Mitanni

Four names for one country

Drafted from Barnes, Ancient Near East Series (1989)formation

Hurrian is a language related to nothing much except Urartian, spoken across northern Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia from the third millennium onwards. Hurrian names appear in the records of Akkad; Hurrian populations are attested across the Khabur and the upper Tigris for centuries before anything that could be called a Hurrian state. Wilhelm's survey is a study of that world rather than of one kingdom, and the kingdom is what happened to part of it.

Around the middle of the sixteenth century BC — after the Hittite raid that finished Babylon and in the political vacuum it left — the Hurrian principalities of northern Syria and the Jazira were assembled into a single power. How is not known. There is no foundation account, no conquest narrative, and no royal inscription of the kind Assyria and Egypt produced in quantity.

What the country was called depends on who is speaking. Egypt called it Naharin, "the river-land". Assyria called it Hanigalbat. The Hittites called it the land of Hurri. The form Mittani, which is what modern scholarship uses, is the one that turns up in documents from the kingdom's own orbit. There is no securely established self-designation at all: cuneiform was the writing system and Hurrian the language, and what the kingdom called itself in its own words is simply not known.

The technology usually attached to Mitanni's rise is the light spoked-wheel chariot and the trained horse. It is a real association — the kingdom's chariot elite is documented, and the horse-training manual written by a Mitannian named Kikkuli survives in the Hittite archives — but it should be stated carefully: everyone in the Late Bronze Age Near East had chariots by 1500, and what distinguished Mitanni was not the invention of anything but a hundred and fifty years of being better organised around it than its neighbours.

From the sea to the mountains

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)expansion

At its widest, under Barattarna and Saushtatar in the fifteenth century, Mitanni ran from the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria across the Euphrates and the Khabur to the Zagros foothills. Alalakh in the west was a vassal; Assur in the east was a vassal; Nuzi east of the Tigris was inside it. Kizzuwatna in Cilicia went back and forth. It was one of the four or five powers that mattered, and it was the one in the middle.

Saushtatar sacked Assur and took a door of gold and silver back to his capital. The detail is worth keeping because of who recorded it: the Assyrians, centuries later, in inscriptions that remember the century of Mitanni overlordship as the thing their own empire existed to reverse. The Assyrian empire that eventually did reverse it began five hundred years after Saushtatar. The grudge is older than the empire.

The war that consumed the fifteenth century was with Egypt, over the same northern Syrian cities. Thutmose III campaigned into Syria seventeen times, crossed the Euphrates, and set up a stele next to his grandfather's; Mitanni lost battles and did not lose the country, because Egypt could reach it and could not hold it. The two powers fought over Syria for roughly a century without either being able to finish the other, which is the ordinary condition of a frontier and is why the eventual settlement mattered so much.

Below the kings there was a chariot aristocracy called the maryannu, holding land in return for service, which is the standard arrangement of the Late Bronze Age and of a good deal that came after it. What is known about it here comes from documents at Nuzi and Alalakh — from the provinces, because the centre has produced nothing.

My brother

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)peak

In the early fourteenth century Mitanni and Egypt stopped fighting and became allies, sealed the way such things were sealed: Mitanni sent princesses to the Egyptian royal household — Gilu-Hepa to Amenhotep III, Tadu-Hepa later — and Egypt sent gold.

The correspondence survives, because the Egyptian court's diplomatic archive was dumped at Amarna and dug up in the 1880s. It is the reason a modern reader can hear a Mitanni king at all, and what he mostly does is complain. Tushratta writes to the pharaoh at length about gold: that he has asked for gold, that gold is plentiful in Egypt as dust, that the gold last sent was underweight when melted down, that his father-in-law's promises are not being kept. He addresses the pharaoh as brother. He expects to be treated as an equal, and in the protocol of the period he was one.

That protocol is the thing worth taking away, because nothing comparable is attested again for two thousand years. Late Bronze Age Egypt, Hatti, Babylonia, Assyria and Mitanni operated a recognised system of great kings who called each other brother, married each other's daughters, exchanged physicians and craftsmen, and used a common diplomatic language — Akkadian, which was nobody's native tongue at three of the five courts. Smaller kings were not brothers and knew it.

Mitanni was in that club for about a century and a half. Its membership ends inside a single reign, and the letters stop.

An empire with no archive

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)aside?What aside means

Washukanni has never been found.

The capital of one of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age is named dozens of times in Hittite, Assyrian and Egyptian documents, and nobody knows where it was. Tell Fekheriye on the Khabur headwaters has been the leading candidate for most of a century and remains unconfirmed. With no capital there is no palace, and with no palace there is no archive.

Everything known, known from elsewhere

The political narrative comes from Hittite treaties and Assyrian royal inscriptions — from the two states that destroyed Mitanni, written to explain why they were right to. The diplomacy comes from a rubbish deposit in Egypt. The social and legal material comes from Nuzi and Alalakh, provincial towns that happen to have been excavated, and describes how a Mitanni province worked rather than how Mitanni did. The horse-training manual survives at Hattusa, in Hittite.

The shape of what can be said follows exactly from that.

How the army was raised is answerable, because provincial land documents record chariot warriors holding estates. What the state lived on is not, because no Mitanni tax record exists. How the succession was supposed to work is not, because the only succession described in any detail is the one the Hittites broke. On what public ground the kings claimed to rule is not, because no Mitanni royal inscription survives to make the claim.

The temptation

It would be easy to fill those in. A Late Bronze Age kingdom of this size probably taxed its provinces, probably passed the throne from father to son, and its kings probably claimed a god's favour, because that is what its neighbours did and what the period looks like.

Every one of those guesses might be right. None of them is attested for Mitanni by anything anyone has read, and a plausible answer that nobody wrote down is worth less than an admitted blank — because the blank is honest about the state of the evidence, and the guess quietly upgrades a modern inference into an ancient fact. Mitanni is the clearest case for that discipline in the whole period: an empire that corresponded with pharaohs as an equal, and whose own voice survives in almost nothing.

The seventh application

Drafted from Petrie, Syria and Egypt from the Tell el Amarna Letters (1898)contraction

The best evidence for what was happening to Mitanni is a run of letters its own king sent to Egypt, because of what he asks for and how he asks.

Tushratta — Dushratta in the readings of Petrie's generation — wrote to Amenhotep III and then to his son. The tablets were found at Amarna, filed in the Egyptian records office, and they cover perhaps twenty years at the end of Mitanni's independence.

How he came to the throne

The first letter is not a diplomatic formality. It is a man explaining that he has survived.

His brother Artashumara had been murdered. A man called Pirhi, who had backed the murderers, attacked Tushratta's land and people; Tushratta beat him and killed the murderers. Then the Hittites came into his country, and — he says — his god Teshub gave them into his hand.

He sends the proof to Egypt: a chariot, two horses, a boy and a girl, from the Hittite booty. Then five more chariots with teams, and for his sister Gilukhipa, already in the Egyptian harem, gold breast ornaments, gold earrings, a gold vessel and a jar of oil.

A king announces his accession by demonstrating that he has put down a succession war and beaten off a Hittite invasion, and encloses samples.

The bargaining

What follows is marriage diplomacy conducted as commerce, and Petrie's comment is that the kings of Mitanni were entirely familiar with the oriental art of politely screwing a present or a promise out of a friend.

Amenhotep sends his agent Mani to ask for Tushratta's daughter as mistress of Egypt. Tushratta agrees — and asks for a great deal of gold, citing what Amenhotep had sent his father Shutarna: a dish, a cup and a brick of solid gold. He sends, on his own side, a gold goblet set with lapis, necklaces of lapis and gold and khulalu stone, an amulet, ten pairs of horses, ten chariots and thirty women.

Later he sends the statue of Ishtar of Nineveh to Egypt to be honoured, and asks for her back.

The count that gives it away

The longest letter in the series — about a hundred and ninety lines — contains the sentence that tells you what has changed, and Tushratta puts it in himself, as history.

When Amenhotep III's father asked Tushratta's grandfather Artatama for a daughter, she was granted only at the seventh application. When Amenhotep asked Tushratta's father Shutarna for a daughter, she was granted at the sixth. When he asked Tushratta, Tushratta sent her.

Three generations, and the price of a Mitannian princess falls from seven requests to none.

Petrie's reading is that Mitanni had gone from an independent frontier neighbour to a vassal who had to agree to Egyptian proposals with what dignity it could manage. That is his inference and it goes further than the letters do — the correspondence keeps up the language of brotherhood throughout, and Tushratta addresses the pharaoh as my brother and himself as father-in-law. But a state that used to refuse six times and now does not refuse at all has moved, whatever the salutation says.

The last letter

Amenhotep III dies. Tushratta is uncertain enough about the son that he writes first to the queen mother, Tiye, appealing to her memory of the old friendship and telling the young king to consult her, because she knows what was agreed.

Then he writes to Akhenaten about money. Amenhotep, he says, had promised golden images, lapis, instruments and much gold as the price for a wife — and they have not been sent.

That is where the Mitannian correspondence stops. Not with a defeat or a treaty but with an unpaid bill, and then silence, because the route the messengers used was cut within a year or two by fighting in the north.

The state that had been beating Hittites off its territory a generation earlier now depended on an Egyptian court that had stopped answering, and the letters that record it were filed in Egypt and left there when the city was abandoned.

Taken apart twice

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)end

Suppiluliuma I of Hatti spent his reign dismantling Mitanni, and he did it the efficient way: he took the Syrian vassals first, one at a time, until the kingdom's western half had changed sides, and only then went for the centre. The Egyptian alliance did not help, because Egypt was in the middle of the Amarna period and was not answering.

Tushratta was murdered by one of his own sons. A rival claimant, Artatama II, was backed by Assyria; Suppiluliuma backed another son, Shattiwaza, married him to a Hittite princess, and installed him over a rump kingdom west of the Euphrates as a vassal. The treaty recording the arrangement is the fullest surviving document the kingdom produced, and it was written by the people who had just finished it.

The second ending took another eighty years. Assyria, which Mitanni had ruled for a century, took the eastern territories under Adad-nirari I and completed the work under Shalmaneser I around 1260, deporting populations and administering the country as a province called Hanigalbat. Whatever was left of the Mitanni state ceased to be one.

There is no single conqueror to name. The kingdom was broken by Suppiluliuma and finished off by the Middle Assyrian kings, and the Assyria that eventually made the whole Near East its own is a different state three and a half centuries later — continuous as a place and a tradition, and not the same polity.

What Mitanni left is the country it had held, which stayed Hurrian in population long after it stopped being Hurrian in government, and a hole in the record where its own account of itself should be.

The gods in the treaty

Drafted from Barnes, Ancient Near East Series (1989)aside?What aside means

The treaty by which Suppiluliuma I installed Shattiwaza over what was left of Mitanni ends, as such documents do, with a list of divine witnesses. Among the Hurrian and Mesopotamian gods there are four more: Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya twins.

Those are Indo-Aryan gods. They are the gods of the Rigveda, invoked in a treaty in northern Syria, in a Hittite archive, in the fourteenth century BC. They are not the only trace. The Mitanni kings' throne names — Artatama, Tushratta, Shattiwaza — have Indo-Aryan etymologies. The horse-training manual by Kikkuli of Mitanni, written in Hittite, uses Indo-Aryan numerals for the number of laps: aika, tera, panza, satta, na. The word maryannu, for the chariot warrior, has been connected to the Indo-Aryan marya, young man.

The population was Hurrian and the language of government was Hurrian and Akkadian. What the Indo-Aryan element was — a ruling group that arrived and was absorbed, a prestige vocabulary borrowed for horses and chariots and kingship, a substrate from an earlier movement — has been argued over for a century and is not settled and will not be settled here.

It is here because of what it is evidence of. These are the same gods, in recognisable form, that appear in the Rigveda. The Mitanni attestation is the earliest securely dated appearance of any of them anywhere, and it is two and a half thousand miles west of where the Vedic tradition was eventually written down. A treaty drafted in Anatolia to dismember a Syrian kingdom is a fixed point in the chronology of Indian religion.

It is not an influence Mitanni exerted on anybody. The kingdom propagated no religion and no script, and nobody claimed to succeed it. The gods in the treaty are not something it spread; they are a fact about where its rulers had come from, preserved by accident in a document written to take its territory away.

Hanigalbat

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

Mitanni did not end at a date. It was broken by Suppiluliuma, reduced to a rump under a Hittite-installed king, fought over by Hatti and Assyria for a generation, and then absorbed into Assyria as a province with a new name: Hanigalbat, which is what the Assyrians had always called it anyway.

Its people did not go anywhere. Hurrian-speaking populations remained across northern Mesopotamia for centuries; the name Hanigalbat is still in use in Assyrian records long after there is anything to attach it to. What ended was the kingdom, and what disappeared was any account of it written by anyone who lived in it.

Known entirely from outside

Everything about Mitanni comes from its neighbours' archives — kings, extent, institutions, gods, all of it read off documents somebody else wrote for their own purposes, never its own. That dependence is not a recent discovery.

Sayce, writing in 1888 before any of the Anatolian archives had been dug, already had the shape of the problem: he could locate the district called Mitanni from Egyptian inscriptions, quote Thutmose III on slaying and spoiling in Naharin in a single day and hunting there with arrows and spears, and go no further, because there was nothing further to go on.

A century and a half of excavation since has added a great deal about what Mitanni did and almost nothing about how it thought.

Washukanni

The reason is a hole in the map. The capital has never been found.

It is named repeatedly — Washukanni, the city the Hittite army marched on and the Assyrians later sacked — and no excavation has produced it. Candidate mounds have been proposed in the Khabur headwaters and none has been confirmed. Whatever archive a state of that size kept, and it certainly kept one, is either under a mound nobody has dug or was destroyed when the city was.

That single absence is why a great power of the fourteenth century is a silhouette. Hattusa was excavated from 1906 and Hatti became legible in a decade. Had the archaeology gone the other way — Washukanni found, Boğazköy missed — every judgement anybody has since made about which of the two was the more sophisticated state would have been made in reverse.

What is actually left

A word for a chariot horse's training in a Hittite manual written by a Mitannian. Four Vedic gods in a treaty. A hundred-odd letters in somebody else's palace at Amarna, addressed to a brother-in-law who was letting the correspondence lapse. A sacked door of gold and silver, remembered by the people it was taken from.

For two hundred years Mitanni was one of the five powers that mattered between the Nile and the Zagros. It is the only one of them whose own voice has not been recovered at all.