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NINDA is well known from Mesopotamian texts and means “bread,” so the passage does something with bread, and does something else with watar. At this point, the Indo-European character of the language becomes obvious. One has no difficulty recognizing ezzateni as related to the German verb “to eat,” essen, and the t in the verb endings suggests second person plural in many Indo-European languages, so the obvious translation of the passage was “you eat bread and you drink water.”

Building from this insight, Hrozny was able to publish a grammar of Hittite in 1917. In the next decades philologists, for the most part German, refined our understanding of the historical and cultural content of the archives. It was soon recognized that two other Indo-European languages related to Hittite were also in evidence. One of these, Palaic, appears to have been spoken in areas to the north and west of the Hittite capital. Not many texts in it survive, and it was on the way to extinction by the time it was written down—the first recorded Indo-European language to die. The second language was Luwian,8 spoken in southern and western Anatolia. It was to have a much longer life than Hittite itself, since although it ceased to be written in cuneiform when the Hittite empire was destroyed, it was the language conveyed by hieroglyphic inscriptions that were still being composed well into the first millennium BC. The Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family is now recognized to include two later, poorly known languages not found at Bog˘ azköy, Lydian, and Lycian, which were dying out when they were written in alphabetic scripts related to the Greek alphabet late in the first millennium BC. No modern descendants survive.

The material culture of the Hittites has been rediscovered gradually, with no single breakthrough like Hrozny’s recognition of the character of the language. The Hittite Empire was vast and diverse, and ultimately a political rather than a cultural entity. We learn a good deal of its history from sites in Syria like Ugarit and Emar, where Anatolian elements are far from dominant in the material assemblage. The core of Hittite civilization, of course, must be sought at the capital and from there one works outward in defining such concepts as Hittite art, Hittite architecture, and Hittite styles of pottery. Thus the German excavations at Bog˘ azköy, which resumed in 1931 and, excepting a break during the Second World War, have continued to this day, represent a kind of anchor for Hittite archaeology. We will refer to them frequently in the discussion of various aspects of the Hittites and their empire that follows.

HISTORICAL OUTLINE

The Hittite monarchy enjoyed two phases of political prowess separated by an interval of weakness of unknown duration (Table 7.1). The first is known as the Old Kingdom (ca. 1650 to

1500 BC) and second as the Empire (ca. 1400 to 1200 BC). The historical documentation for the Hittites thus spans the break between the floating relative chronology of the Middle Bronze Age and more or less absolute chronology tied to the modern calendar of the Late Bronze Age, but does little to resolve its length. Most of the tablets excavated at Bog˘ azköy come from

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archives which were maintained until the violent destruction of the capital a little after 1200 BC, in other words a late Empire context, but among them are earlier tablets and copies of older texts going back to the Old Kingdom. Hittite tablets, as a rule, were not dated by their authors, so although we may speak of a Hittite historical tradition and know what various kings did at certain points in their careers, the overall outline of events rests ultimately on synchronisms with Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources.

The dynasty that was to establish the Hittite power emerged from Kussara, as noted in the previous chapter. We do not know its connection with the earlier kings from that city, Pithana and Anitta. One view of the Hittite dynasty’s early history appears in the Proclamation of

Telipinu,9 a text written at a time of crisis in the Old Kingdom. It begins with the following statement:

Formerly Labarna was the Great King. Then were his sons, his brothers, his relations by marriage, his (blood) relations and his troops united. And the land was small. But on whatever campaign he went, he held the lands of the enemy in subjection by his might. He kept devastating the lands, and he deprived the lands of power; and he made them boundaries of the sea. But when he returned from the field, each of his sons went to the various lands (to govern them).10

The text then lists seven lands to which the sons went. This is followed by a passage that repeats the same information, verbatim except for the list of lands, for the next king, Hattusili (I), and repeats it yet again with Hattusili’s successor, Mursili I.

Hardly anything is known about the earliest ruler in this proclamation, although the name Labarna resonates in the term tabarna which was adopted by successors to serve as a kind of royal title, much as the name of Caesar was used in the Roman Empire (see Table 7.1).11 He may not even have been the first of the line, although the names and even existence of the kings who preceded him are poorly documented and controversial.12

There can be little doubt that Labarna’s son, Hattusili I, the best known of the early monarchs of the Old Kingdom, was the man who brought the Hittites into the light of history and laid the foundation of the kingdom that was to dominate Anatolia for the next four centuries. His name means “the man of Hattusa” and it is pretty clearly not the one he was born with. Since it was he who moved the capital from Kussara to Hattusa he may have assumed it in honor of the occasion.

Hattusili is also the first of the Hittite kings to make use of writing, which was re-introduced to Anatolia after a century of illiteracy. His court did not revive the Old Assyrian script, but borrowed a more mainstream style of cuneiform from Syria, perhaps as a direct result of

Hattusili’s campaigns there. Cylinder seals, which Assyrian influence had made common in the colony period, went out of fashion. Instead, stamp seals, an Anatolian specialty going back as far as the sixth millennium, replaced them almost completely. The beginning of this trend can already be seen at the end of the trading colony age. By the same token, many of the hallmarks of

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Table 7.1 Chronological listing of Hittite kings (after Bryce 2005: xvi)

the Old Kingdom and the Empire seem to have their roots in the previous era, and there was clearly a great deal of continuity between all three. This is particularly true of pottery forms, which tended to be remarkably conservative until the end of the Late Bronze Age. Red burnished pitchers with gracefully curving spouts are equally at home in the trading colony or Empire periods. Even in glyptic (seal cutting), where the transformation in the shape of the seal has just been cited as evidence of change, it should be noted that many of the motifs found on Hittite seals can be traced back to trading colony period antecedents.

The most significant change brought about by the rise of the Old Kingdom was political. The quarreling city-states of the earlier era were gone, and the greater part of the Anatolian plateau came to be dominated by a single sovereign of Hittite descent, with responsibilities for subordinate civil and military administration apportioned out to various members of his family. Hattusili had sufficiently consolidated the base of his power on the plateau that he was able to

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direct his attention to Syria—further afield than any Anatolian ruler had ever ventured. His campaigns there were not entirely successful. In the Amuq plain he conquered Alalakh, ending what is known there archaeologically as Level VII. But the primary polity in northern Syria, Aleppo, was able to withstand Hattusili’s siege and the Hittites had to return to their heartland. Hittite records nowhere provide a rationale for invading Syria, but it was to be a recurring theme in Hittite imperialism.

Another great theme in Hittite history also resounds from the beginning of the Old Kingdom: Instability of succession. Hattusili’s sons turned against him and the aging king passed over a nephew at the last moment. The grandson he named as his as his successor, Mursili I, was able to take the throne, but he was eventually assassinated and many of the kings who followed, to say nothing of their family members, fell victim to court intrigues. The Proclamation of Telipinu, cited earlier, chronicles a few generations of this turmoil and seeks to establish rules of succession. Damaged sections of the text make it all but impossible to follow the sequence or rulers, and there is little indication that much attention was to paid to the proclamation’s prescriptions in practice—obscure and short-reigning monarchs succeeded one another in a diminishing realm until the kingdom’s fortunes were reversed in the early 14th century.

The early part of the Old Kingdom saw its greatest military successes. Mursili I succeeded in Syria where Hattusili had failed, sacking Aleppo and bringing an end to the history of the kingdom of Yamhad. Subsequently, he led the Hittite armies on to Babylon and extinguished the dynasty of Hammurapi in 1595 BC.13 This was not a lasting conquest, but rather a brief raid, doubtless made possible by the political weakness of Mursili’s opponents in Syria and Mesopotamia. New powers, however, were on the rise, and Mursili may have encountered one of these in its formative stages on this campaign. The Telipinu Proclamation tells us that he defeated the troops of the Hurrians before noting that he brought back booty and prisoners from Babylon. Hurrians had been a population element in northern Syria and Mesopotamia for centuries by this time, and presumably eastern Anatolia as well, but in the years after Mursili’s raid they were to become the dominant people in the coalescing Kingdom of Mitanni. Hurrians, as we shall see, were to have a profound influence over Hittite culture and politics—to the point where some of the later Hittite kings appear to have been Hurrians themselves, if one judges by the names they had before they came to the throne.

Historical sources for the later rulers of the Old Kingdom are meager and incoherent, but it would appear that the kingdom held its own on the Anatolian plateau while retreating from Syria. The Kingdom of Kizzuwatna, covering the Cilician Plain, achieved independence, but was bound to the kings of Hatti in the oldest treaty found in the Bog˘ azköy archives.

Culturally the Old Kingdom established the norms which were to prevail until the end of the empire. As noted earlier, writing was re-introduced in the time of Hattusili. The pattern is one often seen in emerging states adjacent to more literate areas: First borrow a language and a script together, then use the script to write one’s own language. The earliest Hittite texts are written in Akkadian, but in short order scribes started using the syllabic signs to sound out words in their own language. Some bilingual texts were written in this period, which aided modern

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decipherment. Although scribes were soon writing most of their tablets in Hittite, they did not neglect the Mesopotamian tradition. Not only were Hittite texts filled with Akkadian words and Sumerian logograms, but the scribes occasionally copied or wrote whole documents in these foreign languages. This came to be particularly important to them in communications dealing with lands outside of Anatolia, where Hittite was unknown.

With a specialized knowledge of Hittite writing habits it is possible to distinguish between tablets written in the Old Kingdom and those belonging to the Empire. Texts in the imperial archives sometimes exist in several copies, showing that Hittite scribes spent much of their time, as medieval monks did, copying older material to insure its survival and availability. One of the most important and frequently copied texts is the Hittite Law code, which was not only composed in the Old Kingdom, but also modified in the same period. The laws were drawn up as a list of offenses, each with a prescribed punishment. The laws themselves provide a fascinating glimpse into Hittite society, showing the interaction of merchants, slaves, freemen, soldiers, and the palace. Most cases deal with such commonplace concerns as homicide, bodily injury, matrimony, and problems with private property, but others go into more bizarre areas, such as witchcraft and sexual taboos. The copies we have often include clauses saying “formerly the penalty was X, but now it is Y.” Even the Old Kingdom copies say this. Surprisingly, punishments seem to get less draconian when revised.

During the waning years of the Old Kingdom, or as some would see it the intermediate period between the Old Kingdom and the rise of Empire in the 14th century BC,14 numerous changes took place in the political climate which reshaped the word with which the Hittites had to contend. The most immediate concern was loss of control of the mountainous areas north of the capital. In the reign of Hantili we hear, for the first time, of an unruly people known as the Kaska. Apparently too disorganized to be controlled by the usual methods through which the Hittites brought enemies into submission, the Kaska soon took over areas that were of great importance, in particular the site of Nerik, an important cult center of the Storm God. From the 15th century to the end of the Empire, the Kaska played the role of unconquerable frontier barbarians so familiar in other ancient empires like Rome and China. Unable to make treaties with them because they had no kings, unable to profit from attacking them because they had no wealth to seize, Hittite kings set up a kind of limes (fortified frontier) to protect their northern border, but this did not stop the Kaska from threatening the capital, even at times when the empire was one of the world’s great military powers.

To the south, the Hittites remained on the sidelines for at least a century as other great powers contended for control of Syria. Egyptian pharaohs, building their empire in Asia, campaigned as far north as the Euphrates and entered into at least one treaty with the Hittites. From its center in northeastern Syria, the Kingdom of Mitanni came to dominate an arc of territory that stretched from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean and for a while included the Kingdom of Kizzuwatna, thus effective blocking Hittite access to the south. These trends coincided with increasing Hurrian influence in Anatolia.

It is customary to date the commencement of the Empire to a king Tudhaliya,15 around the

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beginning of the 14th century. His accession was represented as a restoration of the royal family after a usurpation by the obscure Muwatalli I, and military successes in Anatolia soon followed. In particular, Tudhaliya pushed toward the west, defeating a coalition of powers that included the kingdom of Arzawa, Hatti’s most powerful rival in that region. The re-establishment and maintenance of Hittite power on the Anatolian plateau was a dynamic process over the next half century with numerous setbacks, particularly on the Kaska frontier. The most dramatic expansion of Hittite power took place under perhaps the greatest and least pronounceable of the Hittite kings, Suppiluliuma I,16 with a return to Syria and the defeat of Mitanni. The wars that he conducted there were to lead to long-lasting domination and the creation of an administrative structure by which Hittite territory was governed. Suppiluliuma appointed two of his sons to rule as kings in Aleppo and Carchemish,17 respectively, and the dynasty of the latter was ultimately to outlast the Empire itself.

The Hittite rulers from Suppiluliuma to the end of the empire are richly documented—so much so that we can appreciate their personalities and intimate concerns in some detail.18 Here we can only summarize some of the major political events which have a bearing on the cultural history of the Hittites. Suppiluliuma’s campaigns in Syria inevitably brought the Hittites into conflict with Egypt. Akhenaton and Tutankhamen were pharaohs at the time, and the turmoil of Egypt’s religious revolution and counterrevolution undoubtedly facilitated the Hittite conqueror’s work. In a celebrated incident, Tutankhamen’s widow wrote to him suggesting a marriage alliance between herself and one of his sons. Suppiluliuma was incredulous, but eventually sent one of his sons. He was murdered when he reach Egypt, and the upshot was a war. Prisoners taken in Suppiluliuma’s campaign of revenge were believed to have been the cause of a great plague that devastated the Hatti lands for years afterward. It is possible that this plague was so severe as to reshape the ethnic makeup of the Empire’s core; from this time forward it appears that Luwian may have been the language spoken by the majority, although the chancellery still wrote in Hittite.19 Many of the key Hittite leaders died in short order. First Suppiluliuma, then his successor, and then two Hittite princes in charge of the Hittite affairs in Syria were victims of this disease. Mursili II came to the throne as a youth, and had to more or less reconquer the kingdom. His long reign was one of constant struggle, but he ultimately extended Hatti’s influence over most of western Anatolia while holding on to Syria. There were even some successes on the northern frontier against the Kaska.

Mursili’s son Muwatalli, not long ago recognized as the second king of that name, succeeded to the throne and, for reasons not well understood, took the dramatic step of moving the Hittite capital from Hattusa to a city called Tarhuntassa, in the Lower Land. The precise location of this site is unknown today, but lay somewhere in the area southeast of Konya and northwest of the Cilician plain. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Kaska burned Hattusa after the court’s departure.

A desire to be closer to Syria may have been another motive for the move. Meanwhile Egypt gradually emerged from her period of internal chaos and sought to reassert herself in Palestine and Syria. In Muwatalli’s reign an epic clash took place between the two powers at Qadesh, today Tell Nebi Mend outside of the Syrian city of Homs, in 1285 BC.20 While the Egyptian king

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