Hittites
The Bronze Age superpower of Anatolia that rivaled Egypt, produced history's first surviving peace treaty, then collapsed around 1180 BC and was forgotten for millennia.
For most of recorded history, nobody knew the Hittites had existed. They survived only as a shadowy people mentioned in a handful of Bible verses, until archaeologists digging in central Turkey in the early twentieth century pulled an entire lost superpower out of the ground. From roughly 1650 to 1180 BC, the Hittite empire ruled Anatolia from its mountain capital at Hattusa, fought Egypt to a standstill for mastery of the Near East, and then collapsed so completely that its own name dropped out of human memory for three thousand years.
The superpower on the plateau
Hattusa sat on a windswept plateau in what is now north-central Turkey, ringed by more than six kilometers of stone walls and gates guarded by carved lions and sphinxes. From here Hittite kings governed a patchwork of vassal states stretching across Anatolia and down into Syria. They were formidable soldiers, masters of the light war chariot, and among the earliest peoples to work iron, though the old textbook claim of a Hittite 'iron monopoly' is now doubted. What made them a great power was not just their army but their reach: a Hittite king could bully or bargain with rulers a thousand miles away.
Kadesh and the first peace treaty
That reach collided with Egypt at Kadesh, in modern Syria, around 1274 BC. Ramesses II and the Hittite king Muwatalli II threw thousands of chariots at each other in one of the largest chariot battles ever fought. Both kings went home claiming a glorious victory, but in truth it was a bloody draw, and Ramesses spent years carving his flattering version across the walls of Egyptian temples. The lasting result came about fifteen years later. Around 1259 BC, Ramesses and the new Hittite king Hattusili III signed a formal agreement of peace, mutual defense, and the return of fugitives. It is the earliest surviving written peace treaty in history, and a copy of it hangs today at the headquarters of the United Nations.
The club of great powers
Kadesh was the exception. For much of the Late Bronze Age the great kingdoms preferred correspondence to combat. Egypt, Hatti, Babylon, Assyria, and the Mycenaean Greeks formed a kind of exclusive club, their rulers addressing one another as 'brother,' swapping gold, greetings, and daughters in dynastic marriages, all recorded on clay tablets in cuneiform. It was one of the first international systems the world had seen, and it depended on every member staying strong.
Around 1180 BC that system came apart. In a wave of destruction historians call the Late Bronze Age collapse, cities across the eastern Mediterranean burned within a few decades, battered by some combination of drought, famine, migrating raiders remembered as the Sea Peoples, and the failure of a trade network that had grown too interdependent to survive a shock. Hattusa was abandoned and burned. The Hittite empire simply ended.
It stayed ended, and forgotten, until 1906, when German excavations at Hattusa uncovered an archive of thousands of clay tablets. In 1915 the scholar Bedrich Hrozny cracked their language and delivered a jolt: Hittite was Indo-European, a distant cousin of Greek, Latin, and English. A vanished empire that had once negotiated as an equal with the pharaohs had been hiding in plain sight, under a Turkish hillside, waiting to be read.