Hello to the Hittites!
A court of chariots, lions and treaties
Hello,
Happy Friday and welcome (back). I wrote last week about my visit to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, Türkiye. I said then that I had more to write about Hittites. Then, this week, by more-or-less total coincidence, I happened to attend a lecture about Hittites.1 It seemed like a sign, so here goes!
Who Were the Hittites?
That was roughly what I was asking as I walked into the central gallery of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. I knew the word. On a grand timeline of everything, I knew they fitted somewhere after ‘people start farming’ around 8000 years ago and before ‘the wars between the Greeks and the Persians’, so around 2500 years ago. If you’d pushed me harder, I’d have said, more towards the later end of that timescale, so maybe 3000-5000 years ago?
On a map of everything, I knew they had lived somewhere around the Eastern Mediterranean area. I can now do a bit better!
The Hittites did not start in Anatolia, though. They likely migrated from somewhere north of the Black Sea and either conquered, drove out our gradually learned to co-exist with the earlier populations of the area. (Probably, it was a combination of all three. They ended up in charge, so the chances are good that they arrived with some show of force but their language preserved words borrowed from the people they met in Anatolia, showing that there was at least some sharing.)
My guess of ‘when’ wasn’t that far off, but again, I can now do better. The Hittites first appear around 1750 BCE. They established what would become their longterm capital at Hattusa about a hundred years later, c. 1650 BCE, and their power began to slide from around 1300 BCE. This means they lived in the period generally known around the Mediterranean as the Bronze Age (which I’ve written about here, here and here). About a century after the Hittites began to lose their grip, c. 1200 BCE, most of the big powers of the previous 500 years or so found themselves facing various overlapping crises that are often referred to as the ‘Bronze Age collapse’. We (by which I mean scholarship/people who are specialists in the Late Bronze Age) still don’t fully understand what happened - climate change was likely a factor but so were warfare (between states and within them), serious disease outbreaks and the appearance of a rather mysterious group of coastal raiders in the Mediterranean known as the Sea People. But it certainly took the Hittites down with it! Some break-away kingdoms survived for a few more centuries, looking back to the Hittites as their ancestral identity, and then they were absorbed by new empire builders coming northwest from Mesopotamia (and that’s another story!).
After where and when, the what and the how are, inevitably a bit trickier. How do we ever explain what made (or makes) a whole society what it is or exactly how it worked (or works)? Plus, this is not my period of study. So please take this as very schematic! Still, for an empire that flourished over 3000 years ago, we have really quite a lot of information. The site of Hattusa has been excavated fairly systematically for more than 60 years. As well as sculptures and buildings, this has revealed over 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions on them, including legal and diplomatic texts, administrative lists and religious and literary material. Other, smaller sites inside Hittite territory have also been excavated and the Hittites were mentioned and depicted by ancient Egyptians, who were some of their major political contemporaries.
As a result of all of this, a sketch of Hittite life is possible. They ruled their territory mainly through controlling cities. These weren’t huge by modern standards: probably 5000-8000 for Hattusa and perhaps 2000-3000 for smaller cities. Still, for the Bronze Age, they represented major concentrations of wealth and human resources. Farming communities would provide the cities with grain (mostly barley) as well as meat and other agricultural produce, both as tribute/tax to their rulers but also to supply the temples. Since the temples were also in the cities and were probably run by the same groups in society who made up the ruling family and its aristocracy, the temples and the court effecitvely constituted a combined ruling system, which was pretty common in lots of societies until quite recently.
The clay tablets from Hattusa and amazing sculptural remains from sites like Alacahöyük (now mostly in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations) show an urban society including scribes and scholars, artists, musicians, generals and politicians, and craftspeople. Hittites used ceramics for everyday eating, drinking and cooking as well as for decorative objects. They also made things out of bronze, from religious or political emblems and sculptures to jewellery and weapons. (In fact, the rather lovely ceramic box I wrote about last week dates from the Hittite period.)
One technology they seem to have been famous for (it is shown in Egyptian carvings) and that they were proud of among themselves was the chariot. Even if they made most of their wealth off farming and taxing long-distance trade with neighbouring regions (a major source of business was gold and silver from Anatolia for tin from the Iranian plateau), force was needed to expand and defend their agricultural lands and to attract traders with the promise of a strong government and the protection it could provide. Besides, as far as we can see, all of the states of the Bronze Age celebrated warfare and warrior rulers, so this was also a part of their self-image. The Hittites at their most ambitious invaded deep into Mesopotamia and set up ally kings there.
A Warrior’s World
One activity that Hittite aristocrats clearly enjoyed was hunting (and that is common in lots of societies that also celebrate warriors and warfare - hunting could be a form of practice for war and showed off the same virtues of daring, courage and skill at arms). I was particularly struck by this image of an archer firing at a boar and a deer for the careful depiction of both animals, which each have quite a bit more movement and personality than the archer!
In another image from the same site and period, a man with a spear attacks a lion. Underneath and above the poor creature, a pair of dogs help the hunter, reminding me of another doggy companion carved in stone from many thousands of miles away and mmore than 2000 years later, that I’ve written about before. No surprises there: dogs are, as far as we know, the earliest animal to have become domesticated. By the Bronze Age, they had been part of human life for more than 10,000 years. The dog carved in the picture below may well have been bred for hunting and it is completely possible that Hittite nobles sat around comparing notes on their preferred types or the bloodlines of their favourite pets.
It wasn’t all hunting boar and brutalising lions though (even if there was an awful lot of that going on in Hittite art, from what I could tell!). Wall carvings from Alacahöyük also show more peaceful entertainment.
A really remarkable artefact in the museum’s collection, from around the 17th century BCE (so right at the start of the Hittite period, and about 300-400 years before the images above) is a vase illustrating a wedding.
The written tablets that survive from the Hittite Empire provide other glimpses into the things they found interesting and obvious. They wrote a lot of legal codes, for example, though I was fascinated to learn from one of my fellow fellows here in Istanbul that we aren’t totally sure what they were for: they may not actually have been used very much in law courts, so much as for scribes and scholars to discuss and contemplate. The Hittites were also some of the first authors of what might recognisably be regarded as treaties with foreign powers.
In a Rich Man’s World
Everything I’ve shown here, and pretty much everything on display in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, was made for the very richest members of the Hittite Empire. They could order big, beautiful and durable things made for them, showing their hobbies, their entertainments and their achievements. Sometimes, like the acrobatic performers, less exalted members of the Hittite world show up but only as bit parts. That doesn’t make the Hittites unusual. It makes them pretty typical. If, in 5000 years, some archaeologist is digging up the Istanbul or Ankara (or Wolverhampton or Chennai or anywhere else) of today they will probably be able to reconstruct far more about the richest 10% (or fewer!) than about anybody else. Just as smaller Hittite settlements copied the styles of the capital, Hattusa, so our own advertisements and consumer goods are often shadows or copies of what the super rich are up to. As a result, even when we discover the lives of the poorer in archaeology, we are often seeing a reflection of who they wanted to seem like.
New archaeological techniques, though, are opening up windows into other parts of the Hittite world. This year I’ve enjoyed listening to a colleague who works on archaeobotany, or the study of the remains of plants. His work and that of his colleagues, is documenting changes at sites in Anatolia, including during the Hittite period, in people’s diets, in how they farmed and even in the wild plants they would have seen and perhaps used in medicine or perfumes or simply enjoyed or marked the seasons by. Other colleagues here, working on periods later than the Hittites, have talked about the microscopic elements in pottery, that can help to show where clay was brought from as a raw material or can reveal ready-made ceramics being traded between settlements and regions or production techniques changing. Probably, as I type this, somebody somewhere in a lab in Türkiye is looking at slices of Hittite pottery under a microscope in order to conduct the same sorts of analysis. Those sorts of things are hard to display in museums but they are starting to find their place.
For me, the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations was a chance to colour in and zoom in on some parts of my mental map that were very sketchy. As tourists of the past, as well as the present, we see first the things that a society shouts loudest about or what is most different from what we’re used to. As a tourist in the Hittite Empire, I saw the lions and the deer and the huge amount of time and energy it would have taken to make the stone sculptures I’ve pictured here (most of which are about 3/4 life sized, if you are imagining the human figures in them). Those were the things that the people with wealth and power most wanted others to see.
As a medievalist taking a tour in the Bronze Age, one of the things that stood out as particularly different, in comparison with the first millennium CE, was probably the material simplicity. Some of that is a reminder that for every 100 years, let alone for every 1000 years that passes, less and less survives. Organic materials decay. Stone crumbles. Above all, in a place like Anatolia, where people have lived for millennia, treasures of one society become the junkyard of the next: metals are melted, stones are reused and re-cut. We’ve always recycled and as a result, we will always know slightly less about things the further back in time they were (unless people in the past did something particularly weird, like producing massively more stuff than the people who came after them, which is something I’ve talked about before).
The Hittites must have had wooden furniture, leather belts and straps, woven baskets and woollen cloth. Almost none of it survives, and without it, their world looks plainer and more austere than the medieval world I study. They probably had quite a lot of gold and silver - it was one of their main trade goods! But most of it probably became the Byzantine coins I study and a million and one other things besides. Without those gold and silver objects and other easily re-usable shiny things like gemstones, their world looks less colourful then the Byzantine one I am used to. With each step further back we go, we have to make a bit more effort to see the people who lived then as fully Technicolor and, consequently, as just as real as us.
The difference isn’t just a matter of survival though. The total population of the Hittite Empire has been estimated at around 150,000-200,000. That is on the lower side of estimates for the population of Byzantine Constantinople in the first millennium CE. Anatolia under the rule of the Byzantine Empire in, say, c. 600 CE, probably had a population in the low millions. There had been, in the intervening centuries, major changes in population (numbers but also languages, cultures and patterns of migration) and in technology. For all of the issues in labelling whole periods by what people mainly made axes out of, the fact that the Hittites lived in a world of bronze while the Byzantines ruled Anatolia in a world in which iron had been well known for centuries, changed what could be made, as well as how effecitvely other people could be destroyed (iron weapons, like iron tools, are more efficient than bronze ones…).
This isn’t intended as a systematic comparison of Anatolia c. 1300 BCE and c. 600 CE. It is just the reflections of a historian out of time. But I’m glad to have gotten to know the Hittites better and I look forward to learning and sharing more. Some of the most interesting sculpture in the museum, for me, for example, were not Hittite at all, but from the centuries immediately afterwards. It was a valuable reminder, though, of how much more there is to learn, for me personally, but also for ‘us’, the global sum of knowledge that exists to be called on.
Caring about what life was like for ordinary people in the past has driven new questions and new techniques for answering them. It has also exposed things, like longterm environmental and climate change, that would have affected the kings and the high priests as well, because in reality societies are intertwined with themselves and their wider world, even if they don’t always show that off. Most of all, the Hittites for me pose interesting questions: what makes one period or society clearly different from another? What remains the same because of where those societies were or because of long-term cultural similarities, or because they were all made by humans? What choices did they have, and did they use, that the people I study or that we today, don’t? What options did later people have that they could not have imagined?
The level of coincidence here is ‘more-or-less’ total because the reason I was in Ankara was because I am currently a residential fellow at a Center for the Study of Anatolian Civilizations. That has given me the opportunity to spend time in Türkiye, including Ankara. Everybody here is doing projects related to Anatolia and the Hittites were an Anatolian civilization, so there are forces of convergence in operation. However, I am not a Hittite specialist, I did not know before I visited that Hittite material is the heart of the collection of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and there is only one scholar working in my commmunity this year who works on Hittites, whose talk just happened to be this week, out of the whole 8 months or so that were possible. So I’m still claiming some seredipity.