Image Details

Erich Lessing

Discovered a little more than a century ago by anthropologist Ernest Chantre on the site of the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusa (modern Bogazköy, Turkey), this 13th-century B.C. Akkadian tablet, written in cuneiform, records the names of cities and villages with ties to the Hittite empire. As early as the mid-second millennium B.C., Hittite kings and their scribes—mankind’s first historians—began to record the significant events taking place in their world.