The Assuwa Rebellion In Anatolia

Thutmose III was in contact, and perhaps involved in active commercial exchange, with distant areas, including areas located to the north and west of Egypt.

Contact with Assuwa (assuming that is the proper identification for Isy) was initiated by Assuwa rather than by Egypt. About 1430 BC, Assuwa launched a rebellion against the Hittites of central Anatolia, and one must consider the possibility that Assuwa was actively searching for diplomatic contacts with other major powers during the decade leading up to the rebellion.49

The Assuwa Rebellion came to the forefront in 1991, when a bulldozer operator was digging the blade of his machine into the shoulder of a road by the ancient site of Hattusa, capital city of the Hittites—now a two-hour car ride (208 kilometers) east of modern Ankara. The blade struck something metallic.

Hopping down from his seat on the cab and reaching into the loosened dirt, he pulled out a long, thin, and surprisingly heavy greencolored object. It looked and felt like an ancient sword, an identification that was confirmed when it was cleaned up in the local museum by the resident archaeologists.

However, it wasn’t a typical Hittite sword but rather was a type not seen previously in the region. In addition, it had an inscription incised into the blade. It initially proved easier to read the inscription than to identify the make of the sword, and so the translation was done first.

Written in Akkadian—the diplomatic language of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East—using cuneiform (wedge-shaped) signs, the inscription reads as follows: i-nu-ma mDu-ut-ha-li-ya LUGAL.GAL KUR URUA-as-su-wa u-hal-liq GIRHI.A an-nu-tim a-na D Iskur beli-suu-se-li. For those few readers not conversant with Akkadian, the English translation is: “As Duthaliya the Great King shattered the Assuwa country, he dedicated these swords to the storm-god, his lord.”50

The inscription refers to the so-called Assuwa Rebellion, which the Hittite king Tudhaliya I/II put down in approximately 1430 BC (he is referred to as “I/II” because we are not certain whether he was the first or the second king with that name).

The revolt was already well known to scholars who study the Hittite Empire because of a number of other texts, all written in cuneiform on clay tablets, that had been found by German archaeologists excavating at Hattusa earlier in the century. However, the sword was the first weapon—and the first artifact of any kind, for that matter—that could be associated with the revolt. It is clear from the inscription that there are likely more swords remaining to be found.

However, before we proceed further, we shall spend some time among the Hittites, locating Assuwa, and examining the rebellion. We shall consider why this is evidence of early “internationalism” and—potentially—evidence that the Trojan War was fought two hundred years earlier and for different reasons from those Homer adduced.

EXCURSUS: DISCOVERY OF THE HITTITES

The Hittites ruled a large empire from central Anatolia for much of the second millennium BC.

But they were lost to history, at least geographically, until only about two hundred years ago.

The Hittites were known to biblical scholars because of their mention in the Hebrew Bible, where they are listed as one of the many peoples ending in “–ite” (Hittites, Hivites, Amorites, Jebusites, and so on) who lived in Canaan during the late second millennium BC, interacting with and eventually succumbing to the Hebrews/Israelites.

Abraham bought a burial plot for his wife Sarah from Ephron the Hittite (Gen. 23:3–20), that King David’s wife Bathsheba was first married to Uriah the Hittite (2 Sam. 11: 2–27), and that King Solomon had “Hittite women” among his wives (1 Kings 11:1).

However, early efforts to find the Hittites in the biblical lands were unsuccessful, despite the specific geographical location pinpointed in the declaration made to Moses from the burning bush: “I have come down to deliver them [the Israelites] from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites” (Exod. 3:7).52

In 1879, at a conference in London, the respected Assyriologist A. H. Sayce announced that the Hittites were located not in Canaan but rather in Anatolia; in Turkey rather than in Israel/Lebanon/Syria/Jordan.

His announcement was generally accepted, and the equation is still accepted today, but one has to wonder how the Bible could have gotten it so wrong.

The answer is actually fairly logical. Much as the British Empire stretched far from England proper, so too did the Hittite Empire stretch west in Turkey and south into Syria. And just as some former parts of the British Empire continue to play cricket and drink afternoon tea, long after the original empire vanished, so too some of the former parts of the Hittite Empire in northern Syria retained portions of Hittite culture, language, and religion— so much so that we now refer to them as the Neo-Hittites, who flourished during the early first millennium BC.

By the time the Bible was written down, sometime between the ninth and the seventh centuries BC according to authorities, the original Hittites were long gone, but their successors—the Neo-Hittites—were firmly established in the northern part of Canaan. There they no doubt interacted with the Israelites and other peoples of the Levant, ensuring their mention in the biblical accounts and unintentionally creating confusion for later explorers seeking the original Hittites.

Moreover, as archaeologists began to excavate Hittite sites and eventually to translate the numerous clay tablets found at these sites, it became clear that they had not called themselves Hittites. Their name for themselves was actually something close to “Neshites” or “Neshians,” after the city of Nesha (now known and excavated as Kultepe Kanesh in the Cappadocian region of Turkey).

This city flourished for some two hundred years as the seat of a local Indo-European dynasty, before a king named Hattusili I (meaning “the man of Hattusa”) sometime around 1650 BC established his capital city farther to the east, at a new site with that name, Hattusa. We still call them Hittites today only because that name became firmly ensconced in the scholarly literature before the tablets giving their true name were translated.

The location of the new capital city, Hattusa, was carefully chosen. It was so well fortified and so well situated geographically, with a narrow valley providing the sole access up to the city, that it was captured only twice during its fivehundred-year occupation—probably both times by a neighboring group called the Kashka.

The site has yielded thousands of clay tablets during excavations conducted since 1906 by German archaeologists such as Hugo Winckler, Kurt Bittel, Peter Neve, and Jürgen Seeher. Included among these tablets are letters and documents from what must have been the official state archives, as well as poems, stories, histories, religious rituals, and all kinds of other written documents.

Together they allow us to piece together not only the history of the Hittite rulers and their interactions with other peoples and kingdoms, but also that of the ordinary people, including their daily life and society, belief systems, and law codes—one of which contains the rather intriguing ruling “If anyone bites off the nose of a free person, he shall pay 40 shekels of silver” (one wonders just how frequently that happened).

Mursili I was a Hittite king, grandson and successor of Hattusili I.

• He marched his army all the way to Mesopotamia, a journey of over one thousand miles, and attacked the city of Babylon in 1595 BC, burning it to the ground and bringing to an end the 200 year-old dynasty made famous by Hammurabi “the Law-Giver.”

Then, instead of occupying the city, he simply turned the Hittite army around and headed for home, thus effectively conducting the longest drive-by shooting in history.

As an unintended consequence of his action, a previously unknown group called the Kassites was able to occupy the city of Babylon and then ruled over it for the next several centuries.

While the first half of Hittite history is known as the Old Kingdom and is justifiably famous because of exploits by kings like Mursili, it is the second half with which we are more concerned here. Known during this period as the Hittite Empire, it flourished and rose to even greater heights during the Late Bronze Age—beginning in the fifteenth century BC and lasting until the early decades of the twelfth century BC.

Among its most famous kings is a man named Suppiluliuma I, whom we will meet in the next chapter and who led the Hittites to a preeminent position in the ancient Near East by conquering a great deal of territory and dealing as an equal with the pharaohs of New Kingdom Egypt. One recently widowed Egyptian queen even asked Suppiluliuma to send her one of his sons as a husband, declaring that he would rule over Egypt with her. It’s not clear which queen it was, or whose widow she was, but some well-informed scholars favor Ankhsenamen as the queen and King Tut as the dead ruler of Egypt, as we shall see.