Review of "Kings of Stone" by R Jay Driskill

Score: 96/100 (9.6 out of 10)

Kings of Stone: The Hittite Enigma by R Jay Driskill is one of the most impressive and best researched historical books we've ever read!

This book demonstrates so much beyond just its informational and educational content...

It demonstrates:
THIS is why we keep a record.
THIS is why we preserve our history.
THIS is why our history matters, even if—for no other reason—just to remind future generations that we existed, made a difference, and mattered.

Someday, centuries or even millennia from now, someone might just dig up what happened to us—the things we did, the things we achieved, the things we failed at, the mistakes we learned from (or didn't), the people we loved, the people we fought; our beliefs, our values, our laws, our traditions, our customs, and the ripple(s) through time and history that we were responsible for.

It's all consequential.
It all matters.

From the smallest preserved edict to the record of the largest battle.
It all matters.

Let us face it. The Hittites get severely overlooked and overshadowed by their flashier neighbors. Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, even Mycenaean Greece. What Driskill does here is drag the Hittites back into the spotlight and say, “Look. This was a real great power. This was a complicated, multilingual, empire level civilization that stood toe to toe with Ramesses and the rest.”

One of the great strengths of this book is how it pulls together many different kinds of evidence into one clear story. Clay tablets, monumental inscriptions, city ruins, climate data, old scholarly arguments that have been revised or overturned. Driskill shows you how a curse text, a treaty fragment, a destruction layer, or a dam in central Anatolia all fit into the same bigger picture. It feels almost like watching a very careful detective rebuild a vanished world piece by piece.

The structure also works beautifully. We get the kings and campaigns, yes, but also full, focused chapters on society, law, religion, literature, and collapse. We see the king and queen at the top, the panku and high officials, the “thousand gods” and their syncretism, the scribes copying myths and treaties, the farmers praying for rain, and finally the long, grinding crisis that pulls everything apart. It never feels like “just” military history. It feels like a study of how a whole system lived and died.

Driskill’s prose stays clear and grounded even when he deals with tricky scholarly debates. He tells you when experts disagree, and he never pretends that we have more certainty than we really do. At the same time, he keeps the story moving and explains technical points in a way a patient general reader can follow. History buffs, writers, game designers, and worldbuilding nerds will find a feast here.

If there is a potential drawback, it is that this can be a dense read at times. The level of detail, the constant engagement with sources, and the deep dives into things like settlement patterns or textual transmission might feel heavy for someone who only wants quick battles and royal drama. A few more visual aids sprinkled through the text could have helped those readers. For anyone even a little serious about the ancient Near East, though, the density is an understandable feature, not a defect.

We were actually amazed and impressed by a lot of what we learned about the little-known Hittites. The author actually did a good job in the of demonstrating how they're not some mysterious group of people who came from out of nowhere. They're actually relevant to civilizations and stories that most people are more familiar with. For example, Abraham bought Sarah's burial land from a Hittite. The Hittites show up again generations later in the story of David and Bathsheba through Uriah. Yes, THE Uriah. They are also listed repeatedly in the Bible as one of the key nations living in the land that Israel would eventually settle, which means they were part of the everyday background of those stories. Outside the Bible, the Hittites are the “other side” of the famous Battle of Kadesh that many people have seen in Egyptian documentaries about Ramesses II. Yes, THE Ramesses II.

The book even touches on how Hittite records may preserve early references to places and peoples that later appear in Greek stories, like the world around Troy, so they end up feeling surprisingly close to a lot of the history and mythology we already know.

The Hittites, as presented in this book, are genuinely fascinated. There are times when this reminded us of one of those royal court dramas on TV or in movies. There's lots of drama! Lots of backstabbing, infighting, betrayal, and even some romance. These are the ingredients for a great episodic television series!

It's also interesting how much we know about the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of these dudes (and gals) who lived like 2,300+ years ago. Actually, this book goes back to around 1,650 BC, so that's 3,600 or so years ago! We're bad at math, sorry. Anyway, how cool is it that we can know how someone felt that long ago?

For example, Driskill shares the story of Hantili I, the royal brother in law who helped assassinate King Mursili I, grabbed power with bloody hands, and then spent the rest of his life trying to live with it. In the surviving texts you can almost hear him circling back to that one act again and again, wondering if every sickness, every bad omen, every family misfortune is the gods sending the bill for that night. He worries that his children and grandchildren will have to carry the stain of his regicide, and he begs the gods to let the guilt stop with him. Moments like that make the Hittites feel less like stone carvings and more like real people whispering across three thousand years, still ashamed, still afraid, and still hoping for mercy.

In western terms, this almost sounds like Macbeth or Richard III trying to cope with what they did to their kings!

There are even some interesting romantic or pseudo romantic stories, like when the queen of Egypt suddenly finds herself widowed and writes to the Great King of Hatti asking him to send her one of his sons to marry because she has no heir. It is part diplomatic crisis, part long distance almost love story, and it feels oddly familiar in a world of political marriages and careful alliances. Driskill walks you through the letters, the suspicions on both sides, and the tragic fallout when things go wrong, letting you feel both the personal desperation of a young queen and the cold calculations of the royal courts. There are also the later marriage negotiations that lead to a Hittite princess becoming the wife of Ramesses II, complete with formal bragging about her beauty and the benefits of peace, which read almost like a royal version of “enemies to lovers.” On the Hittite side, we meet couples like Hattusili III and Puduhepa, whose prayers and letters show a husband and wife ruling together, presenting a united front before both their subjects and their gods. None of these read like modern romance novels, of course, but the mix of duty, attraction, fear, and loyalty gives the book a surprising amount of emotional texture for something built on clay tablets and broken stones.

Ok, so the last thing we wanted to discuss is how this book so critically preserves and celebrates the monumental achievements of the Hittites. It credits them for some incredible historical “firsts” and “earliest knowns.”

For example, they are behind the first surviving written international peace treaty in history, the famous agreement between Hattusili III and Ramesses II after Kadesh.

They give us the earliest large body of written Indo European language in the form of Hittite, which is a huge deal for linguistics. Their vassal treaties and diplomatic letters look like prototypes of later international law, complete with extradition clauses, oaths, and mutual defense. Driskill also makes it clear that the Hittites were not operating in isolation. They were a key pillar in what is effectively the first integrated international trade system, moving metals, grain, textiles, timber, and luxury goods along routes that tied Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt together. They sit right in the middle of what he calls the Late Bronze Age Great Powers System, a tight circle of “superstates” that recognize one another as equals, swap royal daughters, send gifts, and negotiate over markets and spheres of influence in a way that feels uncannily like an ancient version of modern great power politics.

Their law code is one of the earliest to lean away from pure eye for an eye punishments and toward fines and restitution, which feels surprisingly humane for the Late Bronze Age. This is also critical because so much more attention is given to the Code of Hammurabi, which is famous for its harsh “if he breaks this, you break that” style of justice. By contrast, the Hittite laws often reduce the penalty for bodily injury or accidental harm to a payment, compensation, or negotiated settlement instead of automatic death or mutilation. They make distinctions between intent and accident, between theft and simple loss, and even soften earlier penalties over time, which suggests a legal tradition that is willing to rethink itself. Driskill does a great job of showing that if we are going to talk about the roots of humane, restorative justice in the ancient world, the Hittites deserve to be in that conversation right alongside, if not slightly ahead of, Hammurabi.

Now, you could call some of this "soft on crime" and the opposite of Chinese legalism (which include slicing people and sawing people in half), but that is a discussion for another day.

They are also among the early movers in iron working, sitting right at the edge of the shift from bronze to iron that will reshape the ancient world. By the end of the book, you get the sense that the Hittites were not just another ancient empire that rose and fell. They were pioneers who quietly helped set the template for how big states make peace, write laws, manage allies, stitch together wide scale trade systems, and move into new technological ages.

Speaking of technology, the Hittites sounded like brilliant chariot-makers and charioteers! There are accounts of them having thousands of chariots and making them lighter yet sturdier than the Egyptians and such.

Ok, we know that we said the "firsts" were the last thing we were going to talk about, but it dawned on us that we also have to talk about the administrative and government reforms. So much attention in our Judeo-Christian/western-biased history goes to the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews. Well, the Hittites made an impact when it came to those areas too.

For example, there is this king in here named Telepinu who basically looks around at the royal family drama and says, “Enough.” After generations of usurpations, murders, and cousin-on-cousin power grabs, he issues what is essentially one of the first constitutional style reform documents in history, the Telepinu Proclamation. It spells out who gets to be king, in what order, and what happens if there is no clear male heir, trying to remove the “maybe I should just kill my brother and take the throne” incentive from the royal job description. It also takes cases of royal bloodshed out of private revenge and puts them in the hands of a formal assembly, the panku, which can actually judge a king who kills his own relatives. That is a baby step toward checks and balances, three and a half thousand years ago.

Telepinu does not stop at the palace door either. The Proclamation talks about governors who are supposed to protect their provinces instead of squeezing them, and Driskill shows how archaeological evidence backs this up with standardized seals, reorganized provincial centers, and new fortifications. You start to see a state that is trying to be more than one strongman in a fancy hat. It is trying to be a set of institutions and rules that can survive bad kings as well as good ones. Again and again, this book reminds you that the Hittites were not just swinging swords and driving chariots. They were quietly experimenting with succession law, oversight bodies, and provincial administration in ways that feel surprisingly modern.

Then you get Mursili II, who inherits a kingdom shaken by plague, rebellions, and dangerous neighbors, and basically goes into full "fix the system" mode. His annals read like a mix of military log and audit report as he tours the provinces, reins in vassals, replaces corrupt or useless officials, and reasserts royal authority in places that had drifted away. At the same time, his famous plague prayers show a king who thinks of misrule and broken oaths as national problems that bring real consequences on everyone, not just private sins. He keeps asking what went wrong before his time, what promises were broken, and how to repair the relationship between crown, people, and gods. Between Telepinu trying to lock down succession and the panku, and Mursili II trying to rescue a wobbling empire through inspections, reforms, and public accountability, you start to see a long Hittite tradition of treating government as something you can tune, correct, and improve rather than just endure.

What this indicates to us is that these people from 3000+ years ago weren't just stinky, hairy, smelly savages with bad hygiene, short life-spans, and who just wanted to fight, hunt, kill, and sleep with women like mindless cavemen. No, they were actually brilliant in their own way. They were troubleshooters and problem-solvers.

They weren't just figures etched and carved in stone. They were flesh and blood.

And they matter. They've sent ripples through history that are still felt today.

Check it out on Amazon!