In Search of the Trojan War (29 page)

Throughout the letter Hattusilis addresses the Achaian king as ‘my brother’, standard address among the chief kings of the day, as in the Tell el Amarna letters. The key lines – which have caused terrific argument – are the ones in which Hattusilis implies that the Achaian king is of equal rank; our problem is in judging the tone – is the tone ironic, even sarcastic, for example? Clearly it is more sophisticated than many have thought: ‘If any one of my lords had spoken to me – or even one of my brothers – I would have listened to his word. But now my brother the Great King, my equal, has written to me, so shall I not listen to the word of my equal?’ However if the intent is sarcastic this could mean ‘I do not hear the words of an equal’ (in other words ‘You are, or pretend to be, a Great King, my equal, but I do not hear the language which should be used between equals’). Just the same problem can be found on any page of Hansard:
how
something is said can be as important as
what
is said.

It is surprising that, in trying to understand the Tawagalawas letter, its context has been ignored. How are we to judge its tone in isolation? In fact there are other Hittite letters of the period which help us to understand it; one of them is written by the same king, Hattusilis III. Hattusilis had deposed his nephew, who had even applied to Ahhiyawa for help. Throughout his career Hattusilis was touchy about his usurpation, and was easily provoked into arguments about his standing whenever he imagined himself offended. This is important in interpreting the psychology of the Tawagalawas letter, as we can see in a letter from Ramses II to Hattusilis in reply to an aggrieved letter from Hattusilis, in which the Hittite emperor expressed himself hurt by what he judged to be the overbearing tone of a previous letter from the Egyptian king: he thought Ramses was implying that he was inferior, and not a ‘Great King’: Ramses had to write to reassure his ‘brother’:

I have just heard all the words that you have written to me my brother, saying, ‘Why did you my brother write to me as if I were a mere subject of yours’ – I resent what you wrote to me my brother
… you have accomplished great things in all lands: you are indeed a Great King in the Hatti lands. … Why should
I
write to you as though to a subject? You must remember that I am your brother. You should speak a gladdening word [such as]: ‘May you feel good every day’ and instead you utter these incomprehensible words not fit to be a message. [Translation by Ken Kitchen]

We could hardly have a closer correlation with the Hittite’s taking offence in the Tawagalawas letter: Hattusilis may have been a grumpy man at the best of times, but there is no mistaking the same mind behind both letters.

Just what is implied in the situation revealed in the letter to the king of Ahhiyawa is revealed in another Hittite letter of Hattusilis or his brother Muwatallis to the Assyrian king, a
nouveau riche
among Near Eastern monarchs, who had helped himself to land up the Euphrates valley which had been a dependency of the Hittites. The Assyrian then wrote claiming Great King status and proposing an alliance. In a rage the Hittite king replied to him:

You brag that … you have vanquished my ally and become a Great King. But what is this you keep saying about ‘brotherhood’? You and I were we born of the same mother? Far from it, even as my father and grandfather were not in the habit of writing about ‘brotherhood’ to the King of Assyria [your predecessor], so stop writing to me about brotherhood and Great Kingship. I have no wish for it. [Translation by Ken Kitchen]

Don’t you brother me! Such examples could be multiplied. They make quite clear what is going on in the Ahhiyawa letters: between 1265 and 1240 BC, ‘Achaia-land’ was on a ranking in Hittite diplomacy
comparable
to Egypt and Babylon; even Assyria was not, though she soon would be. Hattusilis may have been annoyed, may well be resorting to flattery, but the Greeks were a major power in the Eastern Mediterranean, perhaps more influential and powerful than states better attested in the Hittite
tablets such as Arzawa, Wilusa and Mira. And they were important in Hittite eyes because they represented a real ‘political’ and military threat to the fringe of their empire.

We have here a marvellous insight into the workings of diplomacy of the time, and it is thrilling to think that such letters may have been read out in the royal megaron at Mycenae. Such diplomatic sophistication is precisely what we would expect of the thirteenth-century Hittites, who by then were taking the lead in the formulation of treaties: they were the masters and the Achaians the
nouveaux riches
, perhaps blind to the niceties and minutiae of etiquette which were instantly comprehended by, say, the Egyptian Foreign Office. We can also see how a detailed look at the Tawagalawas letter confirms our impression that during the time of Hattusilis (
c
.1265–1235 BC) and Tudhalias IV (
c
.1235–1210 BC) the Achaians could be regarded as Great Kings roughly on a par (allowing for flattery) with the great Near Eastern kingdoms. This squares perfectly with archaeology, and with Greek tradition, which says that this period was the heyday of the Atreid dynasty.

LITERACY – ARCHAEOLOGY AND TEXTUAL EVIDENCE

This kind of diplomacy suggests that the Achaian king had Hittite scribes in his territory (though it is a mark of the Achaians’ fringe standing in international diplomacy that they wrote in Hittite cuneiform, not Akkadian, the language of diplomacy between the ‘superpowers’). This would certainly mean the presence of Hittite scribes at Mycenae and Miletus. In the latter case there is obviously no problem, but is there
any
evidence for Hittites in the world of mainland Greece? So far archaeological finds of Hittite material are scanty, though they do exist; but the Linear B archives are interesting in this respect as they have men with Hittite names, particularly at Knossos, but also at Pylos where we find a Pijamaso. All in all, we must assume that the Achaian king employed Hittite scribes in his Foreign Office, like western Anatolian rulers such as the king of Mira
writing to Ramses II of Egypt. No fragments of diplomatic correspondence have ever been found at Mycenae, but then neither has any fragment of anything but petty inventories: it is clear that the royal archive of the Atreids has not survived.

Our evidence of Arzawan and Miran correspondence with Egypt suggests strongly that the western Anatolian kingdoms, along with those of the Achaians and Hittites, may have participated in diplomacy in the manner of Near Eastern countries and city states. In this case we may well ask whether Troy itself may have been able to be a member of this community. No evidence of tablets was found by any of the excavators of Hisarlik, but then the site was so badly damaged that none would be expected. Nevertheless the possibility should be borne in mind that a city as sophisticated in its military and domestic architecture as Troy VI, a city which traded with Cyprus and Syria, could have employed scribes who could write in Hittite to the Great King, and perhaps even to Mycenaean Greece, with which it also had trading relations. The literacy of the Late-Bronze-Age world is something almost totally forgotten by the Homeric epic, but that King Priam could have corresponded with Hattusilis III – or Agamemnon for that matter – is at least conceivable.

The ambassadors and experts who did the legwork (and headwork) in such negotiations were obviously close to the royal king. ‘I am sending a groom,’ writes Hattusilis to the Achaian king, ‘who from my youth used to ride with me on my chariot, and who also rode with your brother Tawagalawas … since he has a wife of the queen’s family … is he not as good as my brother-in-law?’ Their words, of course, were especially valued because of the ambassadors’ wide-ranging experience: ‘This story was told me by Enlil-bel-nishe, the envoy of the king of Babylon,’ writes Queen Pudukhepa of the Hittites to Ramses II of some court gossip. But kings themselves could also make visits. In 1244, after Hittite diplomacy had patched up a peace with Assyria, Babylon and Egypt, Prince Hishmi-Sharumma, the future Tudhalias IV, visited Egypt and may have stayed for several
months. His visit seems to have paved the way for Hattusilis himself in around 1239–1235 BC. At first grumpy (‘Why should I come? What would we do?’) and troubled by an ailment of the feet, Hattusilis seems to have met Ramses in Egypt, a ‘summit’ between the two most powerful men in the ancient world. That the Achaian king’s brother Tawagalawas should have visited the Hittite court is therefore no surprise: we might even say the same for a Trojan king’s son visiting the king of Mycenaean Sparta!

Such is the background to the international diplomacy at the time of the Trojan War. The Hittites were far more concerned with the east, with the growing power of the upstart Assyrians in the Euphrates valley, with the maintenance of their overlordship of the rich cities of Syria, with normalising relations with Egypt at the frontier with Canaan, even with keeping the warlike Kaska tribes to their Black Sea border region. The last thing they wanted was disruption in the west too. They wanted a diplomatic
cordon sanitaire
of allied states in western Anatolia, bound to them by treaty. In all this their desire to achieve stability by diplomacy rather than by war is characteristic – and understandable. The growing influence of the Achaians in western Anatolia was a threat, and, as all Hittitologists have recognised, in the thirteenth century BC the Hittite kings were forced to play a more active role in the west. It is in this light that we should view Hittite evidence for armed intervention by Greeks in the lands of the Hittites’ western allies. It is possible that here we have the real ‘political’ background of the Trojan War.

ARE TROY AND THE TROJAN WAR IN THE HITTITE TABLETS?

We have come to the conclusion that the Hittites knew the Mycenaean Greeks, Homer’s Achaiwoi, as a powerful seafaring state called Ahhiyawa, and that the Greeks were involved on the coast of Asia Minor in military and diplomatic activity. Can we go further than that? If the Trojan War really took place, even loosely in the manner Homer describes, then it would fit very
well with the general evidence of the Hittite archive; but is such a war actually mentioned in the Boghaz Köy tablets?

The question divides into two parts. First, was a place called Troy known to the Hittites? If it was, it occurs in only one document, and that has recently been redated by linguists. Previously dated to the thirteenth century BC, it is now thought to come from the time of Tudhalias I (
c
.1440–1410 BC), a strong king whose annals record the Hittite conquest of Arzawa in western Anatolia. The tablet tells of the subjugation of a neighbouring country called Assuwa, whose name most scholars agree is the archetype of the Greek word Asia, an area originally confined to Lydia and the lands south of the Troad. Assuwa to the Hittites meant a specific place, with a ‘town of Assuwa’, but in alliance with it were twenty-two other places which many experts think are listed from south to north, ending in the north-west corner of Asia Minor, the region of Troy itself. The last name in the list is written in Hittite ‘Taru[u]isa’, which is assumed to be the northernmost component of the alliance, and on superficial resemblance temptingly close to Homer’s Troia. Could this be Troy? The identification of the name is unfortunately problematical. One point in its favour is that phonetic rules do not always apply in transferring from one language to another, but on the face of it it does not match, and the only way it would is if we posit an original form, Taruiya, and assume that the form given in Tudhalias’ annals derives from that (parallels for such a dual form do in fact exist – for instance Karkisa and Karkiya are evidently the same place). But this is too speculative a leap for most scholars.

Much more intriguing, though, is the association of the name Taruisa with the preceding place on the list, Uilusiia, pronounced Wilusiya. Now it is on the face of it a really remarkable coincidence that these two names should occur together, even in a document of
c
.1420, in roughly the same place that the legends place Troy. One of the inexplicable things about Homer’s story is that in it Troy has two distinct names, Troy (which often seems to mean the city) and Ilios (often the country). As we saw in
Chapter 4
, originally the name Ilios was pronounced with a digamma, that
is, Wilios, and this is certainly acceptable as a rendition of the Hittite Wilusa or Wilusiya (both forms occur). Is it possible that in the thirteenth century Hisarlik-Troy was
within
the wider realms of the Hittite state of Wilusa?

Of Hittite Wilusa we know a good deal, though unfortunately not its precise location. It was an Arzawan state and therefore one of the group of western Anatolian states which included Arzawa and Mira; if the former lay around the Hermus and Cayster valleys, and the latter in the middle and upper Maeander valleys including Beycesultan, then Wilusa probably lay north and north-east of Arzawa. One of the important powers in the west, Willus therefore most likely included the area of Troy. Of its relations with the Hittites and its neighbours we know details from a treaty dating from the time of Muwatallis (1296–1272 BC), and this gives another clue, for by a coincidence the king of Wilusa named in the treaty is Alaksandus, a name which strikingly recalls Homer’s prince Alexandros (Paris) of Wilios. Could they be the same man? Astonishingly enough, an independent tradition survived into classical times among the native, Luvian, speakers of South West Turkey that the lover of Helen had indeed been the ally of Muwatallis. It is possible then that Homer has here preserved the real name of one of the kings of Wilusa –
and that Wilusa was Troy
.

Interesting facts about the history of Wilusa emerge from the treaty. Since the subjugation of Arzawa in the seventeenth century BC, Wilusa had always been loyal to the Hittites. Though an Arzawan state (presumably by racial affinity), it was loyal to the kings of Hatti even when Arzawa fought against them. Throughout the reigns of Tudhalias I and II, the great Suppiluliumas, and Mursilis II, whenever Hittite armies invaded Arzawa they never had to attack Wilusa, but were loyally supported by this apparently isolated state. This suggests that Wilusa was situated on the northern fringe of the Arzawan states, far enough from their capital Apasas (Ephesus?) to maintain a policy of its own.