Warriors of Anatolia

A Concise History of the Hittites

Trevor Bryce

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786725288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

The Hittites in the Late Bronze Age became the mightiest military power in the Ancient Near East. Yet their empire was always vulnerable to destruction by enemy forces; their Anatolian homeland occupied a remote region, with no navigable rivers; and they were cut off from the sea. Perhaps most seriously, they suffered chronic under-population and sometimes devastating plague. How, then, can the rise and triumph of this ancient imperium be explained, against seemingly insuperable odds? In his lively and unconventional treatment of one of antiquity's most mysterious civilizations, whose history disappeared from the records over three thousand years ago, Trevor Bryce sheds fresh light on Hittite warriors as well as on the Hittites' social, religious and political culture and offers new solutions to many unsolved questions. Revealing them to have been masters of chariot warfare, who almost inflicted disastrous defeat on Rameses II at the Battle of Qadesh (1274 BCE), he shows the Hittites also to have been devout worshippers of a pantheon of storm-gods and many other gods, and masters of a new diplomatic system which bolstered their authority for centuries. Drawing authoritatively both on texts and on ongoing archaeological discoveries, while at the same time offering imaginative reconstructions of the Hittite world, the author argues that while the development of a warrior culture was essential, not only for the Empire's expansion but for its very survival, this by itself was not enough. The range of skills demanded of the Hittite ruling class went way beyond mere military prowess, while there was much more to the Hittites themselves than just skill in warfare. This engaging volume reveals the Hittites in their full complexity, including the festivals they celebrated; the temples and palaces they built; their customs and superstitions; the crimes they committed; their social hierarchy, from king to slave; and the marriages and pre-nuptial agreements they contracted. It takes the reader on a journey which combines epic grandeur, spectacle and pageantry with an understanding of the intimacies and idiosyncrasies of Hittite daily life.

CHAPTER 1

REDISCOVERING A
LOST WORLD

Imagine you have boarded a time machine that takes you 3,500 years into the past and deposits you in central Turkey, in a huge rock and mudbrick city surrounded by walls stretching as far as you can see. Everyone stares curiously at you. ‘Water!’ you say, as you feel your first blast of intense dry summer heat. You are immediately understood. Someone hurries off and returns with a bowl brimming with liquid. ‘Watar,’ he says as he hands it to you.

A STRANGE WORLD REVEALED

Let’s move forward to the year 1834 AD, to the 28th day of the month of July to be precise. On the site of our time-travel visit, a Frenchman called Charles Texier now stands, staring uncomprehendingly at the desolate ruin before him. For that is all the city now is. An ancient Celtic settlement called Tavium is supposed to lie thereabouts, and Texier has been sent by the French Ministry of Culture to find it. But Tavium dates to the period of Roman rule in Turkey. Texier has no idea what the city where he now stands is. But he realises that it is very much older and very much larger than Tavium could have been. The impressive buildings and immense walls of the city at the height of its glory have now completely disappeared. But the walls’ stone foundations and those of the buildings within it still testify to the city’s former grandeur. As do several of its still-surviving monumental gates. One in particular draws Texier’s attention. On it is carved a human figure over 2 m tall. Wearing a helmet and short kilt, and armed with axe and sword, this figure obviously depicts a warrior. But that is all Texier can say, for he has never seen anything else like it.

He is even more mystified when he is shown by some locals to a large outcrop of rock that lies near the great city. It is called Yazılıkaya – a Turkish word meaning ‘Inscribed Rock’. Here Texier sees two processions of carved figures, dressed in strange garb and approaching each other. There are symbols, worn but still visible, next to some of these figures, curious picture-like symbols. Maybe these represent a form of writing, their picture-like character recalling the hieroglyphic script of Egypt. But the signs are nothing like Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are other strange figures carved on the rock walls – a human-headed sword plunged into the ground, a group of 12 identical figures wearing short kilts, conical hats and footgear with upturned toes. Armed with scimitar-like swords, they are depicted in profile and appear to be running – or walking very fast. There are two other figures, wearing skullcaps and carrying staffs with curled-up ends. One of these figures is accompanied by a taller figure wearing a conical hat with horns attached; he has his arm around his companion in what appears to be a protective gesture. Again strange ‘hieroglyphic’ symbols are carved next to the figures. Texier is fascinated by his finds, and sketches many of them. But he has no idea what they are.

Figure 1.1 Yazılıkaya today.

SOLVING THE MYSTERY

It would be decades before the mystery of the strange city and the nearby carved rock outcrop was solved. How this was done is in itself a fascinating story, made up of several different strands. Let’s consider these strands one by one, and the ways in which they have been interwoven to produce the final solution.

Strand no. 1: Well known from the Bible are people and individual persons we call ‘Hittites’, after the biblical name Hittîm. Sometimes they are called ‘the sons of Heth’ – hence the German name ‘Hethiter’ for the Hittites. Several biblical Hittites are well known to us, like the ill-fated Uriah, sent by King David to his death on the battlefield so that David could have free access to his beautiful wife Bathsheba. Most of our biblical references imply that the Hittites were just one of a number of minor tribes living in the Judaean hill-country of southern Palestine. But there are a few Old Testament passages that suggest the existence of a ‘Hittite nation’ of considerably greater status and power. The most notable of these is from the Second Book of Kings, where the Aramaeans say to one another ‘Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and the Egyptian kings to attack us!’ (2 Kings 7:6). This episode, dating to the time of the ninth-century prophet Elisha, speaks not only of Hittite kings, but gives these kings a status similar to that of the pharaohs of Egypt.

Strand no. 2: In 1822, the French scholar Jean-François Champollion successfully completed the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the language for which it was used, a success closely associated with the famous Rosetta stone. It was the starting point for revealing to us the contents of thousands of Egyptian inscriptions. Some of these inscriptions contain references to a country called Ht (often vocalised as Kheta). This was clearly an important country. The pharaoh Ramesses II claimed victory over it (wrongly!) in the famous battle of Qadesh on the Orontes river in western Syria, and an earlier pharaoh Tuthmosis III had dealings with it during his campaigns in northern Syria.

Strand no. 3: In the 1830s, a cliff-face inscription in three languages, Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite (the so-called Behistun/Bisitun monument, located in western Iran), provided the Orientalist Henry Rawlinson with the key to the decipherment of the most important ancient Near Eastern languages, including the (subsequently deciphered) Assyrian language. Passages from the Assyrian inscriptions, in particular those dating from the late second millennium through the early centuries of the first millennium BC, contain references to a land called Hatti, which seemed to be connected particularly with territories in northern Syria west of the Euphrates river.

Strand no. 4: Fifty years later, in 1887, a cache of clay tablets, now 382 in number, was discovered in Egypt, at a place called el-Amarna, on the site of the ancient city of Akhetaten. The city was newly built in the mid-fourteenth century as the royal capital of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Three hundred and fifty of these tablets record correspondence between the pharaoh and his subject-rulers and foreign peers. A number of the tablets, like the Assyrian records, refer to a land of Hatti, and in one case to a king of Hatti.

Strand no. 5: In the early years of the nineteenth century, an eccentric Swiss merchant called Johann Ludwig Burkhardt travelled widely in the Near East, dressed in oriental garb and calling himself Sheik Ibrahim. During a visit he made to the Syrian city Hama, he came upon a block of stone built into a house in the bazaar. Strange symbols on the stone were interpreted by him as a form of writing, a bit like hieroglyphic symbols, though quite different from those of Egypt. He wrote about his find in his book Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, published in 1822.

Fifty years later, another three similarly inscribed stones were found in buildings in the bazaar at Hama, and yet another stone with similar inscription was found built into the wall of a mosque in Aleppo. The following year (1872), an Irish missionary called William Wright received permission from the local Turkish pasha to prise out these stones (with strong protests from the local people who attributed magical healing powers to them) and ship them to Constantinople for closer study. It became clear that the symbols on the stones were like those found by Texier at Yazılıkaya and were part of the same ancient script. This script was now found in a number of other places as well – not only in Syria but also in the Anatolian peninsula, almost as far west as Anatolia’s Aegean coast.

RIGHT FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS

Now let us pull all these strands together. In a landmark lecture delivered in London in 1880 to the Society for Biblical Archaeology, a scholarly man of the cloth, the Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce, presented a bold and apparently new proposition: the Hittites of the Bible were the people of a vast empire which extended through Anatolia and a large part of Syria. This conclusion he based very largely on the widespread distribution of the ‘hieroglyphic script’ throughout these regions – a script which Sayce believed was the written language of the Hittites themselves – though no-one had the slightest idea then of what the inscriptions said. (Actually, William Wright had already published this conclusion a couple of years earlier in an obscure article, but it was Sayce who got the credit for it.)

Sayce’s lecture might well be regarded as the very beginning of the rediscovery of a lost world. How on earth did it get lost in the first place, when we consider its size (Sayce was certainly right in his claim about the empire’s vastness) and the fact that the great contemporary powers of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon were never lost to human knowledge? That’s a matter to which we shall return. But at this point, let’s make some important corrections to Sayce’s conclusions:

(a)the ‘Hittites’ never called themselves Hittites;

(b)the ‘hieroglyphic script’ was not written in the Hittite language;

(c)the administrative centre of the empire was not in Syria (Carchemish on the Euphrates was a favoured location) but in north-central Anatolia;

(d)the Hittite empire dated not to the Iron Age (late second millennium onwards) but to the preceding Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age in particular (from the seventeenth to the twelfth century).

How could Sayce have been so right and yet so wrong at the same time?

THE HITTITE LANGUAGE DECIPHERED

To answer this question, we need to move forward to the early years of the twentieth century. In 1906, a German Assyriologist called Hugo Winckler (a rather unpleasant man, to judge from accounts of the time) and his Turkish colleague Theodor Makridi, began the first major excavations in the city that had so mystified Charles Texier seven decades earlier. We should, however, acknowledge that the first official excavations of the site were conducted in the years 1893–4 by the archaeologist Ernest Chantre. The site’s modern name was Boghazköy, today called Boghazkale. Right from the beginning, clay tablets in great quantities started coming to light. There was little doubt that this site was part of the great Hittite empire, as Chantre’s excavations ten years earlier had already suggested. And Winckler could read quite a few of the tablets since they were written in the Akkadian language (Assyrian and Babylonian were its two main versions). This had been deciphered many decades earlier, and was widely used in its own time as an international lingua franca. But the majority of the tablets were written in a strange, unknown language. This must have been the language of the Hittites themselves.

From the texts that could be read it became clear, already in the first year of the excavations, that the ancient name of the site was Hattusa. There could be no doubt from these excavations that Hattusa was a very important city of the Hittite world. But it was to prove more than that! As Winckler perused the basketloads of tablets and tablet-fragments brought to him each day, he came across one in particular that caused him great excitement. It was a copy of an Akkadian version of a peace treaty drawn up between one of the most famous of all pharaohs, Ramesses II, sometimes called Ramesses the Great, and a Great King of Hatti, called Hattusili. Where else but in the Hittite royal capital would such a document be found? The site Winckler was excavating was the very heart of the Hittite empire! (In all fairness, we should point out that the actual credit for identifying this site as the Hittite capital belongs to Georges Perrot, an Oriental scholar who two decades earlier had written an article claiming that Boghazköy not Carchemish was the capital of the Hittite empire. But it was not until Winckler’s excavations that hard evidence for this identification was found.)

The Akkadian tablets provided important information about the city and the empire it ruled. But this information was still very limited – and would remain so until the language used on the majority of the tablets, no doubt the language of the ‘Hittites’ themselves, could be read. That was a task finally achieved, during World War I, by a Czech scholar called Bedřich Hrozný, who had been released from war service to undertake it. Attempts by earlier scholars had failed. At least the script in which the language was written could be read since it was one commonly used in the Near Eastern world. Its invention is associated with an Early Bronze Age (third millennium) people of Mesopotamia called the Sumerians. They expressed their language in written form by pressing the triangular ends of reeds cut from the Tigris and Euphrates river-banks into soft clay. Modern scholars call this script ‘cuneiform’, after the Latin word cuneus for wedge, because of the wedge-like shapes produced by this process. And the script thus created was widely adopted by many civilisations, including the Hittite civilisation, throughout the Near Eastern world for several millennia to come.

So the unknown script on the Hattusa tablets could literally be read, or sounded out, even though the language they recorded was still unintelligible. Then the famous breakthrough! As he was perusing the texts, Hrozný came across a sentence which when transliterated into letters of our own alphabet read: nu NINDA-an ēzzatteni wātar-ma ekutteni. Now, NINDA was an old Sumerian logogram. This was a sign representing a single word which was adopted without change in other cuneiform scripts written in different languages. NINDA meant ‘bread’ – so it seemed that the sentence was about food. ēzza-(tteni) reminded Hrozný of the Latin word edo and the German essen, both of which mean ‘eat’. eku-(tteni) recalled the Latin word aqua, suggesting that this word had something to do with water. And most interestingly, the word wātar(-ma) recalled the German word Wasser, and the English word ‘water’. Hrozný concluded that ēzzatteni and ekutteni were second person plural verbs meaning ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ respectively. And thus he read the sentence as a whole as ‘You will eat bread and drink water’.

Figure 1.2 The key sentence.

But the real significance of his find was his conclusion from this sentence that Hittite was a member of a very large language family which we call Indo-European. Membership of the family covered a wide range of tongues, both ancient and modern, including Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, German and the modern romance languages. Hittite was now established as the very earliest of these languages preserved in written form. And Hrozný’s sentence provided the key to reading and understanding the thousands of tablets and tablet-fragments inscribed in this language, found by the German excavators in the Hittite capital.

But we should not continue before giving credit to an earlier scholar who had identified the language as Indo-European a decade and a half earl...