In Search of the Trojan War (28 page)

There are many significant deductions to be made from this extraordinary record. First of all, it seems to describe a journey,
and most likely a journey by ambassadors from Amenophis III to the Aegean world at a time when Crete, Messenia and the Argolid were recognisably a political entity. In the eyes of his panegyrists, the Pharaoh had pretensions to a nominal hegemony over the Eastern Mediterranean, and sent ambassadors to many of the ‘barbarian’ countries on the fringe of his world, among them the ‘foreigners in their islands across the Great Green’. In fact such a journey is precisely what we would expect from Egyptian evidence. An inscription of year 42 of Thutmose III (around 1450 BC) mentions tribute sent from the Danaja, including a silver vase of ‘Keftiu work’ and four bronze vessels; another list from Karnak of Amenophis III mentions Danaja with Ugarit and Cyprus; fifteenth-century accounts of Keftiu embassies to Egypt provide antecedents. There are also numerous Egyptian pieces on mainland sites such as Mycenae, and in Crete after the Greek conquest. Scarabs of Amenophis III at Cydonia and Knossos, an alabaster vase of Thutmose III at Knossos and several late Mycenaean alabastrons (ritual containers) found in Egypt can all be ascribed to diplomatic activity more plausibly than to random commerce; the vase bearing Thutmose’s cartouche is the kind of gift exchanged in such diplomatic contacts, as are recently discovered faience plaques at Mycenae bearing the name of the Pharaoh Amenophis III.

Here, then, is a fascinating discovery with great significance to students of the Aegean world. It allows us to say that in around 1380 BC Egyptian ambassadors sailed first to Crete, then to mainland Messenia, then, rounding Capes Tainaron and Malea, landed in the Argolid at Nauplion and visited the king at Mycenae; they then sailed southwards via Kythera and stopped at Knossos, departing from Amnisos via eastern Crete for home. Such a visit brings to life the picture we have seen in Egyptian schoolbooks of pupils learning ‘Keftiu names’ in their proper forms; it fills out our evidence for considerable Mycenaean trade with Egypt, including a mass of pottery found at Amarna which perhaps can be dated to around 1350 BC during the brief lifespan of that city; it also enables us to imagine a little more of
the circumstances of the life of a man such as
ai-ku-pi-ti-jo
, ‘the Egyptian’, who appears in the Knossos tablets: such expatriates may well have existed in the Aegean world.

An equally exciting discovery was announced as recently as 1981. It concerns the dig made in 1963 in the Mycenaean palace of Thebes in central Greece, which was destroyed in around 1220 BC. Here among many treasures were found thirty-six engraved lapis lazuli cylinder seals and nine unengraved ones, clearly part of the royal treasury. Lapis lazuli, which is mined in north-eastern Afghanistan, was particularly prized for its luminous blue colour, and it often occurs as the subject of Bronze-Age correspondence. Two letters sent to the king of Ugarit in the thirteenth century BC show that kings themselves were anxious to get their hands on this desirable royal treasure: ‘The Hittite king is very interested in lapis lazuli,’ writes an ambassador. ‘If you send some to him he will show you favours.’ Other letters show that one
mina
weight of lapis (about 500 grams) was an acceptable royal gift to foster ‘good relations’. As it happens, among the Theban seals is a group from Babylon which actually weighs one
mina
, and it has proved possible to date and place them with some accuracy. They were part of the repository of the temple of Marduk in Babylon until it was sacked by the Assyrians in
c
.1225 BC. After this it would appear that they were sent by the Assyrian king to the ruler of Thebes ‘for good relations’. Now we know that it was at precisely this time that the Hittites were attempting to enforce a trade embargo on Assyria, and there is evidence that the Greeks were included in the prohibition (
see here
). If this hypothesis is correct, then the Assyrian king used his Babylonian loot – the precious lapis – to try to forge an alliance with one of the peoples who, like himself, were hostile to the Hittites. This important example of the way Greek kingdoms – and not only Mycenae – might have been involved in diplomacy should be kept in mind.

So now that we know that the Greeks had relations with the kingdoms of the Near East, it seems entirely believable that they should appear in the Hittite Foreign Office archive. Indeed, as we can point to a Greek presence on the shores of Asia Minor, it
would be surprising
not
to find them in any representative selection of Hittite diplomatic letters involving western Asiatic kingdoms like Arzawa and Mira, with whom the Greeks must have come into direct contact. The question is a simple one. Can we identify the Mycenaean mainlanders with the kingdom known to the Hittites as Ahhiyawa? Regarding the name, Homer calls the Greeks ‘Achaiwoi’, from which the name for Greece would probably be Achaiwia, and this form has been found in Linear B. The Hittite form is sufficiently similar to make coincidence unlikely. It is, on the face of it, hard to imagine where such a powerful kingdom might be if not in Greece, but modern scholars have put it in various places – in western Anatolia, in the Troad (centring on Troy itself) and even in Thrace. We can certainly say that part of Ahhiyawan territory was in Asia Minor, for a boundary text places it west of Mira, a kingdom in the middle Maeander valley. This Asian territory of Ahhiyawa was controlled by a coastal city called by the Hittites Milawata or Millawanda, and it seems virtually certain that this situation corresponds to the Greek enclave around Miletus (the early form of this name seems to have been Milatos, perhaps Milwatos in Bronze-Age Greek). In support of this idea a whole network of Hittite place names from the tablets can be located in the hinterland of Miletus, making it probable that Greek Miletus was the Ahhiyawan Millawanda of the Hittite texts. In this case Ahhiyawa itself – which the Hittites frequently describe as ‘overseas’ – must be mainland Greece, and though it is not impossible that a king, say of Thebes or Orchomenos, could have been pre-eminent in the fourteenth or thirteenth centuries BC, it is surely most probable that Mycenae was the seat of the king whom the Hittite Foreign Office viewed as a ‘Great King’ in accordance with contemporary diplomatic practice, a ‘Great King’ not only of mainland Greece but of many islands as Homer says. This dramatic conclusion puts our view of Late-Bronze-Age Greece in a wholly different light, for it means that we have a record of their dealings with the Hittites for the two centuries of their heyday. Let us now see what the letters have to tell us.

MYCENAEAN DIPLOMACY WITH THE HITTITES

In Hittite eyes the Mycenaean mainlanders were a powerful overseas state with a pre-eminent ‘Great King’. They were noted seafarers whose ships traded with the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks frequently had friendly relations with the Hittites. They sent gifts to the Hittite king, which were then shared among his vassals; these gifts might include clothes, draperies and textiles, and also copper objects ‘in the Achaian style’. Along with ambassadors, members of the royal families might visit each other’s courts: the Greek king’s brother, Eteocles, and a Hittite royal groom had ‘ridden in the same chariot’; likewise a Hittite king might banish his disgraced wife to Greece. Their relations were evidently governed by the kind of treaty we find all over the Near East at this time: the Emperor Mursilis could invoke an extradition clause to send a ship and ‘bring back’ the prince of Arzawa from Greece; similarly the Greek lands around Miletus were marked by a frontier agreed by treaty. Lastly, a fascinating text of around 1300 BC tells how cult idols from Greece and ‘Lazpas’ were sent to the plague-stricken Hittite king’s bedside in the hope that they might work a cure; just the same kind of thing happened between Near Eastern states (these idols presumably looked like those found recently at Mycenae and Tiryns, and that they should also have been sought from Lesbos – Lazpas – makes sense, for the great pre-Greek god of Lesbos, Smintheus, was a plague god – his name has been found in Linear B).

The gradual progress by which the Greeks rose to being a significant element in western Anatolia is recorded in the tablets, from the raids of a marauding royal freebooter with his 100 chariots in around 1420 BC to the situation revealed in the early thirteenth century when the Greeks ruled an area known as ‘Achaia-land’ in south-western Anatolia, with its main city at Miletus. The Hittites acknowledged Miletus as Greek territory, with a defined frontier, but they were prepared to act against it if need be. In around 1315 BC Mursilis’ generals sacked it (this destruction level has been identified), after which massive
fortifications were built. Hattusilis III entered the city over another dispute in
c
.1250 BC; a little later it seems to have passed under a pro-Hittite regent. It was from Miletus, as we shall see, that the Achaian king’s brother tried to establish a kingdom for an ally with Hittite blessing: a fascinating parallel to Homer’s tale of Achaian royal brothers fighting in Asia Minor at Troy.

The extent of Greek interference in the affairs of western Anatolia is shown in a number of tablets. Not long before 1300 BC the Greek king was powerful enough to attract important Asian states into his orbit, including the most powerful, Arzawa, whose king, Uhhazitis, made war on the Hittites in alliance with the Greeks; the Arzawan royal family fled to Greece after their defeat. An Achaian king was in dispute with the Hittites in around 1260 BC over another western Anatolian state, Wilusa. Also in Hattusilis’ reign the ‘king of Achaia-land’ was somehow involved in an alliance with the neighbouring Seha River land against the ‘Great King of Hatti’. A reference of either the fourteenth or the thirteenth century speaks of the Achaians in connection with events in Assuwa, probably to the south of the Troad (
see here
for a tentative placing of these countries). Greek activity in Asia Minor was therefore not merely confined to the slave raiding revealed in
Chapter 5
.

By the thirteenth century BC, the traditional time of the great expedition to Troy, the Greeks were a significant element in Hittite diplomacy. They were sufficiently important to be listed in a Hittite treaty with Amurru in Syria, banning their ships from trading with Assyria. They were even important enough to be mentioned, though erased, in a rough draft of a treaty listing the kings of equal rank to the Hittite one, namely those of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. In
c
.1263 BC a deposed Hittite king might actually ask the Greek king for help before his exile in Syria. In a letter of
c
.1260 the Emperor Hattusilis could mention his troubles with Ahhiyawa in the west in the same breath as the sack of his city of Carchemish in the east by the Assyrians. The Hittite Foreign Office cannot have been pleased about being drawn into western Anatolia in force – their preferred way was diplomacy –
but there is no doubt of their increasing involvement there; as the great Hittitologist Goetze remarked, ‘Hittite kings and the military must have had reason to fear the man of Ahhiyawa.’

To sum up, as the Hittites saw them the Greeks were one of the most powerful of their western neighbours, who, because of their control of the Aegean, were able to seduce states such as Arzawa into alliance at times when the Hittite kings were vulnerable; in this they seem to have been especially successful at moments of dynastic crisis, for instance when a new Hittite king came to the throne and needed to reassert his overlordship over his western subordinates. In this light, if we combine the archaeological evidence from
Chapter 5
, we can see how well our picture from ‘imperial Mycenae’ fits the material in the archive from Boghaz Köy. If our identification is correct – and there seems no other plausible location for such a major kingdom as the Ahhiyawa – then the kings of the Atreid dynasty at Mycenae (specifically Atreus and Agamemnon according to legend!) were viewed as ‘Great Kings’ by the Hittite Foreign Office under Hattusilis III (
c
.1265–1235 BC) and Tudhalias IV (
c
.1235–1210 BC); they could be described as ‘equals’ and listed among the ‘kings equal in rank’ to Hatti, Babylon and Egypt. Clearly, then, to the Hittites Ahhiyawa was a powerful kingdom with vassal states, the kind of kingdom recognised by Hittite diplomats. Yet in the twenty-two references to it in the Hittite tablets Ahhiyawa plays a fringe role in their history – inexplicably peripheral if we would place it, as some have, in Anatolia. The answer must be that its main centre lay overseas, with its enclave in the south-west around Miletus.

Of course it is possible the other Greek kings might have been described as the ‘King of Achaia-land’ by the Hittites at various times. Orchomenos, with its vast dyke system in Copais, was clearly powerful (and the name Eteocles occurs in its legendary genealogies); before its destruction in
c
.1220 BC Thebes was also very wealthy, and, as we have seen, conducted diplomacy as far away as Assyria. Even Iolkos, the city of Jason, which legend says sent the Argonautic expedition to the Black
Sea around this time, is a possibility. But archaeology and the epic tradition surely point to Mycenae. With that in mind we can now turn to the most crucial Hittite tablet from the period of the Trojan War.

THE ‘TAWAGALAWAS LETTER’: EMPEROR HATTUSILIS WRITES TO A GREEK ‘GREAT KING’

This is the most famous Hittite letter bearing on Ahhiyawa, and one of the most fascinating documents from the ancient Near East in its detail and characterisation. Let us look at it not so much for the situation it reveals, but for the evidence it gives us for a Greek king’s involvement in international diplomacy. The date is the first half of the thirteenth century BC, possibly towards 1260; the Hittite emperor is most likely to be Hattusilis III; in legendary chronology the Achaian king could therefore just possibly be Agamemnon himself, or his father Atreus. The situation is swiftly sketched. Based in Millawanda (Miletus) is the Achaian king’s brother Tawagalawas (two occurrences of the patronymic Etewokleweios at Pylos show that this name could be a rendering of the Greek name we know as Eteocles). All is not going well for the Hittites in the west; their hold on the Arzawan states is growing shaky. There is disaffection among their allies, who are subject to increasing Greek interference. Most serious, a powerful renegade called Pijamaradus, probably a royal Arzawan, is raiding in Lycia with an army and a fleet, apparently in collusion with Tawagalawas and the Greeks. Millawanda (Miletus) is at the centre of these operations, and eventually Hattusilis enters the city, from which Tawagalawas and Pijamaradus have fled ‘overseas’. The Hittite emperor is anxious not to provoke an international incident and, though demanding the extradition of Pijamaradus, he decides to send a royal kinsman as a hostage to guarantee his safe conduct: he even apologises for his bluff, ‘soldierly’ turn of phrase which had been interpreted as aggression! Evidently he does not wish to antagonise his correspondent.