The Hittite & Lydian kingdom, The Red Sea, the Mycenean

The "Neo-Hittite" post-Empire states, petty kingdoms under Assyrian rule, may have lingered on until ca. 700 BC, and the Bronze Age Hittite and Luwian dialects evolved into the sparsely attested Lydian, Lycian and Carian languages. Remnants of these languages lingered into Persian times and were finally extinct by the spread of Hellenism. The later Lydian language appears to be directly descended from Hittite rather than from Luwian.

Lydian is attested in coin legends of the 7th century B.C. and in some 100 inscriptions dating to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Lydian became extinct around the first century BC, giving way to Greek as a Roman Province. The gold deposits in the river Pactolus that were the source of the proverbial wealth of Croesus: Lydia.

To the south of the core territory of Hattusa was the land of Kizzuwatna in the area of the Taurus Mountains, an ancient kingdom of the second millennium B.C. named Cilicia during Antiquity, north of Cyprus along the Aegean coast east from Pamphylia, to Mount Amanus (Giaour Dagh), which separated it from Syria. Cilicia lacked large cities. The district is watered by the Calycadnus and was covered in ancient times by forests that supplied timber to Phoenicia and Egypt. The Cilicians appear as Khilikku in Assyrian inscriptions. The great highway from the west existed before Cyrus conquered Cilicia (Medieval Armenia)

The Halys River was the border between Lydia and Persia until Croesus of Lydia crossed it to attack Cyrus the Great in 547 B.C. but the Battle of Halys and Persia expanded to the Aegean Sea. Similarly Alexander found the Gates of Hellenism and Roman Cilicia open, when he came down from the plateau in 333 BC. After Alexander's death it was long a battleground of rival Hellenistic marshals and kingdoms, and for a time fell under Ptolemaic dominion (i.e. Egypt), but finally under that of the Seleucids, who, however, never held effectually more than the eastern half.

On the Fertile Crescent, Egypt-controlled Canaan to the south, and on Assyria to the south-east. Hittite is the best attested member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The Brook of Egypt (Canaan) was used for the river defining the westernmost border of the Land of Israel. The population of most of the Hittite Empire (Children of Heth) by this time spoke Luwian dialects, another Indo-European language of the Anatolian family that had originated to the West of the Hittite region.

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