In Our Time - The Hittites

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the empire that flourished in the Late Bronze Age in what is now Turkey, and which, like others at that time, mysteriously collapsed. For the next three thousand years these people of the Land of Hatti, as they called themselves, were known only by small references to their Iron Age descendants in the Old Testament and by unexplained remains in their former territory. Discoveries in their capital of Hattusa just over a century ago brought them back to prominence, including cuneiform tablets such as one (pictured above) which relates to an agreement with their rivals, the Egyptians. This agreement has since become popularly known as the Treaty of Kadesh and described as the oldest recorded peace treaty that survives to this day, said to have followed a great chariot battle with Egypt in 1274 BC near the Orontes River in northern Syria. WithClaudia Glatz Professor of Archaeology at the University of GlasgowIlgi Gercek Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and History at Bilkent UniversityAndChristoph Bachhuber Lecturer in Archaeology at St John’s College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, around 1274 BC, there was a mighty chariot battle at Kadesh in modern Syria, to be followed by most often called the first known peace treaty, the Treaty of Kadesh. The Egyptians were one part of the treaty

But the identity of the other Remained a mystery until the 20th century When they were identified as the Hittites From what is now Turkey And in the last century With more and more discoveries The interest in these Hittites of the late Bronze Age Has snowballed

Not least, for the light they throw on life On the Aegean coast Where the contemporaries, the Misenians Reputedly, fought the Trojan War With me to discuss the Hittites are Claudia Glatz Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow Ilgi Goethek, Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and History

at Bill Kent University in Turkey, and Christophebacher in archaeology at St. John's College, University of Oxford. Christoph, what reason did anyone in the late 19th century have to think that the Hittites ever existed? We need to sort of travel back down to the mid to late 19th century. And as you suggested in your introduction, you know, there was obviously a... already in the mid to late 19th century, intense interest in the ancient world. And this interest was really driven by two historical traditions.

On the one hand, you have the classical tradition and the sort of ancient chroniclers like Herodotus, who wrote extensively and colorfully on the sort of contemporary civilizations. This would be about the 5th century BC, so the Egyptians, the Babylonians, etc. From the classical tradition, there is a resounding silence on the civil. civilization we call the Hittites. It is as if they never existed. And then there's the biblical

tradition, which is really the Old Testament. And indeed, the term Hittite, the very word Hittite, we have borrowed in a sense from the Old Testament. And here, the overwhelming impression of the Hittites in the Old Testament and in several books of the Old Testament is a people who may have been nomadic or semi-nomadic dwelling, perhaps, in the Middle Testament. And in several books, in the deserts of Syria. Yet there's also some references to Hittite kings and even armies. But nevertheless, by the, let's say, 1870, there was no archaeological notion of the Hittites,

i.e. they did not exist archaeologically. So what changed it then? It took a number of individuals, travelers and scholars, really to begin piecing together very, very disparate evidence. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on, rock monuments stretching across the length of Turkey and into northern Syria. Now, these hieroglyphs bear no relation whatsoever to Egyptian hieroglyphs. So this was a mystery.

The other strand of evidence indeed comes from ancient Egypt, New Kingdom, Egypt in particular, where Egyptian pharaohs recorded a conflict with a formidable power from the kingdom of Khati. The third strand of evidence, of course, is the Hittites in the Bible. And it took one scholar in particular, Archibald Sase, then at the University of Oxford, to piece together all these strands of evidence and to raise the idea or even the hypothesis that those inscriptions across the length of Turkey to northern Syria belong to a Hittite empire. So you've got to start there.

and how did, it seemed to be developed very quickly that people went out there to dig to do the usual archaeological explorations and quickly discovered that there was quite a big civilization now extant and hadn't been heard of for 3,000 years. Yes, I mean, actually it wasn't that quick. So, Seis published this...

In archaeological terms, yes, in 30 years. We're talking for 3,000 years down to about 50. 30, right. Indeed. So, but it did take about 30 years after Archibald Seitz published this hypothesis of a Hittite state and empire that archaeologists began testing this hypothesis. And there was two archaeologists in particular, Hugo Winkler and Theodore McCready, who set out in 1906 to find a Hittite city somewhere in what is today Turkey.

And they focused their attention on a site called Bozkoi, based on travelers' accounts, of this unusual city called Boazkoi in central Turkey, Theodemocrinian Hugo Winkler began an excavation at this site. And with no notion, of course, that this would actually be a Hittite site, but a hypothesis. And within two weeks of their excavation, they came down upon a royal archive in Kunei form of the Hittite state and empire. Thank you very much.

Claudia, these 30,000, I think, uniformed tablars, what did they reveal about the Hittites? First of all, what they reveal, easier that you read. Vinkler and Macridi found these massive amounts of Qaeda from tablets. Many of the tablets that they found were written in Acadian, which is a Semisic language at home in what is today the plains of central and northern Iraq, which had already been deciphered by the mid-19th century. And so these tablets could be read immediately. Other tablets, notably those written in Hittite, took a little longer to decipher.

But even just from these Acadian tablets, a pretty clear picture was emerging about Hattusa and its status as an imperial capital in the 14th and the 13th century, whose political and military reach seems to have reached all the way to coastal regions in Western Turkey and on the other end to the Euphrates Valley in the east and into northern Syria. In the later second millennium, Acadian was a lingua franca, used in international. diplomacy and correspondence. And so some of the tablets that they were finding were letters to Egypt, to Babylon and other places, but also vassal correspondence and treaties.

And so really a year after Winkler and Macrides started excavating, they could piece together the outlines of Hittite imperial history and international relations. And that then could be connected to discoveries made elsewhere, notably in Egypt, including the Armarna archives of international correspondents. between the Egyptian pharaohs of Aminoviz, the third and the fourth, otherwise known as Akinatin, with the Hittag court, but also other royal courts in the wider region. So what you're talking about is a well-developed,

in those times and those terms, civilization, there was a one city wall switch for eight or nine kilometers, there were festivals, there was a royal court, there were big grain centers and so on. The Hittites were part of this kind of club of great powers, Egypt, Mithani, Assyria, and Babylonia, who referred to each other as these brothers and exchanged elaborate diplomatic gifts and divided the rest of the region up amongst themselves. In terms of the central Anatolia, which is the core region or the heartland of this

Hittite political entity, these early excavations by the Turkish-German team, brought to like some of Hattuz's most iconic monumental structures, like the Royal Palace on this dramatic rockout crop on Buechale, which means a big castle in Turkish. And the spectacular finds that were retrieved kind of set the tone for the rest of the archaeological work that's taking place and still is taking place in Turkey. And so what we have is a lot of monuments, a lot of temples and a lot of institutional structures, public buildings that have been excavated at the range of sites. Administrative hubs of different sizes distributed around the central Anatolian plateau

where local officials were in charge of collecting agricultural surplus from surrounding communities and forwarding it to the central capital at Hatusa. Elgin, can I get to this? Who ruled? Who was in charge of it? Was there a infertive royal family? how did the system work? Can you give us, can you take us in that direction? This land was ruled by one dynasty, one family,

from practically its beginning to its end and the Hittite royal family, although the rules of royal succession and how things went were a little bit different. Our sources suggest that this was a very centrally, the core territory was a centrally administered area. Were they gods like the pharaohs in Egypt were gods or what function did these gods have? The Hittites famously referred to their pantheon as the thousand gods of Ati.

And this wasn't an exaggeration, not really. So the Hittites were polytheists, but the Hittite pantheon grew over the course of Hittite imperial expansion to include prominent deities of regions subject to Hittite rule. The Hittite kings themselves, with one possible exception, were not really considered deities as they lived. But when they died that they became deities, in fact, the Hittite expression to die when referring to a member of the royal family is, you know, to become a god. They had gods of everything, didn't they? Rivers, waterfalls, mountains, rocks. They did. Yes, they did. So, you know, they had on the one hand proper deities like, you know, at the top of the hierarchically orchestrated.

organized pantheon, you had the Storm God of Hatti and his consort, the sun goddess of the town Irina, along with their own progeny. But they also had features of the natural landscape, such as mountains and rivers, springs. And they even had, they even thought of parts of temples, such as hearts or pillars as divine or numinous. And we know the names of not only the state pantheon, but also the pantheons of numerous local towns, small or large, scattered across the Hittite heartland. Christoph, what do we know about the capital of Hattusa? What does that tell us about the Hittites?

What did you find there? That was a huge find for archaeologists early on to strike at the heart of the matter, it seems, from what I've read. It is a huge city. I mean, the circuit, the defensive wall, the circuit wall is over eight. kilometers in length. And I think what is remarkable about Hattusa really is its landscape because it is built up onto a mountain.

And you almost get the impression that it is a castle, right? It is a heavily defensive, very well-fortified city built up into the sort of foothills of the Pontic Mountains. The city itself is, you know, and Claudia hinted at this problem earlier. So within the walls, it is really exclusively state-focused, you know, palaces, temples, etc. There's no sense whatsoever that, you know, most of the population lived within Hattusa, within the walls of Hattusa. It seems to be just a massive state project of, you know, temple construction, ritual, etc., etc. So Hattusa itself is really this kind of elite enclave, heavy.

heavily, heavily defended enclave up on a mountain. And I think a castle isn't too, you know, it's almost an outsized castle. It would be a way to imagine this city. And so the city itself, we mentioned already, so Claudia had already mentioned Buyukale as the kind of acropolis where the palace is located. And from that acropolis, you can look down onto the city. And even today, you can climb up into the acropolis and see the various temple foundations, you can trace the foundations of the city wall. It is really stunning, actually,

the vistas. And of course, you can look up into the north and see the Pontic Mountains, and you really get the sense that you're almost in a sort of iree, you know, or a castle even, above the landscape. Come and to Clarelia, what can we glean then about, I'm trying to get, for the listeners, and for myself, this sounds like a very big, well-developed civilization with its many gods with its rituals. Maybe you could tell us about the rituals, Claudia, they bound them together. I mean, I'm fascinated by the idea that all this was developed.

They were big enough to take on the Egyptians and fight a draw. The Egyptians claimed victory, but so do the Hittites, and the historians, people like who have now said, no, the Hittites shaded it. So there was all that there. Then it vanished. So I want to build up a feeling of what it was like before it vanished. So what can we glean about the rituals that bound them together?

What sort of civilization, let's call it that word, it's useful. It was, Claudia. So rituals formed a very important part, very important aspect of official Hittite culture. Now, I say official culture because all of the ritual and festival texts, but also much of the buildings and the places where these rituals would have taken place, are all very directly associated with the state. So the tablets were found in public buildings, etc.

The festivals and the rituals themselves would have been associated with these structures as well. Our archaeological perspective, again, is restricted to these public monuments and some elite residences that were excavated in the capital city, but also in other sites associated with the Hittite state, like at Mashat Huuk, which is called ancient Tapica, at Ortaquay, he titled Shapinua, at Kusakle, ancient Sarissa and at Oimaj, Huk,

which is the cult centre of Neriq. So there is no doubt that ordinary people would have conducted rituals in their own houses or village communities. So all the more extraordinary that in about 1,200 BC, this more or less vanished will come back to this, Elgi, but can we just explore what you have now found before we talk about how it's so mysteriously vanished? Can anyone read Hittite?

Yes, we can definitely read Hittite. The excavation of Hattusa, modern Boazkoy or Boazkali, as it's also called today, started in 1906, and soon about 10,000 tablets were found. How big was the city? Do we know, sorry, do we know the population of the city? Claudia, would we be able to give an estimate?

10 to 15,000? 10 to 15,000. About 30,000 tablets are now extant from the Hittite archives, and the majority of these tablets were written in a then-unknown language at 1906, but a smaller portion had been written in Acadian. So at that time, the cuneiform script had already been deciphered, and the Acadian language was well understood. and considerable advances were being made in understanding Sumerian as well.

So the recovery of the Hittite language was not a true decipherment because the first scholars to work on this language could actually read the sounds of the syllabic cuneiform signs. And it was a matter of determining whether the language recorded was related to any known language family. And it is. We know that Hittite is the first recorded Indo-European language from the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family.

And this makes it a relative of not only ancient languages like Latin and Greek and Sanskrit, but several modern languages as well. So once it was determined that Hittite was Indo-European, it was just a matter of then understanding the language, finding cognates, and finding out the meaning of words by comparison to other Indo-European, languages. Was there any Rosetta Stone moment? Since they could already establish the sounds of the signs, they could then read them out loud. It was just a matter of understanding the language. But, I mean, it helped, of course, that they could already read Acadian and a sort of sketch of Hittite history had already been established thanks to the documents in Acadian, some of these

diplomatic documents that Claudia already mentioned. So they knew what the Hittite history looked like a little bit while trying to decipher the language that we now call Hittite. And I can also add that Hittite was not the only Indo-European language spoken in Anatolia. In fact, the Hittite archives have revealed a very linguistically and culturally diverse population in Anatolia. Aside from Hittite, there was the Indo-European languages Luvian. and Palaic, which are also tested in the Hittite archives, and languages like Hattik and Huryan, which are linguistic isolates, and, of course, documents in Sumerian and Acadian,

although the former Sumerian is not well documented in the Hittite archives. Thank you very much. Christoph, you wanted to say something about the Rosetta Stone connection, the possible. Yeah, so Ili is clarified that there wasn't that kind of moment with the Boazkoy archive. But I mentioned at the beginning the hieroglyphic inscriptions, which are indeed, so Ilgi just mentioned,

Luvian as one of the Indo-European language that was spoken within this Hittite realm. And there was indeed a Rosetta Stone moment for the hieroglyphic inscriptions. And that was very similar to the Rosetta Stone where there is a monument, a rock monument, inscribed in different scripts and languages. Phoenician on the one hand, which was a known script, of course, in a known language,

a West Semitic very closely related to Hebrew, etc. And then the same text in Luvian hieroglyphs. So that was several decades, maybe five, six decades after Boascoi, but that was indeed, I think, a very closely analogous Rosetta Stone moment. And if you remember, it was Lovian hieroglyphs that first alerted people like Archibald-Sace to some extensive political entities. some empire even across Turkey and into northern Syria. We've heard about different, we've heard from England about different tribes, countries,

would it be. Can we concentrate on the Hittites now? What made the Hittites Hittites? Were they a people? Were they a culture? Were they subject to a particular king at a particular time? You know, if we think about how a Hittite might identify themselves, they didn't call themselves Hittites. I already said Hittite as a biblical term. So we have borrowed the biblical term to call the Hittites Hittites. they refer to themselves as people of the land of Hati.

And this land of Hati really is, and Claudia sort of mentioned already, the geography of the Hittite-Satan Empire. It is in central Anatolia, central Turkey today defined by a number of Hittite cities. So they self-identified with a place, the land of Hati. And I think what is intriguing about the land of Hati, Hati is one of these languages that Ilgi mentioned, Hattik, that is not Indo-European, it is not related to Hittite whatsoever, and it was spoken by people probably who lived in this landscape

before the Hittites, in a sense, set up camp. They are identifying themselves with the land of Hati, which originally wasn't even their land. And I think this says something about the Hittite identity broadly in that it is an empire, it is something that is extensive and expansive, and it appropriates things, it appropriates languages, it appropriates gods even. It appropriates everything that it subjugates.

And so Hittite as an entity is almost this amalgam of different languages, different cosmologies, and certainly benefiting from vassals of these different regions, all of which, of course, spoke different languages, etc. Claudia, thank you very much. They had systems of storing grain. Can you tell the listeners about that? They seem to be extraordinarily grand and effective. We know that private individuals and communities could own land themselves, but the temple and palace institutions were big landholders and generally just big economic players in addition to their religious and political administrative roles.

And the role of these institutions in the extraction, storage and redistribution of grain, we can see reflected in really massive storage facilities at the Hittat capital, but also in other. city. So for instance, the temple, the great temple of, that's located in the lower city of Hatusa, and I think Gilgi just mentioned it as well, was dedicated to the storm god Teshub and the sun goddess of arena. Excavated are about 80 storage rooms, but there could have been as many as 200, with large pithoi inside. And at Hatusa, Kushaklan, Kamankalahuk, there were also large underground grain silos. And the most impressive silo dates to the later 16th century, so quite early in Hittite history. It covers about half a hectare and has 32 monumental storerooms, which could hold something between 7,000 to 9,000 cubic meters of grain. So this taken together,

the storage facilities in Hattusa could feed about 30,000 people, is the estimate, for about a year. with the grain that is stored, which, as we've just talked about, if we assume that 15,000 people or so lived in Hattusa, it's double the number of inhabitants. We're talking about something on a very big scale. It's terrific, it's very impressive. The circumscription of this surplus from farming communities

is, of course, itself, an arena in which the political power of the Hittah state is performed, but also where these local communities engage in kind of the negotiation and sometimes the subversion of this power. And tax collection in the central Hittite empire, this appears to have been in the hands of local communities, the so-called men of the town or district, and also a Hittite official,

who was responsible for forwarding this produce to the capital. There's some mentioned in Hittite texts of kind of long-winded negotiations over tax reductions, but there is a much bigger body of knowledge from other historical and ethnographic sources about what happens at the time of this tax extraction and it's always a dramatic and a negotiated occasion with attempts to get away with partial payments

and other ways of tricking the tax official. You mentioned the word power. Ilgi, what about the Hittites armies? Were they in constant warfare along their borders? Were they well, can you give us some idea of the fighting power of the Hittite community, country? Yes. The Royal Annals certainly give this impression that the Hittite armies,

and they did have a standing army and could seasonally recruit more soldiers whenever necessary. So they give the impression that the Hittite army was always perpetually involved in fighting. Some of it might be propaganda, but it seems that they did need to use the, their army to protect their land, but also to conduct military campaigns that seem to have been mostly economically motivated. And when I say for economic reasons, it seems that one of the biggest problems the Hittite Empire faced was the need for manpower. Droughts and famines and wars considerably depleted the populations in Hattie. there was also the fact that a lot of people didn't want to be Hittite subjects, to pay taxes or to be conscripted into the army, and they escaped.

So when we look at the royal annals, we see that a lot of military campaigns ended in the deportation of massive amounts of people into Hattie to be put to work there in agriculture or animal husbandry, building projects, or recruited into the army. Thank you. Christoph, what do we know about the Battle of Kadesh in 1774, where they seem to afford at least to a draw with what we think of as the great Egyptian empire? And the technology, a battle largely waged by men on chariots, so that's taking us quite a way. Can you just give us your view or not on the Battle of Kadesh? What happened?

Yeah, so I'll just pick up from Ilgi, and we had to imagine this was, probably the largest military campaign that the Hittites ever waged. Right. And so we can also imagine the intense conscription and the recruitment for this campaign drawing from people all over the empire, perhaps some willingly, perhaps some unwillingly. But anyway, this is sort of a classic imperial conflict where Hittite imperial interests were expanding to the south, up south from the highlands of Turkey. ancient Anatolia, an Egyptian imperial interest was expanding from the south, right, up through

the southern Levant and into Syria. And the frontier in this conflict emerged at the Arantez River, which is where the city of Qadash is located. Now, Qadash was annexed originally by the Egyptians, Sete I first. And so that was really the northern limit of Egyptian imperial expansion. And so the son of Sadi the First, Ramsey's the Second, was alerted to a massive troop movement of the Hittites down, the chariot forces, as you mentioned, down towards this frontier, right? So, so Ramsey's the Second himself led an army, a chariot army, as you already mentioned, up towards this frontier at the Arontes River. The Hittite army was led by the king Mouwitali II.

So these are armies led by kings in conflict around this city of Kadesh. So you rightly observed that the battle ended in a draw. If you read the Egyptian sources, you wouldn't think that at all. The Egyptian monuments, the inscriptions of Ramsey II declare a victory for Egypt. and if you only knew the Egyptian sources, you would be convinced, I guess, or at least if you just relied entirely on the monuments of Ram's the Second. But what we do know is that Qadesh, Egyptians lost control of Qadesh.

They no longer had that sort of annexation of Qadash. And we also know from later letters between Hittite kings and Egyptian kings, diplomatic correspondence, that the Hittite kings were complaining that the Egyptian kings, that the Egyptians continue to have on their mortuary temples this description, this representation of an Egyptian victory at Kadesh. So the battle really did end in a draw. Should we think, Claudia, should we think of the Hittite lands as tightly and centrally controlled,

or was it altogether looser? Where are we there? Yes, so we've already heard about the treaties and the agreements that were concluded with these other political entities. And some of them also include vassals, states that ultimately become Hittite vassals. And these are either defeated in a military sense or endiced to seek the protection of the Hittite Great King against either local, usually local, smaller local enemies.

And so in turn, these vassals, especially the really prosperous ones, like the trading city of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast. had to pay a lot of tribute, usually precious metals and some garments, be ready to join the Hittite military campaigns like the one at Kadesh that Christoph just described for us. And their kings also had to come to Hattusa regularly to show their deference and respect, and they had to agree to refrain from independent foreign relations. So technically these local dynasties remained in charge of the day-to-day running of these newly incorporated areas, but there was at times quite significant interference and supervision in the form of scribes and other officials

from the court at Hattusa, but also the Hittite vice regal seat at Karkamish, which is a large monumental site located right on the Syria-Turkish border at the moment, and who helped to kind of run these Syrian territories on behalf of the Hattusa. Ilgi, can you tell us briefly about the stability of, of the Hittite land. Was there a long line of dynasties? From its foundation to its demise, actually the Hittite state was ruled by one dynasty, one extended

family. However, peaceful royal succession was the exception, it seems, rather than the rule. For instance, most of the old kingdom, a relatively long period in Hittite history, is very poorly understood, precisely because contenders for the throne were busy stabbing one another in the back. This is the period from the reign of King Han Thiele I, the third documented tight king in about 1590s,

to the reign of Totalia I in about 1400s, which for us marks the beginning of the early empire period. So to give one example, this king, Han Thiele I just mentioned, came to power by a sassar. assassinating his predecessor, that was Mursili the first. And he, Hantili and his sons were assassinated by Hantili's son-in-law, Sidanta, and that one in turn was murdered by his own son, Amuna. So it went for a long while, despite efforts by one Hittite king, Telipino, to sort of iterate or reiterate the rules of royal succession through an edict that we call the edict of Telipino. Still, this didn't solve problems, and this was a problem until the end of the Hittite Empire, basically.

Thank you. Christoph, according to recent theories, what connects the Hittites to the Trojan Wars? This work is largely based on Hittite political geography, which is itself a text-based study of the places that are recorded in analytic texts or. diplomatic correspondence within the Hittite archives. And what people have begun to piece together is what Western Anatolia, Western Turkey, looked like politically, geographically, from the perspective of the Hittites. And two places or two geographic entities, we can call to that, have emerged as perhaps relevant to the Trojan War. So on the one hand, you have references.

to a formidable power called the Aheawans, which for a long time now, linguists have understood Aihawa to be cognate with the Achaeans, and that is one of the terms that Homer used

to describe the Greek combatants in the Iliad. So you have, on the one hand, an adversary, let's say, in Ahyawa, that was clearly meddling with Hittite imperial interests

in Western Turkey or Western Anatolia. The other place name that is of interest is a place that the Hittites called Wulusa. And here also, linguists and philologists have drawn a cognate relationship between Wulusa, Hittite Wulusa and Ileon, the Homeric, one of the terms that Homer, in addition to Troy, one of the terms that Homer used to describe the place, the city, Troy, i.e. the Iliad, Iliah, on, et cetera. So Wulusa, Hittite Wulusa is cognate with Iliun. Hittite Acheiawa is cognate with the Akeans or the Greeks. So what appears to, what the political geography is suggesting is that Wulusa is a sort of, to some extent, a minor political power that is caught between a power struggle between the Akeiawans on the one hand, i.e. the Akeans, if we were to buy this hypothesis, and the Hittites. And Wulusa as a place, i.e. I. I.e. I. Troy. As it is caught between this power struggle between the Ahyahuans and the Hittites is switching allegiances. It is a very sort of complicated politic of a vassal, let's say.

This is an absence in their conversation so far, which is the Hittite women. In the records, we say they're being in great demand as brides among their neighbors. How did that work? Well, one very good example of this comes back to, it follows on the Battle of Kadesh. And that was a, you'd mentioned in the introduction that there was a peace treaty signed between or agreed between the Hittites and the Egyptians. And that was maybe 15, 20 years after the Battle of Kadesh. And it established not only peace between the two empires, but also an alliance between the two empires. And that peace treaty itself was sealed to some extent with a gift exchange that included the princess of Hattusili the third as wife to Ramsey's a second. We know her Egyptian name only.

We don't know her a Hittite name. But she was in a sense exchange to Ramsey's a second as a gift in a kind of diplomatic correspondence. Not far from what Cloudy had suggested already with the Amarna correspondence is all those complex to diplomacy. So there you have very compelling evidence for how a Hittite royal could be used politically to cement an alliance between two powers. Claudia, what brought the Hittite empire to an end? This is as fascinating as the fact that it grew to be such a complicated, interesting, inventive, society with its

uniform tablets and so on and so forth. And then the word vanished has been used in some of the notes I've been ringing, some of the stuff I've been reading. So it vanished. How did it vanish and how did it not really research itself for 3,000 years? Two questions.

Could you answer the first of them? The short answer is that we don't know for sure why the Hittite empire collapsed. There are a number of theories that privilege one or another factor. So, for instance, we have very recent theories that concentrate on climate changing or the worsening of climatic conditions in the wider East Mediterranean region, a more traditional external factor that's usually brought into the conversations of the sea people, although, as we said before, the core area of the Hittite Empire lies on the central plateau, 1,000 meters high and 500 kilometers away from the Mediterranean Sea.

There have been more systemic perspectives that kind of juxtapose the highly centralized or what seems to be a highly centralized and tightly structured Bronze Age, palatial economic system with their monopolies over the production exchange of specific goods with what comes afterwards, which is a more decentralized maritime trading world in the Iron Age, as some of the factors, and as this world is developing, the palatial late Bronze Age world slowly comes to close. Now, on their own, neither the cataclysmic climate change model or any of the other scenarios sit very comfortably with the Hittite case, although aspects of each of them played into Hittite political collapse. I would also throw in trends towards initial Hattusa-driven decentralization,

political decentralization, that in the end kind of backfires on them with local polities like Karkimish, but also Tarantasa and other areas becoming more powerful than originally intended and challenging central sovereignty. Sorry, Ilgi, would you like to add to that? Do you have views on that? but the collapse, demise, vanishing, all words seem to be reasonably applicable of this empire. Aside from what Claudia has described, I would also like to add that several populations within Anatolia or situated along its borders had been resisting Hittite rule and sometimes very successfully for very long time. So if we get back to the dynamic that I mentioned earlier that most people didn't want to be subjects

and they were constantly trying to run away from Hittite rule, this must have been one of the contributing factors as well that the populations, even in the Hittite heartland, were waiting for the opportunity to cease to be independent and to escape the yoke of Hatti. Claudia? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I just wanted to add something to what Ilgi was saying and mentioned another aspect of Hittite campaigning and warfare that we've also talked about already,

and these are these deputy populations, which are also taken from areas that the Hittites conquered and then resettled on the central Anatolian plateau, often close to where the Kaska border was. And I think this created also. so a disenfranchised population that was either outright hostile to Hittite interests and culture or was entirely disinterested in it. And that is part of why in the central Hittite area, particularly at Hattusa the capital,

after the administrative apparatus leaves the city and part of it is destroyed, we see very little of the culture of the Hittite that is we associate with the Hittite state and with the Hittite Empire in the core region continues into the early Iron Age. And that may be one explanation why it vanishes in the way that Melvin described it in his introduction to that. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Christop Bakhuber, Ilgi Goethe, Clodia Glatz, and to our studio engineer, Jars Aspen. Next week, it's a groundbreaking filmmaker Fritz Lang from Metropolis and M in

Weimar, Germany, to the Big Heat in Hollywood. for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What do you think we missed out that's important, that we should have included? One of the things that may have not come out quite as much in the recording so far is that what we really are lacking in our understanding of the Hittite state and it's not its grand and glitzy relationships with other great powers, but how, on the one hand, it really worked at home, but also what is the experience of normal people of ordinary, you know, central Anatolian or South Anatolian or Northern Syrian people of this empire and it, you know,

empires are not fun things to be dominated by and how were they engaging with and resisting. the various strategies that these empires employed to extract resources, to affect compliance, and things like that. So the survey work, I think, is really important because this is, at the moment, the archaeological method that will give us some insights into what's going on out in the countryside and maybe capture the lives of, or begin to capture the lives of normal people, although in the end, we would need to excavate some of these farmsteads, some of these villages, in order to really get a better idea. Did they pray to the same gods as we see in the Hittite Central Pantheon

or were there more localized rural traditions that were maybe continuing from a previous period? We don't know any of these things yet about Hittite society. Elgin to take this up. I'd also like to emphasize the imbalanced textual situation as well. all the texts that we have, those 30,000 tablets and fragments, have been produced by the state and for the state. So the available documentation and the modern narrative of the Hittites that's based on it is naturally statist and centralist, in fact, royalist to a certain extent. So we can say a lot about the king, the administration, the extended royal family. but, and this is something very different from other periods and places in Mesopotamia, as well as Anatolia.

We have no private documents. I mean, if you compare this to the previous period in Anatolia, the Karam period, the old Assyrian period, all we have are private archives. And when you get to the Hittite period, pretty much all you have are state archives. So this statist or state-centered narrative has to be. balanced, you know, if not by textual finds, then by archaeological work as, you know, survey and excavation of smaller scale places, as Claudia said. So there's a, to have a more balanced view of Hittite society, one that doesn't exclude the people of Anatolia.

Crystal? Yeah, I'll, you know, to extend on these points, and this, I think maybe relates a little closer to what Claudia was saying. So, you know, thinking about the archaeologist. of empire and the experience of empire. There is a lot of work going on now. For example, within the Roman Empire, particularly, I mean, I would say the most groundbreaking work is actually in this country in Britain, trying to get some sense of how local elites

or not lived within that sort of hegemonic structure of Roman imperialism. And again, there's a lot of work going on in this country where that is becoming more and more accessible, let's say, to both archaeologists and historians. And similar point to not really having any sense of what is happening in the kind of day-to-day or in the kind of non-elite context of the Hittite cities and landscapes, et cetera, we still also have very, very little understanding of how, you know, in, you know, let's say, Syria or even southern Turkey or Western Turkey, there simply are, we simply don't have the data to access how people lived, you know, within the hegemonic context of Hittite imperialism.

And this is quite different, for example. I mean, of course we've got the Roman example, but even in the Assyrian example, if we think about the Assyrian Empire, there is a lot of compelling evidence, visual culture, written culture, of how local elites, non-Assyrian people in ways assimilated themselves or negotiated these sort of complex identities as both local and also Assyrian, that is simply invisible, archaeologically, textually, or visually. And, you know, is this, does this reflect the archaeological data? Is it, I don't know, we simply can't answer these kinds of questions. How did local people experience Hittite imperialism? We are really far from that. And I would say Claudia has probably come closest to addressing these questions with very limited data sets. I don't know, Cloud, if you want to pick up on that a little bit.

Well, thanks, Christoph. I just maybe continue that along that same line of thinking. Another thing that we really need to do more work on is the Hittite texts give us a sense of the persistence of this hegemonic structure. And it's true, it somehow hangs in there for several hundred years. So it clearly is successful in some ways. But I think we're ignoring other aspects of the text, which is kind of a pervasive sense of rebellion and upheaval and contestation. And Ilgi has mentioned this also. in our discussion a few times as well.

How do we translate this into archaeological work? The state, the way we think about the state pervades our research questions. It pervades our interpretation, what seems a plausible interpretation even. So, for instance, when archaeologists find a destruction horizon at the site, the most accepted way to interpret it or the most uncontested in the ecological community would be to say, well, the Hittite king, Supiluma or somebody else, came by and destroyed the site. But there might be other reasons for why the site was destroyed at the time of when the Hittites passed by or when they were incorporating the site into their empire.

And it could be a form of protest. It could be a way of abandoning a place that could be taxed, that could be controlled or otherwise. So we need to shift our way of thinking about these things. to kind of decenter, in a sense, decolonize our way of thinking about the ancient empires as well. Christop, I understand you're still working there, doing archaeological digs, is that right? Yes, not in the land. What do you hope to find? What would be a big find for you, as it were?

Yeah, well, we have a big find. It's not, it wasn't from an excavation, it was from a survey. And this story relates back to Muatali II, who led the Hittite armies at the Battle of Kadesh. He did another remarkable thing and moved the capital of the Hittite state, Hittite empire, from Hattusha to a place, I think Claudia had already mentioned, to a place called Tadentasha.

Much in the same way, for those familiar with ancient Egyptian history, Akhenatenaten moved the capital, from Thebes to Amarna. So unlike Amarna, we have no idea, really, where Taranthasha is. It hasn't been identified archaeologically. So we began a survey in a region just at the south of the land of Hattie, which is the modern Konya Plain. In the Thai political geography is called the lower land.

And we set off on this survey not to find Tarantasha, but there is long been hypothesized that Tarantasha should be in this landscape. It should be south of Hatusha. It could be in a very agriculturally fertile Konya Plain, which is where we conducted our survey. And we focused our survey on the one hand, on getting a big picture of this landscape. You know, what happened to this landscape as it was annexed by the Hittites, what happened during Hittite intervention, what happened after the Hittite intervention. And what is remarkable for us, and we have a hypothesis, is that one site in particular called

Turkmenkara Hyuk is much, much bigger in the late Bronze Age, i.e. during the Hittite intervention than any other site in that region. And in 2019, a colleague was doing an intensive survey at the site of Turkmenkata Hirojyuk, and a villager had found a Luvian hieroglyphic inscription at the site, and alerted my colleagues to that find. The Luvian hieroglyphic inscription relates to a king called Hartapu, who actually postdates the Hittite Empire, but sits within this adjacent region that may not have collapsed like the Hittite state did. In fact, every indication right now is that there is a continuity in this landscape, the lower land that we don't see in the land of Hattie.

And this Luvian hieroglyphic inscription, in a sense, even though it post-dates the Hittite imperial period, is testament to that continuity. So we have thrown it out there as a hypothesis that I think could only be proven or disproven with an extensive excavation, that this may indeed be the lost capital of Tardantasha, i.e. where Mubitali, the second, moved the Hittai capital from Boaz Koi to Tarantasha. But it remains a hypothesis. Obviously, it will take years of excavation to prove or disprove this. Well, thank you all very much indeed.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hang on a second, just before you go. Given that you've listened all the way through to this podcast, would you like to find some more great listening? Podcast Radio Hour might be just what you need in your feed. Q Trail. Podcast Radio Hour on Radio 4 Extra. This is the podcast that recommends great podcasts, BitMetter,

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