts, a very famous text,

is a letter written by a Hittite king to Vassal, king in Ugarit,

er, urgently requesting that a large consignment of grain be sent to the Hittite homeland,

and the letter finishes by saying, "It's a matter of life and death."

Day by day, the poison of betrayal that Hattusili had unleashed

was weakening Hattusha and draining Hittite authority around the empire.

But what exactly happened in the last days of Hattusha

to make the Hittites disappear so completely from history?

None of the texts or hieroglyphs could help.

Then, archaeologists uncovered one last clue in Hattusha

that would help solve the mystery.

As they dug deep into the foundations of the palace and other key buildings,

they uncovered bricks that had been baked hard by fire.

But only parts of the city seemed affected.

We have fires here at the palace in Bogazkoy,

but also in the temple area - temple one, and here...

In the upper temple area, some of the temples burned.

Here, this temple, temple seven, burned.

Only the important buildings of state were burnt down.

But there was something even stranger about the destruction of these buildings.

It seems as if those parts of the city which were destroyed by fire,

er, were...beforehand were cleaned or were emptied.

The precious objects, which must once have been there -

the gold, treasures and the most recent archives of the Hittites - had all disappeared.

And nowhere was there any sign of an invading army, whether foreign or Hittite.

There was one theory that could explain all the most recent archaeological evidence.

The Hittites knew their city and empire were finished, and so they abandoned their city.

It's even possible that, as they left, they set fire to their own great buildings -

leaving nothing of value to their enemies.

What does the Great King of Hattusha do in the last moments of desperation?

I believe that what he did was to organise a systematic evacuation

of the...above all, the acropolis and the royal buildings,

so that he would take his most valuable possessions with him, including documents.

Together, the Hittite brothers were invincible.

They had built a great city and created the fourth great empire of the ancient world.

They looked set to rule forever.

But with their code of unity broken, everything disintegrated.

At the height of their power, fear and greed turned them against each other.

The Hittites deserted their city.

They left behind no monuments recording their incredible deeds,

and the great libraries containing their story were burned, burying all the clay tablets.

The Hittites then simply abandoned Hattusha.

And disappeared without trace.

The interesting question, I think, is where did they go?

If they took their most valuable documents with them,

this could mean that the last chapter of Hittite history lies hidden somewhere,

just waiting to be dug up.

The Hittites had deliberately built the city of Hattusha to last forever.

But it was so remote that no other great civilisation ever settled up here again.

There was no-one to pass on the myths and legends of the Hittites,

and so their history died with the city.

Over time, the stones of Hattusha were buried and its name forgotten.

And so the amazing story of the Hittites disappeared

for more than 3,000 years.