This Empire Rivaled Egypt — Then Vanished For 3,000 Years

For nearly three thousand years, one of the great empires of the ancient world was completely forgotten. Its name did not appear in any history book. Its language was not spoken. Its cities were not on any map. It was as if an entire civilization, once the equal of Egypt and Babylon, had simply been erased from human memory. And then, at the end of the nineteenth century, an archaeologist walking through a remote village in central Turkey stumbled upon something that would rewrite the ancient history of the world. Tonight, we walk slowly through the story of the Hittites. The empire that once rivaled Egypt. That invented iron working. That signed the first written peace treaty in human history. That ruled Anatolia and Syria for four hundred years. And that vanished so completely that when we finally rediscovered them, we had to invent an entire scholarly discipline just to understand them again. A slow, contemplative journey through one of the most extraordinary lost-and-found stories in human history, told with cinematic narration and atmospheric music. 🔔 New long documentaries every Saturday. Shorter dark history stories every Tuesday. Subscribe to Buried Histories for the stories the world tried to forget. Chapters:0:00 The Empire That Was Erased3:00 The Land of Anatolia6:00 The Birth of the Kingdom8:30 The Imperial Expansion11:30 The Battle of Kadesh14:30 The First Peace Treaty17:00 Society and Daily Life20:00 The Thousand Gods of Hatti22:30 The Empire at Its Peak25:00 The Late Bronze Age Collapse28:00 Three Thousand Years of Silence30:30 The Rediscovery33:30 What the Tablets Revealed36:00 A Reflection on Memory38:30 An Imagination of the Traveler40:30 A Silent Closing #hittites #ancienthistory #anatolia #historyforsleep #sleepdocumentary #darkhistory #forgottenempires #buriedhistories #ancientturkey #kadeshbattle 🎵 Music: "Eyes of Glory" by Aakash GandhiSource: YouTube Audio Library