Book | The Secret of the Hittites: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire

Mavi Boncuk | 

The Secret of the Hittites: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire

• ISBN-10 : 1842122959 | ISBN-13 : 978-1842122952
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C. W. Ceram[1] the author of the acclaimed Gods, Graves, and Scholars tells the dramatic tale of the Hittites, an Indo-European people who became a dominant power in the Middle East. Their struggle in Egypt with Ramses II for control of Syria led to one of the greatest battles of the ancient world. The fall of the Hittite empire was sudden, and historical records were scarce--until the discovery of cuneiform tablets yielded a rich store of information on which this work is based. "...a saga richly charged with dramatic twists and with enthralling accounts of scholarly detective work."--The Atlantic.

"This is an interesting book about a little-known and fascinating people, the Hittites. Almost completely unknown until the twentieth century, the Hittites flourished for hundreds of years around 2,000 B.C. in what is now Turkey and the eastern Middle East. They were a very advanced civilization known at the time as "The People of a Thousand Gods", which actually meant that this great people allowed something virtually unknown at that time: freedom of religion. A warlike people, they enjoyed peace and prosperity because they were prepared to defend themselves vigorously and often found occasion to prove it. It was to the Hittites that the great Patriarch Abraham went during many of the years wandered as nomads, awaiting the coming of the "Promised Land." (The Hittites, though officially pagan, honored Abraham and called him "lord.") This book describes the early days of the discovery of the archeological evidence of the mysterious and remarkable people eventually identified as "the Hittites." Review by  C. Landridge

[1] C. W. Ceram (20 January 1915 – 12 April 1972) was the pseudonym of German journalist, editor at Rowohlt Verlag, and author Kurt Wilhelm Marek, known for his popular works about archaeology.^[1] He chose to write under a pseudonym — spelling his own name backward as an ananym, and latinizing the K as C — to distance himself from his earlier work as a propagandist for the Third Reich.

Ceram was born in Berlin. During World War II, he was a member of the Propagandatruppe. His works from that period include Wir hielten Narvik, 1941, and Rote Spiegel - überall am Feind. Von den Kanonieren des Reichsmarschalls, 1943.

In 1949, Ceram wrote his most famous book, Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte — published in English as Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology — an account of the historical development of archaeology. Published in 28 languages, Ceram's book eventually received a printing of over 5 million copies, and is still in print today. His very first article in this vein was about epigraphy entitled: On the Decipherment of an Unknown Script and was published in the Berliner Illustrierte (1935).

Other books by the author include The Secret of the Hittites (1956), March of Archaeology (1958) and The First American (1971), a book on ancient North American history. Under his actual name he wrote Yestermorrow: Notes on Man's Progress (1961); Hands on the Past: The Pioneer Archaeologists Tell Their Own Story (1966).

Kurt Marek was responsible for the publication of A Woman in Berlin, the anonymous memoir of a German woman raped by Red Army troops.