Big Hitters

ON a recent visit to Cambridge, I found the two books I had taken with me were not enough for a week-long trip (I had already got halfway through one of the books, and the other proved a huge disappointment).

Luckily I came across a secondhand bookshop that proved to have a decent history section, and from there I bought The Secret Of The Hittites: The Discovery Of An Ancient Empire for £3.50.

This is a 2001 paperback version of a book first published in German in 1955

Anyone with more than a passing interest in ancient history will almost certainly have heard of the Hittites, an Indo-European people who carved out an empire in much of what is now Turkey.

But 200 years ago they were very much a forgotten race, apart from a few mentions in the Bible where Hittites are listed with other tribes as occupying or impinging upon the Promised Land.

However, the fact individual Hittites are described in the Bible as serving King David might have alerted scholars to the people's possible importance.

It took a series of discoveries, still being made when this book was being written, to change that.

Normally a book of this sort, almost 70 years old, would be terribly dated.

But the author, Kurt Marek, a German using as a pen-name CW Ceram, does not try to give a definitive account of the Hittites.

Instead he describes how the world's state of knowledge of the Hittites had got to where it had reached by the mid-1950s.

It makes for an entertaining read, a kind of historical whodunnit?, and I certainly feel as though I enjoyed much more than my money's worth.