Book excerpt: The Hittites were an Indo-European-speaking people who established a kingdom in Anatolia (modern Turkey) almost 4,000 years ago. They rose to become one of the great powers of the ancient Middle Eastern world by conquering Babylon - and were destroyed in the wake of the movements of the enigmatic Sea Peoples around 1180 BC. Macqueen's study investigates such intriguing topics as the origins of the Hittites, the sources of the metals which were so vital to their success, and their relations with their contemporaries in the Aegean world, the Trojans and the Mycenaean Greeks.