For most of modern history, the Hittites were known only from the Bible, and skeptics used their apparent absence from the historical record as evidence that the Bible was untrustworthy. Then in 1906, excavations at Boghazköy in central Turkey — the site of the ancient Hittite capital Hattusa — began to yield thousands of clay tablets. The Hittites were not only real; they had been one of the dominant superpowers of the ancient Near East for nearly six centuries, rivaling Egypt itself.
At the height of their power, roughly 1400–1200 BC, the Hittite Empire controlled most of Anatolia (modern Turkey), extended south through Syria, and clashed repeatedly with Egypt for control of Canaan and the Levant. The Battle of Kadesh (c. 1274 BC), fought between Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Muwatalli II, was one of the largest chariot battles in history and resulted in the world's first known peace treaty — the Egyptian-Hittite Treaty, a copy of which hangs in the United Nations headquarters in New York.
The Hittites appear throughout the Old Testament — as early as Abraham's purchase of the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite (Genesis 23), and as late as the books of Kings, where Hittite kingdoms in Syria are still mentioned centuries after the empire's collapse. Uriah the Hittite, whom David had killed to cover his sin with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11), was a Hittite serving in Israel's army — evidence that Hittite individuals lived and integrated throughout Canaan for generations. The conquest lists in Joshua and the genealogical lists in Ezra both include Hittites among the peoples of the land.
The Hittites are also significant because they represent precisely the kind of imperial power that surrounded and threatened Israel throughout her history. God's covenant with Abraham specifically named the Hittites — "the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims" (Genesis 15:20) — as peoples whose land He would give to Abraham's descendants. The history of the Hittite Empire, once dismissed by critics as biblical fiction, is now one of the best-documented confirmations of the historical accuracy of the Old Testament.