Contemporary Excavated from 1906; tablets c. 1650–1180 BC

Roughly 30,000 cuneiform tablets from the Hittite capital: treaties, annals, law, ritual, and the royal correspondence of an empire.

Before 1906 the Hittites were known almost solely as a people mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and were widely doubted. The archive produced an empire that had to be fitted into a Bronze Age everyone thought was settled - the clearest case in this section of a text-only people turning out to be an archaeological fact.

Standing: Written within living memory of what it records.