Who were the Hittites?

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Two different peoples carry the name. The Hittites of history were an Indo-European people of Anatolia whose empire, ruled from Hattusa near today's Boğazkale, lasted from about 1650 to 1180 BC; they sacked Babylon about 1595 BC, fought Ramesses II at Kadesh on the Orontes about 1274 and made peace with him by a treaty whose text survives in both Egyptian and Hittite copies. After the empire fell, small Neo-Hittite kingdoms kept the name at Carchemish, Hamath and other cities of northern Syria until Assyria swallowed them in the eighth century BC. The Hittites of Genesis are the “children of Heth”, a people living in the hills of Canaan around Hebron, where the map point stands, about 945 km south of Hattusa in a straight line; how the two are related is debated. Genesis counts Heth among the sons of Canaan. When Sarah died, Abraham “spake unto the sons of Heth, saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace”, and bought the cave of Machpelah from “Ephron the Hittite” for four hundred shekels of silver, “in the audience of the children of Heth”. Esau's Hittite wives “were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah”; the spies found that “the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, dwell in the mountains”. Two of David's warriors were Hittites, Ahimelech and Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, and Ezekiel tells Jerusalem: “thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite”. Other passages look north: Joshua is promised “all the land of the Hittites” as far as the Euphrates, Solomon's merchants sold horses to “all the kings of the Hittites”, and the Syrians besieging Samaria fled at the thought that Israel had hired “the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians”. These are the Neo-Hittite kings of Syria; Assyrian scribes called the whole of Syria the land of Hatti. Until the nineteenth century the Hittites were known only from the Bible. Charles Texier came upon the ruins of Hattusa in 1834, Hugo Winckler's excavations from 1906 brought out a royal archive of thousands of clay tablets, and in 1915 Bedřich Hrozný read their language as Indo-European. The “children of Heth” at Hebron are explained in three ways: as a local Canaanite people that merely shares the name, since Ephron, Zohar, Beeri and Elon bear Semitic names; as settlers who came south from the Hittite world, perhaps after the fall of the empire; or as a later writer's use of the name for the old inhabitants of the land in general, as the Assyrians used “Hatti”. No Hittite text mentions a colony in Canaan, and nothing from Hebron settles it.