A historical geography of the Hittite Heartland

Adam Kryszeń's book reconstructs the geographical relations of the major political and religious centres of the core region of the Hittite state, which thrived in Central Asia Minor from roughly the 17th to the beginning of the 12th century BC. Despite century-long efforts to bring order to the knowledge of geography of Hittite Central Anatolia, there are still fundamental issues that await resolution. The investigation is primarily philologically-oriented, in that it makes no pretense of providing any exact identifications that would allow to pinpoint Hittite cities and mountains on the map. Instead of offering yet another set of precise locations, the study analyses the written evidence in order to (re)create the region’s relative geography, understood as a system of geographical relations between the discussed places. The method of inquiry employed in the study utilises all the available data concerning the investigated toponyms and analyses them from a strictly geographical perspective, which enables a better appreciation of the material.