In Search of the Trojan War (27 page)

The archaeological evidence for the Hittites was widely scattered – so widely that it took time for it to be drawn together. John Burkhardt had noted the unknown script at Hamath in Syria in 1812. But it was in central Anatolia in the 1830s that the pieces started to come together.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE HITTITES

In the summer of 1834 a young Frenchman was riding northwards through the majestic tableland between Sungurlu and Yozgat in central Turkey. This is still a wild and bare countryside with long sills of eroded sandstone, cut by watercourses, and few trees. Charles Texier was searching for the
early remains of central Anatolia, and in particular the ancient town of Tavium where invading Celts had been settled in Roman times. What he actually found was to lead to something of far greater significance to history.

At the village of Boghaz Köy he learned that there were ruins nearby, and so he set off southwards up a dirt track towards a bowl of rugged hills which stands over the village. There to his astonishment he found the low foundations of a vast building. As he walked on he came to fortification walls, and beyond them a line of crags surmounted by smaller fortresses, not dissimilar to the Cyclopean architecture becoming familiar to scholars in Greece. At the top of the hill, a mile from the first ruins he had reached, the ridge was crested by an immense surrounding wall of which nearly a mile in length was still standing. At one gate was the larger than life-size figure of a man (a king or a god?) carved in relief, helmeted and holding an axe, with a short sword thrust into his belt. At the other end of this great stretch of wall Texier found a second gate flanked by massive stone lions. These he sketched. A local guide now led him over the ravine northwards to a second site tucked away in a cleft of rock in the cliffs at Yazilikaya; here, to his further astonishment, Texier saw carved processions of gods like the figure on the city gate, and in an inner sanctum protected by winged demons was a set of twelve carved figures distinguished by strange hieroglyphs in an unknown language. Texier paced the city walls out at between 2 and 3 miles, as large as classical Athens in its heyday. In his initial flush of excitement he thought he had found his lost Tavium, but, he says, ‘I later found myself compelled to abandon this opinion … no edifice of any Roman era fitted this; the grandeur and peculiar nature of the ruins perplexed me extraordinarily.’ Boghaz Köy also perplexed the Englishman William Hamilton, who visited the site soon after Texier (Hamilton had been with Lord Elgin at Athens and Mycenae thirty years before); he saw a second site a few miles to the north near Alaça Hüyük, where a sphinx gate still protruded from the earth in front of a city mound. Hamilton published his observations in 1842, Texier his
between 1839 and 1849, but nothing came of these remarkable finds until the 1870s, by which time Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in Greece and Troy had opened up new possibilities for archaeological science. Then in 1878–81 British excavations at Carchemish on the Euphrates opened up a vast Late-Bronze-Age palace mound revealing huge mudbrick walls, a mass of sculpture and hieroglyphic inscriptions which resembled the material seen at Boghaz Köy. Fifteen hundred miles to the west, near to the Aegean coast at Izmir, a mysterious rock carving of an unknown king in the Karabel Pass again seemed to have a connection. The man who made that connection was Schliemann’s correspondent A. H. Sayce, the Oxford Professor of Assyriology. In his
Reminiscences
, published in 1923, he wrote:

A sudden inspiration came to me … that not only was the art the same at Boghaz Keui, at Karabel, at Ivriz and at Carchemish, but that the figures at Boghaz Keui were accompanied by hieroglyphs similar to those of Ivriz. It was clear that in pre-Hellenic days a powerful empire must have existed in Asia Minor which extended from the Aegean to the Halys and southward into Syria, to Carchemish and Hamath, and possessed its own special artistic culture and its own special script. And so the story of the Hittite empire was introduced into the world. …

Sayce now proceeded to elaborate his theory with another brilliant suggestion. For over half a century scholars had known of an Egyptian account (preserved on the temple walls at Karnak, Luxor and Abydos) of a great battle at Kadesh in the Orontes valley in Syria. In this battle, which we now know to have been fought in 1275 or 1274 BC, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II was opposed by the ‘Great King of Khatti’, who ‘had gathered to himself all lands as far as the ends of the sea’ including ‘sixteen nations’ and 2500 chariots. Sayce proposed that the king of Khatti was none other than the emperor of his Hittite empire, an empire powerful enough to check the great warrior pharaoh himself, and to negotiate the famous treaty carved on the walls
of the temple of Karnak. These ideas were dramatically confirmed in 1887 by the discovery of several hundred cuneiform tablets from the diplomatic archive of the Egyptian palace at Tell el Amarna. Here numerous letters from petty kings in Syria and Palestine showed the reality of the Hittite presence in those parts in the century before Kadesh; here too was a letter from one of the ‘Great Kings of Hatti’, Suppiluliumas I himself.

It was inevitable now that Boghaz Köy should be the focus of the search for the capital of this proposed Hittite empire. In 1881 Sayce pressed Schliemann to dig there; the following year Karl Humann made a plan of the city and took casts of reliefs from the chapel at Yazilikaya. In 1893 Ernest Chantre made trial excavations on the site and the first cuneiform tablets were found. The stage was set for a major excavation, and this came between 1906 and 1908 under the German, Hugo Winckler. The results went beyond all expectations. Although the dig was conducted appallingly in terms of the recording of archaeological data, it hit on the archive room in the royal citadel. A total of 10,000 clay tablets was discovered, mainly in Hittite but many in Akkadian, the international language of diplomacy, with others – chiefly literary texts – in older Hurrian and Sumerian languages. Eight languages were found on the tablets, testimony to the multinational character of the empire ruled from Boghaz Köy – for this surely, now, was indeed the ‘capital’ of that empire.

Perhaps the most incredible discovery was made at an early stage in the dig.

… a marvellously preserved tablet which immediately promised to be significant. One glance at it and all the achievement of my life faded into insignificance. Here it was – something I might have jokingly called a gift from the fairies. Here it was:
Ramses writing to Hattusilis
about their joint treaty … confirmation that the famous treaty which we knew from the version carved on the temple walls at Karnak might also be illuminated from the other side. Ramses is identified by his royal titles and pedigree exactly as in the Karnak text of the treaty; Hattusilis is described in the same way – the content is
identical, word for word with parts of the Egyptian version [and] written in beautiful cuneiform and excellent Babylonian. … As with the history of the people of Hatti, the name of this place was completely forgotten. But the people of Hatti evidently played an important role in the evolution of the ancient Western world, and though the name of this city, and the name of the people were totally lost for so long, their rediscovery now opens up possibilities we cannot yet begin to think of.

Winckler’s expectation proved accurate. The Hittite language was deciphered during the First World War and after, and revealed in the Boghaz Köy tablets material of extraordinary interest, much of which displayed very sympathetic aspects of their life and thought. There were literary, legal and religious texts, administrative notes which tell us a great deal about Hittite kingship, and one really fascinating discovery – the revelation of the Hittites’ significant role in the writing of history. But the finds which caused most interest were the diplomatic tablets from the filing system of the Hittite Foreign Office, for they showed the workings of the ‘empire’ in great detail. We have yet to work out the full implications of this vast amount of material – for instance it has not yet proved possible to agree on the geography of the empire, on the placing of the twenty or so major states within it, let alone the forty or fifty minor ‘lands’ – but it has given us insights into every aspect of Hittite life, such as, for instance, the relatively high status accorded to women in their society.

It was inevitable that scholars should have looked for the Greeks in the Hittite documents. Here were accounts of detailed relations with western Anatolian states, Arzawa, Mira, Hapalla and Wilusa, which we can place on the map approximately. These states were at their peak under the Hittites in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC – the very time when, as we have seen, the Greeks were spreading across the Aegean and planting settlements in western Anatolia. Particularly as the Greeks were known to be trading in the Eastern Mediterranean, in Egypt,
Syria and Palestine, surely the Hittites must have known them? So there seemed a strong hope that word of the Greeks might have been found in the Boghaz Köy archive. Nevertheless the announcement was sensational when it came. In 1924 the Swiss Hittitologist Emil Forrer announced that in a mysterious country called Ahhiyawa he had found the land of the Greeks – ‘Achaialand’; that Troy itself was here, and even Paris himself – ‘Alexandros of Ilios’ – with the Greek king’s brother Eteocles causing the Hittites trouble at Miletus. These, Forrer claimed, were part of 200 years of diplomatic relations between the Hittites and a mainland Achaian Greek power catalogued in the Hittite archive. These seductive identifications were loftily dismissed by Ferdinand Sommer in 1932 in
Die Ahhijava Urkunden
(
The Ahhiyawa Documents
), one of the great works of Near Eastern and Aegean philology. However, acute as Sommer’s observations undoubtedly were, they have not settled the controversy – indeed it still rages as furiously as ever. In this chapter I shall argue that the Greeks
do
appear in the tablets, and that Troy – and even perhaps the Trojan War – does too. I shall argue this not merely on the internal content of the tablets themselves and what they tell us about the kingdom of Ahhiyawa (which has to be placed somewhere), but on the grounds of the wider context of international diplomacy in the Near East and Anatolian and Aegean worlds at the time of the Trojan War. It has been argued that there is no reason why the Greeks and Hittites should have had any contact, or even known who each other was, but, as we shall see, the evidence now strongly supports the idea that the Hittites were dealing with a ‘Great King’ of Mycenaean Greece.

INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AT THE TIME OF THE TROJAN WAR

When we turn from the Linear B tablets to the diplomatic tablets of the Near East, we enter a different world. Here is correspondence between real people whose thoughts and actions come vividly to life. In Egypt, Palestine, Syria and the Hittite lands we
can reconstruct historical events in great detail at the time of Mycenaean supremacy in the Aegean. Their kings engaged in diplomacy and the exchange of gifts for many reasons: for status and prestige; for special trading concessions (perhaps to settle their merchants in foreign countries, for example); for security reasons, to protect their frontiers, and so on. As trade was wide-reaching, relations between kings were inevitably frequent, and it is in this context we should remember the presence of Mycenaean goods in Syria, Palestine and Egypt and the finds of Egyptian material in Greece and Crete. The Hittite and Egyptian letters of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC show that there was quite a diplomatic community, for the main kingdoms – that is, Hatti, Egypt, Mitanni and Babylon – were in contact not only with each other but with many intermediate-sized states, including some in western Anatolia (Mira and Arzawa), islands such as Cyprus, and a mass of Near Eastern city states such as Pella, Hazor, Damascus, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Jerusalem, Lachish, Shechem, Megiddo and Gezer, some of them, such as Ugarit and Alalakh, trading cities of great wealth and influence. All these cities maintained scribes and communicated with the chief kings of the day. Their letters were on subjects such as merchants, trading concessions, military support and marriage alliances; we find them requesting gifts, asking for doctors or craftsmen, or even simply sending friendly greetings.

The way such contacts worked in a practical way is revealed in a fascinating exchange between the Hittite Suppiluliumas and the widow of the famous Tutankhamun of Egypt, on the matter of her request for a Hittite prince to marry. The story is told by Suppiluliumas’ son, Mursilis II. The Egyptian embassy, led by a nobleman called Hani, made its request before the Hittite court in an emotional appeal after Suppiluliumas had sent a top court official, Hattusaziti, to Egypt, as he did not believe their good faith. Mursilis takes up the tale:

Then my father asked to see the tablet of the treaty [with Egypt] in which there was told … how the Storm God concluded a treaty between the countries of Egypt and Hatti, and how they were since
then continuously friendly with one another. And when they had read the tablet aloud before everyone, my father then addressed them thus: ‘Of old Hatti and Egypt were friendly with each other, and now this too has taken place on our behalf between them. Thus let Hatti and Egypt be friendly with each other continuously [in the future].’

The sequel of the story is well known: Prince Zannanza was sent to Egypt but murdered there by a rival court faction, provoking a major diplomatic crisis. This marvellously vivid scene in the Hittite court shows precisely how the archive worked, how treaties and correspondence could be rooted out of the ‘filing system’ and used to illustrate and guide contemporary diplomatic practice.

AN EGYPTIAN EMBASSY TO MYCENAE

How far were the Mycenaeans a part of this select club, even a fringe part? Until recently the idea was generally thought preposterous – indeed, as I have said, it is often confidently asserted that the Hittites had no reason even to know who the Greeks were. However, as always, new discoveries lead to changing perspectives. We can, for instance, put our picture of Mycenaean relations with Egypt on a different footing now that we have the recently discovered statue base from Kom-el-Heitan near Egyptian Thebes with its list of Aegean names. The list starts with two generic names, ‘Keftiu’ (which we now know certainly to be Crete) and ‘Danaja’, which shows that Homer was right in calling the mainlanders Danaans. Then follow Amnisos, Phaestos(?) and Cydonia in Crete, and from the mainland Mycenae (‘Mukanu’), an unidentified place called ‘Deghajas’, Messenia, Nauplia, the island of Kythera and a ‘Wilia’ which Egyptologists have been tempted, surely wrongly, to identify with Ilios. The list ends back on Crete with Knossos, Amnisos, Lyktos and a name which looks like ‘Seteia’.