The Hittites
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
The Hittites appear throughout the Old Testament. They are listed among the peoples of Canaan (Genesis 15:20); Abraham buys his family grave from "Ephron the Hittite" (Genesis 23:10); Solomon's traders sell chariots and horses to "all the kings of the Hittites" (1 Kings 10:29); and the Syrian army once fled in panic, thinking Israel had hired "the kings of the Hittites" against them (2 Kings 7:6). For much of the nineteenth century, no source outside the Bible was known to mention them.
What was found
Ruins at Bogazkale (then Boğazköy) in central Turkey had been known since the French traveller Charles Texier described them in 1834. In the 1880s the British scholar Archibald Sayce and the missionary William Wright argued that the ruins and the inscriptions from Syria and Turkey belonged to the biblical Hittites. Then in 1906 the German excavator Hugo Winckler, with Theodore Makridi of the Istanbul museum, dug at Bogazkale and recovered thousands of clay tablets from the royal archive. The few written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time, identified the city as Hattusa, capital of the Hittite empire, a power that dealt with Egypt as an equal. In 1915 the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný, building on a suggestion made by Jørgen Knudtzon in 1902, showed that the main Hittite language was Indo-European, and the tablets could be read.
What it shows
That a great people called the Hittites really existed, with kings, an empire, and an archive, and that later small kingdoms in Syria carried the name on; the biblical references to "the kings of the Hittites" in Solomon's day fit those later Syrian states well. It also shows the rule this whole section keeps: when the ground has not yet been dug, silence is not a verdict.
What it does not show
It does not settle who the "children of Heth" living at Hebron in Abraham's day were (Genesis 23:10). The Anatolian empire lay far to the north, and many scholars think the Hittites of Genesis were a separate local group in Canaan who bore a similar name, or that the name was applied to them later. And the popular form of the story, that "scholars said the Hittites never existed," is stronger than the record: some doubted their existence or their importance, but it was never the settled view of everyone.
Where scholars divide
The live question is the relationship between the Hittites of Genesis, the Anatolian empire at Hattusa, and the later Neo-Hittite kingdoms of Syria. Scholars divide on how, or whether, these connect. The page states the finding and leaves that question open.
Discovery history from the standard accounts of Hattusa and the Hittites. Sources checked 2026-09-24: Hattusa; Hugo Winckler (Britannica); Bedřich Hrozný (Britannica). Scripture quotations from the King James Version. This page reports what was found and what it can bear; where a claim rests on tradition or a disputed reading, it says so.