The Hittites

O. R. Gurney

• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787201071
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

The rediscovery of the ancient empire of the Hittites has been a major achievement of the last hundred years.Known from the Old Testament as one of the tribes occupying the Promised Land, the Hittites were in reality a powerful neighbouring kingdom: highly advanced in political organization, administration of justice and military genius; with a literature inscribed in cuneiform writing on clay tablets; and with a rugged and individual figurative art, to be seen on stone monuments and on scattered rock faces in isolated areas.This classic account reconstructs, in fascinating detail, a complete and balanced picture of Hittite civilization, using both established and more recent sources.

CHAPTER I—Outline of History

1. THE EARLIEST PERIOD

We have seen how the quest for the Hittites led up from Palestine through Syria, until in 1907 the capital of the ‘Land of Hatti’ was discovered at Boghazköy in the north of Asia Minor. The last step is significant because of the fundamental contrast between the plains of Syria and the essentially highland country which formed the homeland of the Hittites. Asia Minor (Anatolia) is a high tableland which rises in general from the Aegean coast in the west to the great ranges of Eastern Turkey: structurally it is part of the mountain system which extends eastward, and then southward, to the borders of India. Seen from the Syrian plains, these northern mountains form a mighty wall known to the Romans as Taurus, which seemed to the ancient geographers to divide the whole world east of the Mediterranean into ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ (i.e., northern and southern) halves. From the Anatolian plateau, however, it is only the western extension of the Taurus range that bounds the view to the south. To the east other mountains dominate the landscape, foremost among them the great cone of the extinct volcano Erjiyes Dagh, the ancient Argaeus, rising to a height of over 12,000 feet, and behind it the chain of Anti-Taurus running obliquely north-eastwards from Taurus to merge in the great massif of the eastern highlands. This range of Anti-Taurus is the watershed which divides the rivers of the plateau from those of Mesopotamia to the east and of Cilicia to the south. The centre of the plateau is occupied by a shallow basin, from which the waters can find no outlet to the sea and drain into a salt lake (Turkish Tuz Göl). North of this the land rises again to a series of transverse ridges running out from the eastern massif, before it sinks ultimately down to the Black Sea coast. This region has always been rendered difficult of access by the thick forests nourished by the waters drawn up from the Black Sea and precipitated on the hill-sides.

The river Kizil Irmak, familiar to classical scholars as the Halys and known to the Hittites as Marassantiya, after emerging from the eastern mountains and flowing for a considerable distance in a south-westerly direction, is turned aside by a secondary ridge as it approaches the salt lake, and so bends round in a great loop, until its course is completely reversed and it cuts through the northern hills in a north-easterly direction to enter the Black Sea. The Hittite area with which we shall be chiefly concerned comprises the bend described by the Halys in its middle course and the plain to the south of the lake; it is bounded on all sides by the highlands, on the east by the Anti-Taurus and the mountains beyond, on the south by Taurus, and on the west and north by more broken ranges. The coastal areas to the north and south were excluded from it, and the western half of the peninsula seems to have been dominated for long periods by the rival kingdom of Arzawa.

Hattusas, the Hittite capital, lay on the northern slope of one of the ridges where the plateau begins to break down towards the Black Sea. Two torrents flowing northward from this range in steep rocky beds unite at the foot of the slope near the modern village of Boghazköy, leaving between them a spur on which the oldest settlement at Hattusas has been found. The site commands a fine view of the valley to the north bounded only by the next range of Pontic hills some fifteen miles away, and is a natural stronghold. It also lies near the junction of the two most ancient trade-routes, the one leading from the Aegean coast across the lower Halys to Sivas and the East, the other southwards from the Black Sea port of Amisus (Samsun) to the Cilician gates. It was only necessary to link the city with these routes in order to make it the centre of a radiating web of strategic roads.

The historical ‘Land of Hatti’, as we know it in the second millennium B.C., was a state, later an empire, created by kings ruling from this mountain fastness. This kingdom and its official language have become known as ‘Hittite’, and the name must now be accepted. But the ‘Hittite’ language was not indigenous in Asia Minor, and the name of Hatti was given to the country by the earlier people of the land, whom we call Hattians. The Indo-European Hittite language was superimposed on the non-Indo-European Hattian by an invading people, and it was presumably at the same time that other Indo-European dialects, Luwian and Palaic, established themselves in other parts of Anatolia (see Chapter VI). Thus we may be fairly sure that none of these Indo-European immigrants would have called themselves Hittites, or anything similar, before their arrival in the district of Hatti.

According to a tradition current about 1400 B.C. Naram-Sin, the fourth king of the dynasty of Akkad (c. 2200 B.C.), fought against a coalition of seventeen kings, among them kings of Hatti, Kanesh, and perhaps Puruskhanda. But history begins in Anatolia with the arrival on the plateau of Assyrian traders about 1900 B.C. At this time the people of Assur were already familiar with the cuneiform script of Babylonia, and the clay tablets on which these Assyrian merchants inscribed their day-to-day business correspondence with their capital city have been found in large numbers at several sites, but chiefly at Kültepe, the ancient Kanesh, near Kayseri. Among the many non-Assyrian names to be found in these documents there are a few which can be interpreted as Hittite, and, scanty though this material is, it is enough to establish a probability that Hittites were already settled in the country.

Little enough is learnt from these tablets of the indigenous population and their history. But we hear of local princes and their palaces, and it is evident that the country was broken up into small principalities, among which Kanesh, Burushkhatum (the Hittite Puruskhanda), Zalpa and Hatti appear to have held a dominant position. Very few of the local princes are known to us by name. But we have been fortunate in recovering three tablets bearing the names of a certain Pitkhana and his son Anitta, for these two are known to us from a remarkable Hittite text, which in its present form at least dates from about 1600 B.C. In it Anittas (for this is the Hittite form of his name), son of Pitkhanas, King of Kussara, records—ostensibly in his own words—the story of his and his father’s struggle for power against the rival cities of Nesa, Zalpuwa, Puruskhanda, Salatiwara, and Hatti (or Hattusas). These cities were successfully subdued, the last named (otherwise well-known as the capital of the Hittite kingdom) being utterly destroyed and declared accursed. Having overcome all opposition, King Anittas transferred his residence to Nesa, which is to be identified with Kanesh (Kültepe), where a dagger inscribed with his name has been found. It would seem, then, that by the end of his reign this king must have controlled the greater part of the Cappadocian plateau. There are, however, some indications that the inscription may be a later compilation and at least part of it may be apocryphal.

It was probably during the reign of Anittas that the commercial activity of the Assyrians in Cappadocia, having flourished for more than a century, came to a sudden end. Whether this was the result of the conquests of Anittas, or of some disaster which befell the city of Assur at this time, is unknown. There is nothing to suggest that the attitude of the indigenous rulers to the Assyrians was anything but friendly. Indeed, we may well suppose that the foreign merchants were welcome to the native princes, to whom they brought the benefits of the higher civilization of the Mesopotamian valley. What is the relation of Anittas to the kingdom of Hatti?

2. THE OLD KINGDOM

The inscription of Anittas, with its curse on the city of Hattusas, was carefully preserved by the Hittites in their archives in at least three copies. He is known to have had a son named Peruwa or Pirwa, but only scraps of tablets have survived referring to events following his reign. No Hittite king ever claimed Anittas as his forebear, and it is uncertain when and why Hattusas was reoccupied and whether the Hittite kings who ruled from there were descended from him, though Kussara, his city, remained at first as a royal residence for them. For the beginning of the Hittite kingdom historians still depend on the edict of the later king Telipinus (well preserved, but only in late copies) which opens with a summary account of previous reigns, as follows:

Formerly Labarnas was king; and then his sons, his brothers, his connexions by marriage, his blood-relations, and his soldiers were united. And the land was small; but wherever he marched to battle, he subdued the lands of his enemies with might. He destroyed the lands and made them powerless, and he made the sea their frontier. And when he returned from battle, his sons went each to every part of the land, to Hupisna, to Tuwanuwa, to Nenassa, to Lānda, to Zallara, to Parsuhanda and to Lusna, and governed the land, and the great cities prospered (?).

Afterwards Hattusilis became king, and his sons, his brothers, his connexions by marriage, his blood-relations and his soldiers also were united. And wherever he marched to battle, he subdued the lands of his enemies with might. He destroyed the lands and made them powerless, and he made the sea their frontier. And when he returned from battle, his sons went each to every part of the land, and in his hands also the great cities prospered (?).

This inscription was written to point a moral, namely that the strength of the kingdom lay in the existence of harmonious relations between the members of the royal family. We have a glimpse of a strong and united clan pushing forward ambitiously in all directions. Of the seven cities mentioned, Tuwanuwa is certainly the classical Tyana, and Hupisna is generally equated with Kybistra; Lusna may be the classical Lystra, well-known from the mission of Saint Paul. Zallara and Nenassa have not been identified with any certainty, but Parsuhanda (the same as Puruskhanda, mentioned above) must have been in the same general area, since it is said elsewhere to have been in the province called the Lower Land, which is the plain to the south-east of the salt lake within the curve of the Taurus. With the exception of Lānda, which was probably in the north, the cities thus form a compact group separated by a considerable distance from Hattusas.

However, the inference that Hittite history began with kings named Labarnas and Hattusilis, whose achievements were virtually identical, must be regarded with some suspicion. No inscription of this Labarnas is preserved, and it seems that in these early times labarnas was a royal title rather than a name. The earliest authentic inscriptions in this kingdom are those of King Hattusilis. He was remembered in later times as king of Kussara, and it was at this city that he delivered the speech which is our main source of information on political conditions in the early kingdom (see below, pp. 51-54 and 142). However, the same document shows that at least at the end of his reign the administrative capital was already Hattusas.

During this and the following reign the Hittite kingdom began to expand southward and eastward. This meant the emergence of the Hittite armies from behind their mountain barrier and the crossing of the formidable range of Taurus, through which only a few passes lead. Perhaps it was the wealth of the southern plains and their ancient civilization that tempted them to this difficult operation. Hattusilis appears to have come into collision first with the prosperous kingdom of Yamhad, with its capital at Aleppo (Hittite Halap), which at that time controlled northern Syria. In this enterprise he must have met with a reverse, perhaps even with his death, for the next king, Mursilis I, is said to have avenged his father’s blood and destroyed Halap. The siege of Urshu, a literary description of which has survived (see below, p. 148) must have occurred during this campaign.

Mursilis, not content with his conquest of North Syria, pressed on down the Euphrates and fell upon the great Amorite kingdom of Babylon, which collapsed before him. The Babylonian Chronicle records this event—the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon, of which Hammurabi is the most notable figure—as follows: ‘In the time of Samsuditana the men of Hatti marched against the land of Akkad.’ This epoch-making victory links Hittite chronology firmly with that of Babylonia, but unfortunately the latter is itself still a matter of controversy. A very plausible view places the Hittite capture of Babylon shortly after 1600 B.C., though some would either raise or lower this date by about sixty years.

However, the internal organization of the Hittite kingdom had not yet reached a stage which would enable it to stand the strain of such a formidable adventure. Signs of this instability had already become manifest during the reign of Hattusilis. The princes of the royal house, led by the son whom Hattusilis had himself proclaimed as his successor, had started an insurrection, but the king was strong enough to stamp out the rebellion. The heir to the throne was disowned and banished from Hattusas, and Mursilis, then a minor, was adopted in his place. But the prolonged absence of this young king on his foreign campaigns was an invitation to conspiracy, and on his return from Babylon Mursilis was assassinated by one Hantilis, who had married the king’s own sister. A sorry period of palace murders and intrigues was thus inaugurated which lasted for several generations and reduced the kingdom to a condition little short of anarchy.

The reign of Hantilis was marked by external disasters. The Hurrians, a people whose home was in the mountains around Lake Van, and who had been the victims of an attack by Mursilis, invaded the eastern part of the Hittite realm. Some distance north-east of the capital Nerik and Tiliura were destroyed by invaders, and the king found it necessary to strengthen the fortifications of Hattusas itself. In the south Hantilis and his successors seem to have lost most of the territory conquered by Labarnas, Hattusilis, and Mursilis.

The position was to some extent restored when about 1525 B.C. Telipinus, the husband of a royal princess, seized the throne, and succeeded in securing his position by disposing of all rival claimants. The chaotic conditions of the previous fifty years had demonstrated only too clearly the need for a law of succession and for a consolidation of the Hittite state from within, and this seems to have been the main task which Telipinus set himself to accomplish. He composed an elaborate edict, in which a brief survey of Hittite history (the beginning of which is quoted above), illustrating the dangers of discord and disunity in high quarters, led up to the proclamation of a precise law of succession and of a number of other rules for the conduct of the king and the nobles. The laws thus promulgated seem to have been observed down to the last days of the Hittite Empire.

In external policy Telipinus was content to establish a safe and defensible frontier. To the north and east of the capital the barbarian invaders were pushed back to a safe distance, and a certain amount of territory seems to have been reconquered. But to the west and south the loss of Arzawa and the countries beyond the Taurus, including the whole of Syria, was accepted. It is perhaps typical of this king that he is the first of whom it is stated that he made a treaty with a foreign power. The treaty was with Kizzuwatna (the Cataonia of Roman times), which at this date probably comprised the eastern part of the Cilician plain with an extension up the valley of the river Pyramus. The treaty itself has not survived, and we do not know its terms. But as the ruler of Kizzuwatna apparently claimed the title of ‘Great King’, and as Kizzuwatna is known as a powerful state in the following century, we may suppose that Telipinus recognized its king on terms of approximate parity.

Telipinus is usually regarded as the last king of the Old Kingdom. From the middle of his reign the historical sources fail, and the names of his immediate successors cannot be stated with certainty. This rather obscure period fills the interval between Telipinus and Tudhaliyas I, with whom a new epoch may be said to begin. During this interval of about half a century the archaeological evidence proves that there was no serious break in continuity, and indeed written evidence, though scarce, is not entirely lacking, for land deeds or charters of a particular kind, bearing an impression of the royal seal, are characteristic of this period.

3. THE EMPIRE

About the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. a new dynasty appears to have come to power at Hattusas. Historical evidence is lacking, but personal names of a Hurrian type begin to appear in the royal family and there is some reason to suspect that this family originated in Kizzuwatna. The names of the kings continue to be typically Hittite, but these were in many cases throne names, the king having borne a Hurrian personal name before ascending the throne. The first recorded member of the royal family to bear such a name is Nikkal-mati, the queen of a Tudhaliyas, and this king may provisionally be regarded as the founder of the new dynasty.

Now Tudhaliyas and Arnuwandas are recurrent names in this dynasty, and recent work has shown that certain historical texts formerly ascribed to Tudhaliyas IV and Arnuwandas III late in the thirteenth century belong rather to much earlier kings of the same names, probably the founder of the dynasty himself and his son.

This Tudhaliyas of the fifteenth century consequently emerges as a strong and energetic ruler who revived the fortunes of the Hittites and reconquered many of the lost territories. His annals record the conquest of Arzawa in the west of Anatolia and the subjugation of a country named Assuwa, a name foreshadowing the Roman province of Asia. In the south and east he is said to have attacked and destroyed Aleppo and to have defeated the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni. This has to be fitted into the known history of Syria during this century. Since the Hittites retired to their plateau, the Hurrians under the leadership of an Aryan dynasty had established a powerful...