- 5/15/2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00A
00:23mysterious new army has struck Babylon without warning, spreading terror throughout the
00:32city. With ruthless efficiency, these dark warriors of Hattusha would go on to destroy
00:44anything in their way. Their mission, to become the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
00:53Yet once they had succeeded, this ruthless army, and the vast empire they created,
01:02simply disappeared, as mysteriously as they had emerged. For 3,000 years, all trace of them was
01:13lost, from all the history books, and even from myth and legend. Till one by one, fragments from
01:22this lost world began to emerge. These fragments opened up a world of mysteries and secret codes.
01:31A fortress city built to last forever, an unstoppable war machine, and a mighty empire
01:42even greater than that of Egypt. This is the story of how a civilization built to last forever
01:51could simply vanish from history.
02:08At the turn of the 20th century, explorers were setting off on one of archaeology's great
02:21quests, to test the truth of the ancient myths. The earliest historians had told of a world,
02:33before the Bible was written, ruled by just three mighty empires, Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.
02:43The explorers now confirmed those accounts. These three great empires, all centered on
02:53the Middle East, had left behind fabulous cities and monuments. So the notion there
03:03could be a fourth great empire, of which there was no trace, seemed impossible.
03:09Yet fragments of a mysterious language, seemingly spoken across large areas of the ancient world,
03:19were beginning to emerge. And some even dared to believe this language, which no one could
03:26understand, could be evidence of a fourth vast empire, one completely lost to history.
03:34Hugo Winkler, a German professor, was one of those who believed there might be a fourth empire.
03:50But he lacked the proof. He could read several ancient languages, including Babylonian and Assyrian.
03:59But now he was scouring the world for examples of that lost language, a language no one could
04:08understand. Because he believed it could lead him to the lost fourth empire. He asked his contacts
04:17to bring him any unusual writings that turned up. Theodore Macready was curator at the Ottoman
04:25Museum in Istanbul. Professor, take a look at this. It has ended up in my department at the museum.
04:40A tablet with cuneiform writing on it. Macready, couldn't one of your people do it with us?
04:47That's just it. No. No one can make any sense of it. We hoped you could. What do you think?
04:54It's fascinating. Why? Because I don't understand a word of it.
05:07Not a single word.
05:12This single tablet would be the vital clue that would lead him to his lost empire.
05:23Where does it come from? There, some ruins in Boasco, central Anatolia.
05:36Anatolia? But there's nothing important up there. Nothing.
05:41Winkler and his team set off to investigate and headed for the wilds of Anatolia in central Turkey.
05:52Following in the footsteps of earlier explorers, he went in search of this remote site and the
06:02source of those strange writings. But the further he travelled, the more absurd it seemed
06:11that a missing empire could be so far away from the other main centres of the ancient world.
06:17And then, in the middle of nowhere, he saw something remarkable.
06:41A massive gateway adorned with lions.
06:48The shape and style of the carvings different to anything he'd ever seen.
06:55The size of the gateway and the quality of the craftsmanship, breathtaking.
07:06Everywhere, the signs of a major civilisation.
07:19And it all led into a vast city.
07:49Who built this place?
07:57As Winkler examined the ruins further, he could see the city stretched out for miles.
08:11Here, in the mountains of Anatolia, nearly a thousand miles from the three key capitals
08:21of the ancient world, were the remains of a vast city, forgotten by history.
08:27A civilisation about which he and the rest of the world knew nothing.
08:35The team set up camp. They were looking for anything to tell them who had built this
08:48extraordinary city, and if it was connected to the missing fourth empire.
08:53They discovered clay tablets across the site.
08:59Each was covered in the same mysterious language Winkler had seen in the library.
09:09But in order to unlock the secrets of this lost civilisation,
09:17Winkler now needed to find one tablet in a language he could actually understand.
09:22For weeks, the team searched, but he just couldn't make sense of any of them.
09:32The tablets were indecipherable.
09:36And then, at last, something appeared that did make sense.
09:46A tablet written in a language he could understand.
09:54Babylonian, the diplomatic language of the ancient world.
09:58Macready? Macready?
10:02Something...
10:07Look, it's in Babylonian.
10:10Ria Ma-Se-Sa, Shari-Ra-Bi.
10:18The treaty which Ramesses, the great king, the king of Egypt,
10:25made with Hatu-Sili, great king, king of the Hatti.
10:34In order to establish a great peace and great brotherhood between them forever.
10:46Only the kings of the three great empires of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon
10:52were referred to as great king.
10:55And yet here, in this peace treaty, was named a fourth great king, Hatu-Sili,
11:02king of the mysterious land of Hatti.
11:07Macready, I think we found our lost empire.
11:16The peace treaty, dated to 1259 BC, was proof there had indeed been a missing fourth empire.
11:26Yet Winkler was to die before he could solve the real mystery.
11:31It's the capital city.
11:33How did such a vast empire disappear so completely from history?
11:48It was a question that would take nearly 100 years to answer.
11:54Archaeologists would need to examine the city carefully,
11:59analyse in detail everything recovered,
12:03and then decipher two seemingly impenetrable codes, one of them in hieroglyphs.
12:14They called the city Hatusha, in the land of Hatti.
12:21They called its people the Hittites,
12:26even though they were completely different to the famous Hittites of the Bible.
12:40The Hittites of Hatusha had built their capital in the strangest of places.
12:51A place where no capital of an empire should ever be.
12:57For a great city, it is just so remote.
13:01It's totally cut off. You can't get in or out.
13:07All major cities of the time were crossroads to the rest of the world,
13:12close to the trade routes, or rivers, or the sea.
13:18But not Hatusha.
13:22Hatusha was 50 miles from a major river.
13:27Locked in behind towering mountain ranges, it was hundreds of miles from the sea,
13:33and perched high up on the barren hills, where the climate was harsh.
13:42The whole region is landlocked.
13:45It's cut off from the Black Sea.
13:48It's some 250 miles from the eastern Mediterranean.
13:53There's the other factor, too, because of its height.
13:56The region snowed in for a number of months of the year, so it totally cut off.
14:05It seemed impossible to imagine how or why the Hittites built their capital city here.
14:16But archaeologists were to discover it was precisely these difficulties
14:22that made it the perfect site for Hittite ambitions.
14:27Every detail of their city was deliberately planned,
14:30a permanent stronghold able to withstand any attack.
14:36The Hittites began by exploiting the natural defences of the mountains
14:41They built in the most extreme places,
14:45carved into sheer rock faces,
14:49and built across steep ravines.
14:53They hauled huge stones up hundreds of metres.
14:59They drilled holes into solid granite.
15:06And built thick walls along the edges of sheer cliffs.
15:14Everywhere were feats of death-defying engineering
15:17as they forged a city out of the granite mountains.
15:23One massive outer wall enclosed the entire city.
15:29It was more than four miles long and crossed every obstacle.
15:41An unbreakable ring to protect the Hittites from the outside world.
15:48The Hittites then turned every part of Hattusha into an impregnable fortress.
15:54They were clearly obsessed with their own security.
16:00These walls were among the most dangerous of the city's walls.
16:06They were built to protect the city from any attack.
16:12They were clearly obsessed with their own security.
16:16These walls were among the thickest in the ancient world,
16:20with unique features to strengthen them even further.
16:24We found these large walls around the whole city,
16:29which at some places reach a width of more than eight metres.
16:33The most surprising feature of the walls are these puzzling compartments
16:38that make the walls unique in the ancient world.
16:42These compartments gave the walls an incredible strength.
16:47The Hittites filled them with a special watertight mix of earth and sand.
16:52When it was pounded, it set hard like concrete.
17:00And on top of these super-strong foundations,
17:04scientists calculated that Hittite builders added eight-metre-high mud-brick walls.
17:12And images on pottery showed that at every 12 metres,
17:16they built watchtowers 13 metres high,
17:20and turned gateways, normally the weak point of any defensive system,
17:25into deadly traps.
17:28Any enemy which did break through would be caught,
17:32and there was fierce violence against Hittite defenders
17:35on the massive defensive towers looming above them.
17:44The unique features of the wall meant that the Hittites were able
17:48to build a fortification system which was unbreakable for any weapon.
17:55But the city didn't stop there.
17:58They built a wall even thicker than the first.
18:01And here they'd added another defensive innovation.
18:05Secret tunnels. Eight of them.
18:12Anyone who did break through the outer ring faced an even greater danger.
18:18Ambush.
18:20A surprise counterattack by the Hittite army hidden in the tunnel.
18:26This was a city bristling with layer upon layer of defensive rings.
18:44Petusha was home to more than 50,000 people.
18:49The Hittites had deliberately chosen a remote mountainous location
18:54well out of reach of their enemies,
18:58and then transformed this impossible site into an impregnable fortress.
19:19But the dry, barren mountains of Anatolia still presented the Hittites
19:24with what seemed an insurmountable problem.
19:28The lack of water.
19:32And so they devised an ingenious way to provide themselves
19:36with continuous, fresh water, even if they were under siege.
19:42At the heart of their system were the strangest-looking objects ever found at the site.
19:50Although at first it wasn't clear exactly what they were.
19:57Luckily, when digging in the upper city, we were able to find a row of them.
20:03And it was understood this narrowing of the cylinder
20:07was just used to stick them together.
20:10To form a row. So then it became obvious it's a pipe.
20:17The Hittites had discovered natural springs in the hills above Petusha.
20:22Using the pressure of the water, they then ran it across the neighbouring hills
20:27and down into vast storage pools within the city walls.
20:33It became clear that the Hittites were rather clever
20:37in bringing water from the natural springs to the highest point of the city,
20:42to where they built the ponds.
20:45These seven ponds were huge.
20:48One alone held enough to meet the needs of 10,000 people for a year.
20:55They ran the fresh water down through miles of pipes into the city's buildings.
21:01It is a masterpiece of ancient engineering.
21:05The Hittites were able to use the landscape very cleverly.
21:13The Hittites had imposed themselves on this strange remote place
21:18and forced it to meet their needs.
21:22As archaeologists mapped out the city,
21:25it confirmed just how impressive this civilisation had once been.
21:35As soon as the Hittites had made their city impregnable,
21:39the Hittites were forced to leave the city.
21:44The Hittites were forced to leave the city
21:48As soon as the Hittites had made their city impregnable,
21:51they decided to show the world just how powerful they were.
21:58They designed monuments to be the envy of the world
22:01and stand forever as evidence of their power and strength.
22:06One of the buildings had monumental doorways
22:09and 200 rooms surrounding a vast central courtyard.
22:15Inside were a number of ritualistic objects.
22:22This was the great temple of Hattusha,
22:25the most holy place in the entire empire.
22:32At the highest point of the city, there was even a massive pyramid,
22:37250 metres wide with 100 steps leading to the top.
22:45It was magnificent.
22:47The outer city wall ran across the top of it.
22:51In the centre, a gateway adorned sphinxes,
22:55facing south to Egypt,
22:58the first sight of the city for most visitors,
23:02a symbol of the power of the Hittite empire.
23:07But it was on a hill right in the centre of the city
23:11that the Hittites built the most important building of all,
23:17a castle for the king.
23:22This was the beating heart of the city.
23:28Around the castle, yet another massive fortified wall
23:32Around the castle, yet another massive fortified wall
23:36to keep the king safe.
23:40From here, every corner of the city could be observed.
23:47A central passageway ran up through the castle,
23:50denying access to all but the most important.
23:54At the top were the king's own private apartments,
23:59at the heart of the city and its massive defences,
24:04and laid out beneath, a wonder of the ancient world.
24:13This truly was a city built on a monumental scale.
24:18Every detail of its defences and survival had been ingeniously designed.
24:24The Hittites, it seemed, had planned for Hattusha to be here forever.
24:32But still there was nothing to explain how they'd emerged
24:36from their isolated city to build a great empire,
24:40and how they'd disappeared so completely from history.
24:44For this, archaeologists would need to continue searching for clues.
24:51They uncovered the sacred places of the kings.
24:55They found images of the Hittites themselves,
25:01and others that revealed their obsession with warfare and with death.
25:06But strangely, throughout the city they discovered few precious objects,
25:11none of the things normally found among the remains of an ancient capital.
25:19It was as if Hattusha had been mysteriously stripped clean,
25:23leaving nothing behind to reveal the fate of the Hittite empire.
25:29But ancient Hattusha did have one wonderful treasure
25:33just waiting to be discovered by archaeologists.
25:39Not gold or jewels, but something far more precious.
25:46The Hattushas were known as the Hittites,
25:49and the Hattushas were known as the Hittites.
25:53Not gold or jewels, but something far more precious.
26:07Hidden away in a labyrinth of rooms were five enormous libraries.
26:15In them, beautifully filed and catalogued, were 30,000 tablets.
26:24It was one of the largest and oldest libraries ever discovered.
26:32Recorded here, the thoughts and deeds of this mysterious people.
26:39The inside story of a lost civilization,
26:42laid out in neat rows, just waiting to be read.
26:49There was only one problem.
26:52They were written in a language no-one could understand.
26:59Cracking this code was to absorb some of the greatest linguistic minds.
27:07The Hittite language was written in a series of triangular-shaped signs called cuneiform,
27:12one of the world's oldest writing systems.
27:17Because it was used for writing several ancient Middle Eastern languages,
27:21the cuneiform signs themselves were known and could be easily read.
27:26It was the Hittite language that was impossible to understand.
27:31It's like being able to read the sounds of Latin,
27:34because it's written in our familiar alphabet,
27:37without being able to understand the meaning of any of the words.
27:46The key to cracking an unknown language is to find a language that's similar.
27:51It's then possible, using shared words and grammar, to begin the decipherment.
27:58But Hittite baffled everyone.
28:01It seemed to be a language all on its own.
28:04There was no other Middle Eastern language like it.
28:09But the code was finally cracked with the discovery of just one sentence among thousands.
28:16A Czech scholar came across this sentence that starts right here
28:21and ends at the end of the column.
28:24You can see it much better on a hand copy that we have right here.
28:29It's this sentence.
28:33I have here the same sentence written out again,
28:37first in cuneiform, then in our own alphabet.
28:42He could see the sign for bread,
28:45something common to many ancient languages,
28:48ninda'am.
28:50But then he saw something that stopped him dead,
28:53something no one could have expected.
28:56So, here, one of the words jumped out at him at first.
29:01Water.
29:03Well, that is, of course, very much like our own English, water.
29:08And in a similar way, edza,
29:11reminded him very much of the Old High German for to eat.
29:15Edza.
29:17So, edza.
29:19And in a similar way, edza reminded him very much of the Old High German for to eat.
29:25Edza, which sounds very much the same.
29:29And so, in combination, he seemed to have a sentence here,
29:33a complete sentence that he might now be able to translate.
29:36So, he might have written out the words like I've done here,
29:40and the nu reminded him of Latin nunc, for example, which means now.
29:47The ninda'am he recognized as bread.
29:51Edzateni, we already saw, was to eat.
29:56Watar could be the water word.
30:02And the ekuteni, at the very end,
30:06the eku part reminded him very much of Latin aqua, water.
30:12So, that might be to drink, if it is a verb used in combination with water.
30:19So, here he recognised a sentence that could be translated as
30:25now you eat bread and you drink water.
30:29And with this he had the first full Hittite sentence translated in 3,000 years.
30:35The breakthrough surprised everyone.
30:38It meant Hittite was not a Middle Eastern language, as everyone expected,
30:42but an Indo-European language, just like English.
30:46The Hittites were unlike all their rivals in the ancient world,
30:50because they were not from the Middle East, but from some part of Europe.
30:58The Hittites must have migrated to Turkey.
31:02And then chosen the barren mountains of Anatolia to build their fortress city.
31:18Now, finally, the world of the Hittites was laid bare for all to read.
31:24Each word revealing more and more of this mysterious,
31:29Each word revealing more and more of this mysterious, lost civilisation.
31:47And so, for the first time in 3,000 years,
31:51the fabulous story of the fourth great empire of the ancient world could be told.
31:59It was a story of how the Hittites carefully planned and executed a strategy
32:04to become a great superpower.
32:07And it all began with control.
32:11Theirs was a world obsessed by order and riddled with fear.
32:17From the tablets, it was clear that every aspect of Hittite life was tightly regulated.
32:25From working on state farms, to the payment of taxes,
32:30and even to people's sex lives.
32:35The texts revealed the population was tightly controlled by harsh penalties.
32:42Execute the entire family of he who disobeys the king.
32:46Cut off the nose and ears of the slave who starts it.
32:51Kill the man who steals a bronze spear.
32:55He shall be put to death.
32:58Take away the land of the man who appeases the man.
33:03The commandments of the Hittites, it appears,
33:06were duty, discipline and sacrifice.
33:13And then, to ensure total obedience,
33:16oaths were sworn to the gods,
33:18who could themselves inflict terrible punishments.
33:23The anger of the gods would be inflicted on you when you broke an oath.
33:28And these oaths would also be very often sort of enforced, strengthened by rituals.
33:35But the most important oath was loyalty to the gods.
33:39And the Hittites were the first to take the oath.
33:44The Hittites were the first to take the oath.
33:48But the most important oath was loyalty to the king.
33:54According to the texts, a ruling elite, the lords of Hattusha, executed his will.
34:02These close members of the king's own family were the real power in Hattusha,
34:07bound together by a sacred bond of unity in the service of the king.
34:13The storm god will destroy anyone who dishonours the king.
34:17All must stand united with the king.
34:20To break this bond of brotherhood was the most terrible act a Hittite could commit.
34:27The gods will always come back at you if you kill a family member,
34:31and that was a real taboo in Hittite society.
34:36The brothers burned effigies of their enemies.
34:40Rituals like this strengthened the sacred bond of brotherhood
34:44that held Hattusha together in this hostile environment.
34:50This bond was the rock upon which Hittite success was built.
34:59The texts revealed just how efficiently the Hittites imposed order on Hattusha.
35:05The libraries held detailed accounts of the administration,
35:09recorded the treaties and alliances with other kings,
35:12and compiled a detailed history of the Hittites themselves.
35:16Everything seemed designed for a greater purpose.
35:27A plan to impose Hittite power on the world.
35:35And at the heart of their strategy was the plan to build an unstoppable war machine.
35:45They began by developing a very effective military machine.
35:50I think that's really the core of Hittite success.
35:52Very highly disciplined.
35:58Training manuals dictated how to turn raw recruits into ruthless warriors.
36:05Specialist training sergeants imposed punishing schedules and absolute obedience.
36:13And trained them in the deadly arts of war.
36:18Officers who don't obey immediately will be blinded.
36:21We expect soldiers to spy on their comrades.
36:24Missing targets will be punished.
36:27The king orders him killed.
36:31The very best warriors specialised in chariot fighting,
36:35the most powerful weapon of the ancient world.
36:39The horses were force-fed a special diet and pushed to the limits of their endurance.
36:45The weakest were killed.
36:50It seemed the Hittites had one ambition,
36:53to create a military force that could win at any cost.
36:58They then unleashed their war machine on the world.
37:04According to the texts, for hundreds of years,
37:07the great cities and kingdoms of the ancient world surrendered,
37:11or were crushed by the Hittites.
37:14From Niazawa and Uliwanda in the west,
37:17to Nia, Eratu and Katna in the south,
37:20the mighty kingdoms of Aleppo and Mitanni,
37:24and even the lands of the Kaska, as far as Hatan Zuwa.
37:29The Hittites showed no mercy.
37:34This text tells about a Hittite king who destroyed a city,
37:38and at the end, after the city had been plundered and razed to the ground,
37:42sowed poisonous weeds,
37:45simply to make sure that it would never be resettled again.
37:50So you can see this as a very early form of biological warfare.
37:57In just one line, the texts record how the Hittites
38:00marched nearly 1,000 miles to the great city of Babylon,
38:04destroyed it and marched home.
38:09Some kingdoms fought back, and at times, even won.
38:13But nothing could stop the relentless Hittites.
38:17Their mission was to build the world's greatest empire.
38:21And now only one power stood in their way.
38:27Egypt.
38:35By 1279 BC, Ramesses the Great,
38:39one of the most powerful leaders in Egyptian history, was pharaoh.
38:44And he knew the Hittites now threatened Egypt itself.
38:50His own empire stretched from the Nile to where Syria is today.
38:56All the ancient empires vied to control this strategically vital area.
39:02And at the heart of the region was the town of Kadesh.
39:07Whoever controlled Kadesh might well claim to be
39:12the most powerful king in the whole Near Eastern region.
39:17So that was the bone of contention between Egypt and the Hittites.
39:25War between the world's two great superpowers was inevitable.
39:29Its outcome would decide the fate of the whole of the Middle East.
39:34The stakes could not be higher.
39:36Ramesses commanded more resources, and now added extra divisions,
39:41making his the largest army in Egyptian history.
39:48Prince Hatushili was the Hittite general
39:51with the largest Hittite army ever assembled, more than 47,000 men.
39:57And crucially, the Hittites had ruthlessly prepared for the inevitable clash.
40:01They now unveiled something that would give them that vital edge.
40:08A new superweapon.
40:17Sometime before the Battle of Kadesh,
40:20the Hittites introduced an innovation in chariot warfare.
40:24What they did was to use a machine gun,
40:29What they did was to transfer the wheel from the back of the car to the centre.
40:36And that was associated with a very significant change.
40:48This Hittite innovation revolutionised ancient warfare.
40:53Moving the wheels from the rear to the centre of the car
40:56made the chariot stronger, and so capable of carrying an extra man.
41:01And that gave the chariot greater weight and firepower.
41:07This changed the battle tactics in that these three-man vehicles
41:12could be used rather more like, say, a small modern tank
41:16for charging into the enemy right at the beginning of a battle,
41:20so presumably creating as much mayhem as possible,
41:23getting deeper into enemy ranks.
41:27The Battle of Kadesh
41:34The Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC
41:38was the greatest battle the world had ever seen.
41:45Thousands of Hittite chariots smashed into the Egyptian lines.
41:57Argh!
42:06The Egyptians claimed victory.
42:10But we now know from the texts found in Hattusha
42:14that, in fact, the Hittites had won the war.
42:21A peace treaty in the Hittite library
42:24shows that their commander, Prince Hattushili,
42:27actually conquered all the territory around Kadesh
42:30and drove the Egyptians hundreds of miles south.
42:35The new superweapon, together with superior tactics, had won the day.
42:43Kadesh was a great victory for the Hittites.
42:54Back in Hattusha, the king was finally one of the most powerful men in the world.
43:16His uncle, Prince Hattushili, had defeated the armies of the pharaoh
43:21and returned home a hero.
43:25Remote Hattusha was now the capital city of a vast empire.
43:35Soon after, Ramesses agreed an everlasting peace.
43:40In it, the Hittite ruler was called Great King,
43:45the title reserved for the head of a great superpower.
43:55The Hittites' mission was complete.
43:58A small band of brothers had appeared
44:01and, within just a few hundred years, had forged a mighty empire.
44:09The future belonged to them.
44:17And yet, within decades of the triumphant return from Kadesh of Prince Hattushili,
44:23this mighty empire vanished from history.
44:26And still, no-one knew why.
44:33Every word in the five great libraries of Hattusha was carefully re-examined for answers.
44:40Somewhere here had to be the final dramatic chapter of the Hittites.
44:47Surely, only the greatest of catastrophes
44:50could bring the fourth great empire of the ancient world crashing down.
44:56But they found nothing, not one word.
45:02The archives seem to run out right before the end.
45:09There's nothing that sheds any light on the very last days of the empire.
45:17It was now clear the archive would never reveal
45:21what disaster had overwhelmed the Hittites 3,000 years ago
45:27and erased all trace of them.
45:35And that's how things remained,
45:38until archaeologists uncovered something that Elaine buried in the heart of Hattusha
45:43for more than 3,000 years.
45:49At first sight, it looked like the tomb of a king.
45:53But inside, there was no body.
45:58Instead, the walls were covered in strange symbols.
46:02Hieroglyphs.
46:05A second impossible Hittite code.
46:09These symbols would one day help unravel the fate of this empire.
46:15A fate brought about not by mighty armies,
46:19but by an all-too-human tragedy of greed and revenge.
46:27We didn't know what it was at first,
46:30but later, when we saw the inscriptions and hieroglyphs on the walls,
46:34we realised this must be an important place.
46:39But no-one there could read them.
46:43And they would take years to fully decipher.
46:59There are only a handful of people who can read Hittite hieroglyphs,
47:03and two of them are married to each other.
47:06Professor Dinschl and his wife Belkis
47:09have devoted their lives to understanding these strange symbols.
47:15They knew from hieroglyphs already discovered around the empire
47:19that this code was increasingly important to the last Hittite kings.
47:25And so now, together with colleagues around the world, they got to work.
47:31Sa, ha...
47:34Hieroglyphs are notoriously difficult to decipher.
47:39They start off simply enough.
47:43If you drew a figure pointing to himself, this means I am.
47:50But things become more complicated with the expression of abstract thoughts.
47:55Such a hieroglyph in English could be created like this.
48:01For example, an eye and a deer.
48:06This would mean I dear.
48:11I dear.
48:16The same sign can have more than one meaning.
48:20But to make matters worse, some Hittite hieroglyphs had evolved
48:24until the picture signs no longer looked like anything recognisable.
48:31The experts needed something to help them unlock the code.
48:40That came with a number of intriguing finds,
48:43including hundreds of tiny lumps of clay.
48:47They were name seals, a kind of ancient business card
48:51with the name and rank of the owner inscribed into the clay.
48:55Around the edge, words were written in cuneiform, which could be understood.
49:01And in the centre, the same words, but in hieroglyphs.
49:08So now the code-breakers could begin to match the two.
49:17One by one, the hieroglyphs were deciphered.
49:20The first hieroglyph from the cave was also the most exciting.
49:24It was a symbol of the last known king of the Hittites.
49:30Well, here are the signs of great king and here hero.
49:40The hieroglyphs told the story of his last great military campaign.
49:45Surely, here also would be the name of the mighty foreign power
49:49that had finally brought about the downfall of the Hittites.
49:54But as the names of his enemies were deciphered, everyone was stunned.
50:00Because the enemy that was named was not foreign,
50:03but came from within the Hittite empire itself.
50:07That could only mean civil war.
50:13The hieroglyphs had revealed an unexpected story.
50:17In the last years of the Hittite empire,
50:19the great king was desperately suppressing a rebellion,
50:23deep inside Hittite territory.
50:29The Hittites were the last of the Hittites.
50:33Now, piece by piece, everything began to fall into place.
50:39Prince Hattushili's return from the triumphant Kadesh
50:42had, in fact, sparked a bitter family feud with the king, his nephew.
50:50The king appears to become increasingly nervous about the great power
50:54which Hattushili had brought upon himself.
50:57The king appears to become increasingly nervous about the great power
51:01which Hattushili wielded, suspected his intentions,
51:05started stripping of his powers, and once that happened,
51:09Hattushili realised that his days were numbered unless he retaliated.
51:19Hattushili acted quickly.
51:23He broke the most sacred oath of the Hittites,
51:26the oath of brotherhood.
51:32He arrested the king and sent him into exile.
51:40The loyalty at the heart of Hittite unity was shattered.
51:46Brother turned against brother, and for the next three generations,
51:51the civil war spiralled out of control.
51:57Until Hattusha, at the heart of the empire, lay dying.
52:09The civil war slowly drained the great city of Hattusha of life.
52:15The city was designed to withstand attack from any foreign invader,
52:20but not from within the brotherhood itself.
52:24The civil war brought about the collapse of the rigid order
52:27that had kept the kingdom together, and the empire began to fragment.
52:32Food no longer reached Hattusha, and the great capital began to starve.
52:39One of the texts, a very famous text,
52:42is a letter written by a Hittite king to a vassal king in Ugarit,
52:49urgently requesting that a large consignment of grain
52:53be sent to the Hittite homeland,
52:55and the letter finishes by saying,
52:57it's a matter of life and death.
53:02Day by day, the poison of betrayal that Hattushili had unleashed
53:07was weakening Hattusha and draining Hittite authority around the empire.
53:13But what exactly happened in the last days of Hattusha
53:16to make the Hittites disappear so completely from history?
53:23None of the texts or hieroglyphs could help.
53:27Then, archaeologists uncovered one last clue in Hattusha
53:31that would help solve the mystery.
53:34As they dug deep into the foundations of the palace
53:37and other key buildings,
53:39they uncovered bricks that had been baked hard by fire.
53:45But only parts of the city seemed affected.
53:49We have fires here at the palace and Bukkale,
53:54but also in the temple area,
53:56and there's a lot of fire.
53:58Here at the palace and Bukkale,
54:01but also in the temple area,
54:03Temple 1, here at the House of the Slope.
54:06In the upper temple area, some of the temples burned.
54:11Here, this temple, Temple 7, burned.
54:14Only the important buildings of state were burnt down.
54:18But there was something even stranger
54:20about the destruction of these buildings.
54:24It seems as if those parts of the city which were destroyed by fire
54:28were...beforehand were cleaned or were emptied.
54:36The precious objects which must once have been there,
54:40the gold, treasures and the most recent archives of the Hittites,
54:44had all disappeared.
54:47And nowhere was there any sign of an invading army,
54:51whether foreign or Hittite.
55:00There was one theory that could explain
55:02all the most recent archaeological evidence.
55:07The Hittites knew their city and empire were finished,
55:11and so they abandoned their city.
55:15It's even possible that as they left,
55:18they set fire to their own great buildings,
55:23leaving nothing of value to their enemies.
55:30What does the great king of Hattusa do in the last moments of desperation?
55:36I believe that what he did was to organise
55:40a systematic evacuation of the, above all,
55:45the Acropolis and the royal buildings,
55:49so that he would take his most valuable possessions with him,
55:54including documents.
56:02Together, the Hittite brothers were invincible.
56:05They had built a great city
56:07and created the fourth great empire of the ancient world.
56:11They looked set to rule forever.
56:16But with their code of unity broken, everything disintegrated.
56:23At the height of their power, fear and greed turned them against each other.
56:31The Hittites deserted their city.
56:34They left behind no monuments recording their incredible deeds.
56:39And the great libraries containing their story were burned,
56:43burying all the clay tablets.
56:53The Hittites then simply abandoned Hattusa
56:58and disappeared without trace.
57:02The interesting question, I think, is where did they go?
57:06If they took their most valuable documents with them,
57:11this could mean that the last chapter of Hittite history
57:15lies hidden somewhere, just waiting to be dug up.
57:32The Hittites had deliberately built the city of Hattusa to last forever.
57:38But it was so remote
57:40that no other great civilisation ever settled up here again.
57:46There was no-one to pass on the myths and legends of the Hittites.
57:51And so their history died with the city.
57:55Over time, the stones of Hattusa were buried
57:58and its name forgotten.
58:02And so the amazing story of the Hittites disappeared
58:06for more than 3,000 years.
58:17Who could forget Ruby Wax?
58:19Dara O Briain gives her the chance to turn back time, next on BBC Two.
Recommended
59:40
58:33
45:12