Once the center of a Great Power
History is full of momentous events, shocking events, that can’t be fully understand because so little of the record has survived. What does survive is mysteries. Here’s one of them.
Sometime around 1595 B.C. the king of the Hittites, Mursili I, marched his army all the way down Mesopotamia from what is now Turkey, all the way to Babylon, then the greatest city in the world. The Hittite ruler sacked the great city, putting an end to the dynasty made famous by Hammurabi, radically disrupting the international political system of the Ancient Near East.
But he didn’t stay long. Babylon was much too far from the Hittite center of power, for any Hittite government to be established there. Mursili looted the place and then marched home. He wasn’t back for very long before he was assassinated.
We don’t know why he attacked Babylon. It was about as far as you could go from Hittite lands and still find any cities at all. There were no roads. Bringing an army all the way down there must have been a colossal undertaking.
In Babylon they must have known the Hittites were coming; but a) their own country was undergoing civil strife, and not in a good position to defend itself; and b) “The Hittites? Did you say Hittites? Don’t they live somewhere way the hell up there in the mountains? What do you mean, ‘The Hittites are coming’?” It would have been very hard news to believe.
History is the collective memory of mankind. With it we can hope to understand our own time. We can at least try. Livy and King Solomon would agree: what has been done before is what is being done now; there is no new thing under the sun.
Inquire of the Lord for wisdom, and for understanding.
Those were in short supply, in Babylon.
Babylon USA, Part II? God did say man cannot rule himself, let alone the world, with any success. I long to pet a lion and a lamb at the same time.
And to sit down beside them on the grass….
Aaah…real CO2 grass…
The relative order of our times would have been the exception and not the rule, throughout most of human history. Invasions, plunder and mayhem could appear at any time in many places. Ancient “civilizations” had little, if any, regard for the rights of individuals.
The law of Moses was the first place in recorded history where a young woman, sexually taken advantage of, had any rights whatsoever in the matter. The Sovereign LORD had to tell His people not to murder, steal or commit adultery. As our current civilization works to dismantle itself, we can see just how good things can be in a godly civilization. Maranatha!
Amen!!
Until recently, historically speaking, the Hittites were used to denounce the Bible because the “scholars” said there was no evidence they ever existed. They were wrong again, just like they are wrong about Climate Change and transgender transitions being good for society.
I’m a Hittite buff; and one thing I’ve never been able to get straight is, exactly who were the “Hittites” in the Bible? The Hittite Empire was centered in what is now Turkey. But there were several nations around, in the early Iron Age and late Bronze Age, who had names that sounded like “Hittite.” And after the Empire fell, Hittite civilization survived in a lot of small city-states, some of which lasted several centuries.
I often wonder whether the Biblical tag “Hittite” is used for several different peoples unrelated to each other.