Hittite religion is a religion recovered from the ground and from a lost language relearned. It vanished with the collapse of the Hittite empire around 1200 BCE and was effectively forgotten until the excavation of the capital, Hattusa (modern Bogazkoy), from the early twentieth century turned up thousands of clay cuneiform tablets, the royal archives, including myths, prayers, festival scripts, ritual texts, treaties and omens.
The decipherment of the Hittite language by Bedrich Hrozny in 1915, which showed it to be Indo-European, unlocked them. Because so much of what survives is ritual text, instructions for festivals, incantations, the words of prayers, Hittite religion is unusually well known as practice, even where its theology stays implicit. It is thus a striking case of a completely dead religion, its living community gone for three thousand years, reconstructed in detail from its own documents rather than from any continuous tradition.