1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (15 page)

Among the other towns that Suppiluliuma attacked and destroyed within the Mitanni lands was the site of ancient Qatna—modern Tell Mishrife—that is today being excavated by Italian, German, and Syrian archaeologists. Tremendous finds have been made just in the past decade, including an unlooted royal tomb, Aegean-style wall paintings with pictures of turtles and dolphins, a piece of clay with the throne name of Akhenaten (probably used to seal a jar or originally attached to a letter), and dozens of tablets from the royal archive, all located within or underneath the palace. In among these tablets is a letter dating to about 1340 BC from Hanutti, the commander in chief of the Hittite army under Suppiluliuma, telling King Idadda of Qatna to prepare for war. The letter was found in the burned remains of the king’s palace, evidence that the Hittites had attacked and been victorious.
⁵⁷

Suppiluliuma was no stranger to diplomacy, for that went hand in hand with warfare in those days. He even seems to have married a Babylonian princess, probably after banishing his primary wife (and mother of his sons) overseas to Ahhiyawa for an unnamed transgression.
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He also married off one of his daughters to Shattiwaza, the son of Tushratta, whom he placed on the throne of Mitanni as a vassal king after sending
a Hittite army with him to win his father’s throne. However, the most interesting marriage linked to Suppiluliuma’s reign is one that never happened. It is known today as the “Zannanza Affair.”

We learn of the Zannanza Affair in the
Deeds of Suppiluliuma
, as written by his son Mursili II, the same son who was responsible for writing the
Plague Prayers
. Apparently a letter was received at the Hittite court one day, purportedly from the queen of Egypt. The letter was regarded with suspicion because it contained an offer that had never before been made by a ruler of Egypt. It was a request so surprising that Suppiluliuma immediately doubted the letter’s authenticity. It read, simply:

My husband is dead. I have no son. But they say that you have many sons. If you would give me one of your sons, he would become my husband. I will never take a servant of mine and make him my husband!
⁵⁹

The
Deeds
record that the sender of the letter was a woman named “Dahamunzu.” However, this is simply a Hittite word meaning “the wife of the king.” In other words, the letter was supposedly from the queen of Egypt. But this made no sense, because Egyptian royalty did not marry foreigners. In all of his treaty negotiations, for instance, Amenhotep III had never once given away a member of his family in marriage to a foreign ruler, despite being asked on more than one occasion to do so. Now, the queen of Egypt was offering not only to marry Suppiluliuma’s son but to immediately make him pharaoh of Egypt. Such an offer was unbelievable, and so Suppiluliuma’s response is understandable. He sent a trusted messenger named Hattusa-ziti to Egypt, to ask whether the queen had indeed sent the letter, and whether she was serious about her offer.

Hattusa-ziti traveled to Egypt, as instructed, and returned not only with an additional letter from the queen but also with her special envoy, a man named Hani. The letter was written in Akkadian, rather than in either Egyptian or Hittite. It still survives today in a fragmentary form after its discovery at Hattusa, within the Hittite archives, and reflects the queen’s anger at being doubted. As quoted in the
Deeds
, it reads as follows:

Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country’s shame to a foreign land? You did not believe me, and you even spoke thus to me! He who was my husband is dead. I have no son! Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband! I have written to no other
country. Only to you have I written. They say you have many sons; so give me one son of yours. To me he will be husband. In Egypt he will be king!
⁶⁰

Since Suppiluliuma was still skeptical, the Egyptian envoy Hani spoke next, saying:

Oh my Lord! This is our country’s shame! If we had a son of the king at all, would we have come to a foreign country and kept asking for a lord for ourselves? Niphururiya [the Egyptian king] is dead. He has no sons! Our Lord’s wife is solitary. We are seeking a son of our Lord [i.e. Suppiluliuma] for the kingship in Egypt. And for the woman, our Lady, we seek him as her husband! Furthermore, we went to no other country, only here did we come! Now, oh our Lord, give us a son of yours!
⁶¹

According to the
Deeds
, Suppiluliuma was finally persuaded by this speech and decided to send one of his sons, named Zannanza, to Egypt. He was not risking much, for Zannanza was the fourth of his five sons. The older three were already serving him in various capacities, so he could spare Zannanza. If things went well, his son would become king of Egypt; if things did not go well, he still had four other sons.

As it turned out, things did not go well. After several weeks, a messenger arrived and informed Suppiluliuma that the party traveling to Egypt had been ambushed en route and Zannanza had been killed. Those responsible had escaped and had still not been identified. Suppiluliuma was furious; he had no doubt that the Egyptians were somehow responsible for this … and had perhaps even lured him into sending his son to his death. As the
Deeds
record,

When my father [Suppiluliuma] heard of the murder of Zannanza, he began to lament for Zannanza, and to the gods he spoke thus: “O Gods! I did no evil, yet the people of Egypt did this to me! They also attacked the frontier of my country!”
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It still remains an unsolved mystery as to who ambushed and killed Zannanza. It also remains an open question as to who in Egypt would have sent the letter to Suppiluliuma, for there are two potential queens, both of whom were widowed. One was Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten; the other was Ankhsenamen, wife of King Tut.
⁶³
However, given the information in the letters—that is, that the queen had no sons—and given the
chain of events that followed the murder of Zannanza, with the throne of Egypt going to a man named Ay, who married Ankhsenamen despite being old enough to be her grandfather, the identification of the mysterious royal letter writer as Ankhsenamen makes the most sense. It is unclear whether Ay had anything to do with the actual assassination of the Hittite prince, but since he had the most to gain, suspicion clearly falls upon him.

When Suppiluliuma vowed to enact vengeance for the death of his son, he made plans to attack Egyptian territory. Ay warned him not to do so, in correspondence that still exists in fragmentary condition, but Suppiluliuma declared war anyway and sent the Hittite army into southern Syria, where it attacked numerous cities and brought back thousands of prisoners, including many Egyptian soldiers.
⁶⁴
Lest anyone wonder whether someone would go to war over a single person, one need only look at the story of the Trojan War, where the Mycenaeans fought the Trojans for ten years, reportedly because of the kidnapping of the beautiful Helen, to which we shall soon turn. One can also point to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which many see as the flash point igniting World War I.

Ironically, as pointed out above and in the
Plague Prayers
of Mursili, the Egyptian prisoners of war who were brought back by the Hittite army are thought to have brought with them a dreadful illness, which spread rapidly throughout the Hittite homelands. Soon thereafter, in approximately 1322 BC, Suppiluliuma died from this plague—perhaps as much a victim of Egyptian-Hittite contretemps as was his son Zannanza.

H
ITTITES AND
M
YCENAEANS

One additional note can be made about the Hittites at this time. During Suppiluliuma’s reign, there began for the Hittites a period during which they were one of the great powers of the ancient world, on a par with the Egyptians and exceeding the influence of the Mitannians, Assyrians, Kassites/Babylonians, and Cypriots. They maintained their position through a combination of diplomacy, threats, war, and trade. In fact, archaeologists excavating Hittite sites have found trade goods from
most of those other countries (we might call them nation-states in modern parlance). Moreover, Hittite goods have been found in virtually all of those countries.

The exception is the area of the Aegean. Hittite objects are close to nonexistent in Bronze Age contexts on mainland Greece, Crete, the Cycladic islands, and even Rhodes, despite the latter’s close proximity to Turkey. There are only a dozen such objects that have been discovered, in contrast to hundreds of Egyptian, Canaanite, and Cypriot imports that have been found in the same contexts in the Aegean. Conversely, almost no Mycenaean or Minoan objects were imported into the Hittite homelands in central Anatolia, despite the fact that imported goods from Cyprus, Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt made it through the mountain passes and up onto the central Anatolian plateau. This glaring anomaly in the trade patterns of the ancient Mediterranean world is not restricted just to the time of Suppiluliuma and the fourteenth century BC, but is demonstrable across most of three centuries, from the fifteenth through the thirteenth centuries BC.
⁶⁵

It may simply be that neither side produced objects that the other wanted, or that the objects exchanged were perishable (e.g., olive oil, wine, wood, textiles, metals) and have long since disintegrated or been made into other objects, but the dearth of trade may also have been deliberate. We will see, in the next section, a Hittite diplomatic treaty in which a deliberate economic embargo against the Mycenaeans is spelled out—“no ship of the Ahhiyawa may go to him”—and it seems quite likely that we are looking here at one of the earliest examples in history of such an embargo.

As has been pointed out elsewhere,
⁶⁶
such a scenario, and a motivation for instituting an embargo, is supported by evidence that the Mycenaeans actively encouraged anti-Hittite activities in western Anatolia.
⁶⁷
As noted at the beginning of this section, if Amenhotep III had sent an embassy to the Aegean, as recorded on his so-called Aegean List at his mortuary temple at Kom el-Hetan, in order to help contain the rising power of the Hittites, such Egyptian anti-Hittite overtures, particularly those that benefited Mycenae, may have found an eager ally in the Aegean.

Alternatively, the hostility and lack of trade between Mycenaeans and Hittites might well have been the
result
of an anti-Hittite treaty signed between Egypt and the Aegean during the time of Amenhotep III. In
short, it seems that the politics, trade, and diplomacy of thirty-five hundred years ago, especially during the fourteenth century BC, were not all that dissimilar to those practiced as part and parcel of the globalized economy of our world today, complete with economic embargoes, diplomatic embassies, and both gifts and power plays at the highest diplomatic levels.

CHAPTER THREE

A
CT
III

FIGHTING FOR GODS AND COUNTRY:
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY BC

W
e don’t know what happened during the final moments of the ship that sank off the southwestern coast of Turkey at Uluburun (roughly translated as “Grand Promontory”) sometime around 1300 BC. Did it capsize in a great storm? Did it founder after striking a submerged object? Did its crew intentionally scuttle it to avoid being taken captive by pirates? Archaeologists do not know, nor are they certain of the vessel’s origination, its final destination, or its ports of call, but they did recover its cargo, which suggests that the Bronze Age ship was most likely sailing from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Aegean.
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