Hittite Empire

Hattusa

Drafted from Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (2005)formation

The city sits on a rock shelf in the bend of the Kizilirmak, in the central Anatolian highlands, about a thousand metres up. The winters are severe and the agriculture is marginal. It is not on a river route or a trade corridor. It is ringed by gorges, which sounds defensible until you notice that the walls run for six kilometres over broken ground and would need a garrison the kingdom could not spare, and that in the course of its history the city was sacked at least twice by people who simply walked in.

A king called Hattusili — "the man of Hattusa" — established himself there around 1650 BC and took the site's name as his own. His predecessor, or possibly the same man under a different title, had burned it a generation earlier and cursed anyone who resettled it. That is the founding act: a capital chosen against advice, on a cursed site, in bad country.

Why there

Bryce's answer is that the Hittite state was never a river-valley state and could not be one. Egypt is the Nile, Babylonia is the Tigris and the Euphrates, Assyria is the northern Mesopotamian plain. Hatti is a plateau of scattered upland basins separated by mountains, and a kingdom there is a kingdom of roads and vassal towns rather than a kingdom of irrigated land. What the site offered was distance: it was hard to reach from any direction, which mattered enormously to a state whose most dangerous enemy for its entire existence was not Egypt or Assyria but the Kaska, the unorganised hill peoples of the Pontic mountains to the immediate north, who raided constantly and who burned Hattusa itself at least once.

It also explains how an empire of that size paid for itself, which was not by taxing a great agricultural surplus, because there was not one. The state ran on dues in produce and labour from land held in return for service, on the tribute of vassals, and on the constant importation of people — deportees, moved in thousands, who are close to being the empire's principal import.

What the archive is

Hattusa was excavated from 1906 and produced something like thirty thousand tablets and fragments, mostly in Hittite, some in Akkadian, in cuneiform borrowed from Mesopotamia. Among them are the treaties, the diplomatic letters and the royal edicts that Beckman translates.

Almost everything known about Mitanni, Hatti's exact contemporary and rival, is reconstructed from other people's documents, and a large share of those documents came out of this archive. The Egyptian-Hittite treaty of 1259 survives in two versions, and one of them was dug up here. This is the only Late Bronze Age power in the region whose foreign ministry survived, and the consequence is that Hatti is legible in a way that its exact contemporaries are not — which is a fact about excavation, not about statecraft, and the reader should hold the two apart.

The raid on Babylon

Drafted from Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (2005)expansion

Hattusili's successor Mursili I took Aleppo, which his predecessor had failed to take, and then did something no one has satisfactorily explained. He marched down the Euphrates to Babylon — eight hundred kilometres beyond anything the Hittite state had an interest in — took the city, ended the dynasty of Hammurabi, and went home.

He kept nothing. He installed no governor and left no garrison. The Kassites moved into the vacuum within a generation and ruled Babylonia for four centuries. The largest single military achievement in Hittite history transferred a great kingdom to a third party who had not been present.

Two consequences, neither of them Anatolian

The first is that the dynasty of Hammurabi ended. What the Hittites destroyed was the state that produced the most famous law collection of the ancient world, and they did not stay to replace it; the Kassites did that, and nobody recorded how.

The second is not military at all, and it runs the other way. Hittite cuneiform is Mesopotamian cuneiform adapted to write an Indo-European language — and Hittite is the earliest attested Indo-European language in the world. It is attested because Anatolian scribes borrowed a Babylonian writing system, and the borrowing is worth more to us now than the raid.

The date

1595 BC is the conventional date, and it does more work than any other number in Hittite history, because the whole chronology of Bronze Age Anatolia hangs off it. The dates used here follow the middle chronology; the competing high and low chronologies move the entire sequence by up to a century in either direction, and the sack of Babylon is one of the pegs the argument turns on.

It is worth being clear about what kind of uncertainty that is. It is not two scholars proposing different dates for one event. It is one event, three competing frameworks for the whole second millennium, and a date that is correct inside whichever framework you have chosen. Nothing about the event is in doubt; the calendar is.

The murder

Mursili came home and was assassinated by his brother-in-law Hantili, who took the throne. Hantili's own line was destroyed by Zidanta, whose line was destroyed by Ammuna, and so on for the better part of a century — a sequence of palace killings that reduced the kingdom to central Anatolia and lost everything Mursili and Hattusili had taken.

The next chapter is about the king who wrote it all down and then legislated against it.

Telipinu's Edict

Drafted from Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (2005)expansion

Around 1500 BC a king named Telipinu, who had come to the throne by deposing his brother-in-law and who had had that brother-in-law's family killed, published a document. It opens with a history: it names his predecessors in order and it records, without varnish, who murdered whom. Hantili killed Mursili. Zidanta killed Hantili's heir. Ammuna killed Zidanta. Huzziya would have killed Telipinu and Telipinu did not kill him, and then somebody did, and Telipinu says he punished them.

Then it legislates. A prince of the first rank shall be king. If there is no prince of the first rank, one of the second rank. If there is no son at all, then a first-rank daughter's husband shall be taken as king. Princes are not to be killed; a king who kills his kin is to be tried by the panku, the assembly of the great men, and the panku is instructed in so many words that if the king does this it must speak.

A rule, written down

What the edict establishes is designation: the king names a tuhkanti, a crown prince, from a defined class of sons, and the edict fixes who is eligible to be named.

That makes it the earliest surviving case anywhere of a succession rule set out as law rather than inferred from what happened to happen. The nearest comparison is eight hundred years later — Esarhaddon's succession oath of 672, sworn by every subject and vassal, drafted at enormous length, surviving in copies from Nimrud and Tell Tayinat. The Hittite edict is earlier, shorter, and doing a different job: Esarhaddon's oath binds everyone to a named heir, and Telipinu's edict binds the king.

Both failed in the same way. Esarhaddon's oath did not prevent a civil war between the two sons it was written to protect. Telipinu's edict did not prevent usurpation either. Suppiluliuma I, the greatest of these kings, took the throne by killing the designated heir; Hattusili III, who signed the treaty with Egypt, took it from his nephew and spent his reign writing a book defending the fact.

The panku

The clause giving an assembly standing to try a king is unusual enough to be worth resisting the temptation to over-read. It has attracted a good deal of enthusiasm about constitutional monarchy on the Anatolian plateau, and Bryce is sceptical: the panku is a body of royal kinsmen and great officers, not an institution independent of the palace, and it does not appear later as a check on anything. The edict constrains who may be designated; it does not move the power of designating anywhere else.

What the edict did do was work for a while. The killing largely stopped, the succession became boring, and the kingdom spent the next century and a half recovering the territory that the century of murders had lost.

Suppiluliuma

Drafted from Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (2005)peak

He came to the throne around 1350 by killing the designated heir, which is the edict of the previous chapter being ignored by the greatest king who ever kept it in the archive. He then spent thirty years making Hatti one of the two great powers of the Near East, and he did it by destroying the one that was already there.

Mitanni had held northern Syria for two centuries and had a marriage alliance with Egypt, and no archive of its own has ever been found. In two campaigns Suppiluliuma took Aleppo, Carchemish, Alalakh and Qadesh, stripped Mitanni of its Syrian empire, and then intervened in the Mitannian succession: he backed a claimant named Shattiwaza against a rival supported by Assyria, married him to a Hittite princess, and installed him over a rump kingdom east of the Euphrates.

The treaty that recorded this arrangement is also the single most important document anyone has for Mitanni. Its list of divine witnesses includes Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya twins — Vedic gods, invoked in a Hittite chancery document in northern Syria in the fourteenth century BC, which is the single most important piece of evidence for the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitannian ruling class. The most-cited document about Mitanni was written by this state's foreign office.

Carchemish

The structural achievement was not the conquest, which took two seasons, but what followed it. Suppiluliuma put one son, Piyassili, on the throne at Carchemish and another, Telipinu, at Aleppo, as viceroys with real authority over the Syrian vassals. That arrangement held for a hundred and fifty years, outlasted the central state. The kings of Carchemish, descended from Piyassili, went on calling themselves Great King and their country Hatti long after Hattusa stood empty.

Hatti fought with its own landholders and with troops owed by its clients, and the unusual thing is that the obligation survives in the chancery's own words. Client levies are normally known from a chronicler describing an army after the fact. Here Beckman can print the treaty in which a named king promises a named number of troops on named conditions, with the list of divine witnesses at the bottom.

The Egyptian widow

Near the end of his reign a letter arrived from Egypt. The queen — Ankhesenamun, almost certainly, the widow of Tutankhamun — wrote that her husband was dead, she had no son, she would not marry a servant, and would the Hittite king send one of his sons to be her husband and king of Egypt.

Suppiluliuma did not believe it and sent an envoy to check. The envoy came back with confirmation and an indignant second letter. He then sent a son, Zannanza, who was killed on the road, and the affair ended in a war and, indirectly, in something worse: Hittite prisoners taken in that war brought back a plague that killed Suppiluliuma himself and his immediate successor, and that his younger son Mursili II spent years addressing in a set of prayers asking the gods what the kingdom had done wrong.

The episode is preserved only in the Hittite account, written by that son. It is worth noticing what kind of document that is: the deeds of Suppiluliuma, composed by Mursili II, is a work of history written about a father by a son who had watched the plague arrive. This region's earlier records mostly cannot supply anything of the sort, and it is a reasonable question whether the Hittites look more interesting than Mitanni because they were, or because their filing survived.

The treaty

Drafted from Beckman, Writings from the Ancient World 7 (1999)peak

Kadesh in 1274 is usually told from the Egyptian side, and the essential thing about it is quickly said: Ramesses II covered the walls of Egypt with an account of a victory that was at best a draw, and the Hittites kept Kadesh. That version and this one are looking at the same two documents. What follows is what the pair looks like from Hattusa, which is a different story, because for Hatti the treaty was not a diplomatic tidying-up. It was a domestic necessity.

The man who needed it

Muwatalli II fought Kadesh. When he died the throne went to his son Urhi-Teshub, and after seven years his uncle Hattusili deposed him and took it. Hattusili III was therefore a usurper who had removed a legitimate king in direct contravention of Telipinu's edict, and he knew exactly how that looked.

He wrote a defence of himself — the text conventionally called the Apology of Hattusili — in which the goddess Ishtar of Samuha has favoured him since childhood, his nephew persecuted him beyond endurance, and he acted only when there was no alternative and even then spared the man's life. It is a first-person political apologia by a reigning king, and there is nothing else like it in this region for a thousand years.

And Urhi-Teshub, exiled, went to Egypt.

What the treaty was for

That is the situation in which Hattusili III concluded a permanent mutual defence pact with Ramesses II. The Hittite text, on a tablet from the Hattusa archive, and the Egyptian text, cut on the walls at Karnak and the Ramesseum, are not translations of each other — each side's version says the other party sued for peace — but the operative clauses match: no aggression, mutual military assistance against attack, and mutual extradition of fugitives, with the extradition clause carefully qualified so that returned refugees are not to be punished.

For Hattusili the extradition clause was the treaty. His deposed nephew was sitting in Egypt with a claim, and this document turned Egypt from a place that sheltered him into a state contractually obliged to hand him over. The peace with the southern rival was, among other things, a solution to a succession problem seventeen years old.

What it freed

The rest of the logic is Assyrian. While Hatti and Egypt fought over Syria, Assyria had taken the whole of Mitanni's remaining territory and reached the Euphrates, and by the 1230s an Assyrian king would defeat a Hittite army and carry off prisoners in numbers the inscription boasts about. Hatti's real problem after 1259 was in the east, and the frontier with Egypt was closed off so that it could be faced.

Thirteen years later Hattusili sent a daughter to Ramesses as a wife, with a correspondence about the dowry and the arrangements that runs to a substantial file, including letters between the two queens. It is the most fully documented diplomatic relationship in the ancient world before the Greeks, and it consists of two states that had been at war deciding, for reasons of internal politics on one side and imperial overextension on the other, to stop.

What the treaty was not

It was not a succession, an inheritance or a subordination, and that is worth saying because those are the relationships that usually get recorded between states.

Hatti and Egypt were contemporaries who fought, negotiated and intermarried for two centuries, and neither ever governed the other or claimed to. Suppiluliuma dismantled Mitanni without ending it, and it was the Middle Assyrian kings who finished the job a century later. The only state Hatti destroyed outright was Babylon, in a raid that it walked away from.

So the greatest of the Anatolian powers spent four hundred years at the centre of a system of equals, and left no successor and no heir. Everything it was actually connected to — Egypt, Mitanni, Assyria, Ahhiyawa — it was connected to by correspondence, war and marriage, which is a different kind of relationship and leaves a different kind of trace.

The king who went to Egypt

Drafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)peak

Thirteen years after the treaty, the Hittite king travelled to Egypt in person to give his eldest daughter to Ramesses II. He brought rich gifts and a military escort, and the escort mixed with Egyptian troops who had fought them on the Syrian plains.

It is the only occasion in the whole of the Bronze Age when the ruler of one great power went to the capital of another. And the Egyptian record of it is a lesson in how a peace between equals gets published.

What the treaty had actually said

Breasted is careful about the terms, and the care matters.

In the treaty itself the Hittite king is recognised as on an equality with the Pharaoh and receives the same conditions. Neither party is superior. The boundary in Syria is one both sides recognised, and the cuneiform tablets from Boghazköy show that the Hittites went on controlling Amurru on the upper Orontes afterwards — so Ramesses had not permanently advanced his father's frontier inland, whatever the temple walls say.

He nevertheless spent the rest of his reign styling himself the conqueror of the Hittites.

The peace held. It cost Ramesses his ambitions in Asia and it suited both sides, and it lasted through his very long reign and into his successor's.

The visit, as Egypt wrote it

The princess was given an Egyptian name, Matnefrure — Who Sees the Beauty of Re — and took a prominent position at court. The visit was carved on the front of the temple at Abu Simbel with narrative inscriptions, and she was given a statue beside her husband at Tanis.

Then the court poets went to work, and the reframing is total.

They had the Hittite king write to the king of Kode summoning him to come along so that they might do honour to Pharaoh. They had the god Ptah explain to Ramesses what had really happened:

I have made the land of Kheta into subjects of thy palace; I have put it into their hearts to present themselves with fearful steps before thee bearing their impost, which their chiefs have captured, all their possessions as tribute to the fame of his majesty. His eldest daughter is in front thereof to satisfy the heart of the Lord of the Two Lands.

A sovereign arriving to conclude a dynastic marriage with an equal becomes a vassal delivering tribute, with his daughter carried at the head of it as one more item of the impost.

Both readings survive

What makes this the most useful episode on the record is that we can check it, which is almost never true of Egyptian royal claims.

The treaty exists in two versions — the Egyptian one on temple walls at Karnak and the Ramesseum, and the Hittite one on tablets from the Hittite capital — and they agree on the substance while differing in exactly the way you would expect: each side's copy is drafted from its own side. The Hittites did not think they had submitted. The tablets show them still holding the territory the Egyptian account implies they surrendered.

So the Abu Simbel version is not a lie about a fact anyone could check at the time; it is a claim addressed to Egyptians, in a language of kingship where a foreign ruler approaching Pharaoh can only be approaching as a subject. There was no grammar available for a peer.

The story that came afterwards

The marriage also produced a folk-tale, and it did what folk-tales do.

Long afterwards — the surviving text is from Greek times — a story circulated that the Hittite princess's father had asked for an image of Theban Khonsu to be sent to his country, so that the god could drive the evil spirits out of her afflicted sister. The land is called Bekhten. Breasted thinks something of the kind may well have happened during the dealings between the two kings.

An Egyptian god travelling to Anatolia to perform an exorcism at a foreign king's request is, in its own way, the accurate version. What actually crossed between the two courts in these decades was not tribute. It was daughters, doctors, gifts, and the confidence to ask.

1180

Drafted from Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (2005)end

Hattusa was burned and abandoned around 1180 BC and the Hittite state ceased to exist. Nobody says who did it.

That is the whole difficulty of the ending, and it is worth setting out what is actually absent. There is no victory inscription. No chronicle entry anywhere in the Near East records the fall. No later power claims to have done it. Assyria, which had beaten Hittite armies in the field and would have had every reason to boast, does not. The archaeology shows the city systematically emptied — the archives and cult statues removed before the fire, which suggests an evacuation rather than a surprise — and then burned, and then squatted in by a much smaller population.

It was not a conquest, because no conqueror can be named. What happened is that the central state came apart and its Syrian branches carried on.

The last letters

The final documents from the region are unusually vivid for something so poorly understood. From Ugarit, a Hittite vassal on the Syrian coast, come letters found in a kiln — baked by the fire that destroyed the city before they could be sent. One is from the last Hittite king or his officials demanding grain and stating that it is a matter of life or death. Another, from Ammurapi of Ugarit, reports that enemy ships have appeared, that his own fleet is away in Lycia and his army in Hatti, and that the country is undefended.

Grain being shipped from Egypt and Syria to Anatolia in quantity, in the last years, is one of the few concrete things the record supplies. Whether the driver was drought, or the loss of the Syrian revenues, or the Kaska, or the general dislocation that took down Mycenae and Ugarit and the Egyptian Levant in the same half-century, is an argument that has been running for a century and is not going to be settled here.

What Egypt says

Egypt went through the same collapse from the southern end, and the Egyptian sources are the only ones that name an agent: Ramesses III's inscriptions at Medinet Habu describe a coalition of peoples moving by land and sea, and say that no land stood before their arms, listing Hatti among the fallen.

That is a claim made by the surviving power about its neighbours' destruction, twenty-five years after the fact, in a triumphal inscription about a battle it won. It is evidence, and it is not the same thing as knowing who destroyed Hattusa. The Sea Peoples as a single organised agent of collapse is largely a nineteenth-century synthesis built on that one text, and the temptation to manufacture a cause out of the only source that offers one is exactly the temptation to resist.

What continued

Carchemish. Piyassili's line went on ruling there, and at Melid, Tabal, Karkemish and half a dozen other places in northern Syria and south-eastern Anatolia, small kingdoms kept the Hittite royal titles, the Luwian language, the Anatolian hieroglyphs and the name. The Assyrians called that whole country Hatti for the next four centuries; so does the Hebrew Bible. Assyrian campaigns westward are, in Assyrian terms, campaigns against Hatti, three hundred years after Hattusa burned.

That is the one real continuation. The kings of Carchemish styled themselves Great King, publicly and in monumental inscriptions, for centuries after there was anybody left to object.

The thousand gods of Hatti

Drafted from Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (2002)aside?What aside means

Hittite treaties end with a list of divine witnesses, and the lists are long. The formula that recurs in the state cult is the thousand gods of Hatti, and it is not rhetorical: the pantheon was genuinely enormous, because it was cumulative. When the Hittites took a town they took its gods, physically — the cult statues went back to Hattusa — and added them to the establishment. Deities arrived from the Hattic substrate, from the Luwians, from the Hurrians of Syria in bulk after Suppiluliuma, and from Mesopotamia.

Prayers survive that address a god by several names in several languages at once, to be sure of reaching them. One royal prayer worries that some offence may have been committed against a god whose rites the king does not know, and asks to be told which one.

Zero, twice, and why

Hatti exported no religion at all, and the fact is worth stating because the traffic ran the other way so hard for so long. It was the great importer of cults of the Bronze Age Near East, and there is no Hittite religion anywhere after 1180 that anybody attributes to Hittite propagation.

The same asymmetry holds for the writing. Hittite scribes took Mesopotamian cuneiform and adapted it to record an Indo-European language, which is a considerable achievement and is an achievement of borrowing rather than of transmission — the credit for the script belongs to Babylon. The Anatolian hieroglyphs used on Hittite seals and monuments are a separate system for Luwian and are not derived from it.

So an empire that lasted four centuries spread neither its gods nor its letters. It absorbed both.

What the archive actually contains

The thirty thousand tablets from Hattusa are overwhelmingly not narrative. They are festival texts — the ritual calendar, in enormous detail, day by day, with the offerings and the processions and the songs. They are oracle reports: questions put to the gods about whether the king should campaign, whether an illness has a cultic cause, whether a particular official has offended, answered by bird-flight or by extispicy and recorded with the reasoning. They are incantations, many of them by named practitioners, several of them women from Kizzuwatna in the south-east.

And they are laws, treaties and letters, which is the part historians use.

It is worth saying plainly that this is an accident of what a fire preserves and what a plateau climate does to clay, not a measure of which kingdom was the more sophisticated one — Mitanni's own record sets out exactly how much of that asymmetry turns on a single unexcavated mound at Washukanni, and the same caution applies here in reverse.

A forgotten empire

Drafted from Sayce, The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire (1888)afterlife

An empire of four centuries, with an archive of thirty thousand tablets, a capital of a hundred and eighty hectares and a peace treaty with Egypt carved on a temple wall, vanished so completely that its existence had to be argued for.

For most of the nineteenth century the Hittites were a handful of verses. Abraham buys a burial cave from Ephron the Hittite. Esau marries two Hittite women. A traitor flees into the land of the Hittites and builds a city there. Solomon's merchants sell Egyptian horses to the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Syria. And in Second Kings, the Syrians besieging Samaria panic in the night because they think the king of Israel has hired the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Egypt against them.

The scholar who was sure

Sayce opens his 1888 book on that last passage, and he quotes a distinguished critic of forty years earlier who had picked it out as an example of the Bible's unreliability. Its unhistorical tone, the man had written, is too manifest to allow of easy belief. No Hittite kings can have compared in power with the king of Judah, the real and near ally, who is not named at all; nor is there a single mark of acquaintance with the contemporaneous history.

Sayce's answer is one line long, and it has aged well: recent discoveries have retorted the critic's objections upon himself. It is not the biblical writer but the modern author who is now proved to have been unacquainted with the history of the time.

What he had to work with

It is worth being exact about what Sayce could and could not know when he wrote that, because it is the measure of how completely a great power can disappear.

Boğazköy had not been excavated; the digging began in 1906. The archive had not been found. The language had not been deciphered; Hrozný did that in 1915. Nobody knew where the capital was, what the kings were called, how long the empire had lasted or that it had ever taken Babylon.

What existed was the biblical verses, the Egyptian inscriptions of Ramesses II about the war and the treaty, Assyrian references to a country called Hatti in northern Syria, and a scatter of monuments and undeciphered inscriptions in Anatolia and Syria that Sayce and a few others had argued belonged to one lost people.

From that, he wrote a book called The Story of a Forgotten Empire, and he was right about the main thing.

Two ways to disappear

The distinction the book turns on is worth keeping.

The Hittites were forgotten as a state and remembered as a name. The Assyrians went on calling all of northern Syria Hatti for four centuries after Hattusa burned. The Hebrew scriptures preserved the word without any idea what had stood behind it. The successor kingdoms at Carchemish and Malatya kept the titles and the language and were eventually absorbed by Assyria, and after that nobody anywhere had any reason to remember that a great power had governed the Anatolian plateau from a cursed and waterless rock.

Everything now known about the Hittites has been recovered from the ground since 1906, in a century and a bit. What preserved the name in the interval was a handful of verses in another people's holy book, describing them as neighbours, horse-buyers and a threat worth panicking about in the dark.