What is the significance of the hittite civilization

What made this problem a great deal worse was that there seemed to be no clear line of succession from one king to the next; all princes of the royal house of which there were many apparently felt themselves eligible to become king, and if they could gain the support of a faction of the nobility, launched a bid for the throne.

Finally one of the kings, Telipinus c. This marked a turning point: from then on, no more is heard of the assembly, and no more is heard of nobles disputing the succession. This change in title reflects a development in which the status of the king changed from being something like a first among equals so far as their nobility were concerned to being more like the absolute monarchs of Egypt and Babylon.

Although Hittite kings were never actually deified during their lifetimes, on death a king was thought to have become a god, and spirits of former kings received religious devotions.

The king was the supreme commander, law giver, judge and priest. Of these roles, only that of judge was regularly delegated to others; he was expected to personally fulfill his military and religious responsibilities in person. Hittite queens had an independent position within the realm. They were high priestesses in the state religion, and some played a prominent role in affairs of state. The Hittite realm consisted of a homeland surrounded by a growing cluster of kingdoms owing allegiance to the Great King in Hattusa, the Hittite capital.

Within the Hittite homeland, most towns and other communities had councils of local elders to look after their affairs. It was also their role to liaise with local Hittite governors or military officers. In the religious centers, the high priest also acted as the civil governor of the community. As the kingdom expanded, more and more conquered kingdoms were brought under Hittite rule.

If an enemy king surrendered, the Hittite king was usually content to accept his oath of allegiance, and the former enemy would receive back his kingdom as a vassal. A treaty would be drawn up and he would undertake to perform all the duties required of him.

Where a city resisted and had to be taken by force, the city was sacked and the inhabitants carried off to the Hittite capital with their cattle, They would then by distributed as serfs amongst the nobility. They were not made into slaves, however. The conquered territory was handed over to a new vassal ruler, usually a Hittite prince.

All vassals were given a great deal of autonomy, so long as they rendered tribute and provided troops for the Hittite army. In return the Hittite king promised to defend them from external enemies and to help keep the ruling family in power. All vassals were prohibited from any independent dealings with foreign kings.

As Hittite power expanded, vassal kingdoms in sensitive locations on the frontiers were created for Hittite royal princes: the famous cities of Aleppo and Carchemish in northern Syria were treated in this way. Later, as the empire grew yet larger, generals who were usually relatives of the king were appointed to governorships, with wide powers over large areas. They acted as intermediaries between the vassal kings and the Hittite Great King. At whatever level, the administration of outlying territories involved the repair of roads and public buildings, the upkeep of temples, the dispensation of justice and the celebration of religious ceremonies.

Border vassals were alway liable to be secede, or be forced away from their allegiance, by a rival power such as the Mitanni, Assyria or Egypt; frontiers had constantly to be maintained by force or the threat of force.

The Hittites paid a great deal of attention to legal matters. This was perhaps because their kingdom united under one rule a disparate group of local societies, each with their own customs, and the Hittite rulers therefore had to provide a code of laws by which to adjudicate issues which arose between people from different localities.

Several collections of Hittite laws have been uncovered, each slightly different form one another. This indicates that Hittite law was developing over time, and not set in stone as other law codes seem to have been. Like other early bodies of law, there was no distinction between civil and criminal law.

It was concerned primarily with preserving law and order by seeking to set out rules of revenge and compensation to avoid individuals and families from taking matters into their own hands. Again like other law codes, the one crime not included in this was the most serious of all, murder.

This was due to the fact that murder was still thought of as being beyond the power of the courts. Laws were mostly framed in the form of hypothetical cases followed by an appropriate ruling, worded in such a way that strongly suggests that they were derived from real cases. They were thus seeking to base the law on legal precedents. The Hittites seem to have placed more emphasis than other legal systems of the time on ascertaining the facts in a case.

Some court records have survived, and show considerable efforts to make detailed enquiries, which have a quite a modern ring to them. Hittite law was humane by the standards of the time.

The only capital offenses were for rape, intercourse with animals and defiance of the state. Slaves, as ever, were in a worse position, being liable to the death penalty for disobedience to masters, and sorcery, and mutilation for lesser crimes. For free men and women, the penalty for most crimes was restitution of damaged or stolen property, or compensation for injury — though offenders were often required to pay several times the value of the damage caused.

In most cases the reparation expressed in silver value. Careful distinction was made between violations committed in anger or on purpose, and those committed by accident — a distinction not made in some other law codes. In the first instance, cases came before the local elders.

In more serious cases a local royal officer such as a local garrison commander would be required to be involved, in conjunction with the elders. Appeals went to the king or in practice more likely his judicial advisors , and also, it seems, to the Assembly.

The core of the Hittite army was the light horse-drawn chariot; indeed their chariotry was second to none, especially in later periods. Hittite chariots were probably heavier than those of their enemies, particularly the Egyptians, and appear to have carried three men instead of two. Otherwise they were very similar in design.

The infantry were probably more numerous than the chariots, but played a subordinate role in battle. The active campaigning season was confined to spring and summer. At the beginning of spring as order for mobilization would be sent out to those territories chosen to take part that year, and a rendezvous named near the relevant frontier.

At the appointed time and place the king would review the army and take command in person. The Hittites were masters of strategy and cunning.

They executed feints, marches and counter-marches to confuse enemy, and before the battle of Kadesh succeeded in concealing their whole army from the Egyptians. Their objective always was to catch the enemy army in the open, where their chariots could be deployed to maximum effect.

Exactly what the weapons and armor of Hittite soldiers was is not clear. The weapons used by the chariot-borne warriors were apparently the lance and the bow.

However, Hittite carved figures show warriors wearing only belted kilt and helmet, and carrying short sword and battle axes, and on Egyptian carvings Hittite soldiers appear in long robes and armed with long spears. Perhaps these varied representations show the heterogeneous nature of Hittite forces, drawn as they were for a wide variety of peoples. The army which fought at the battle of Kadesh , for example, the largest ever mustered by a Hittite king, included contingents from every part of his empire, and from every possible ally and vassal.

The Hittite army contained sappers in connection with the construction of fortifications and for use in siege warfare. Prolonged sieges were sometimes required, and the Hittites had battering-rams and siege towers. They were also masters of defense — massive defensive walls surrounded their cities and fortresses, with gateways designed to make it as hard as possible to fight a way through. On the north and west frontiers of the empire, where wild tribes threatened to raid, lines of fortresses guarded Hittite territory.

The garrisons of these fortresses must have been permanent troops, rather than those mustered for a particular campaign. These garrison troops were probably made up of mercenaries, at least in part. In the accounts of the victories and conquests of Hittite kings there is a complete absence of lust for torture and cruelty which characterized the annals of the Assyrian kings. There was no Hittite navy; this is somewhat surprising as they possessed territories in Cyprus, and trade extensively with that island.

They filled the highest offices of state, such as chiefs of the bodyguard, chief of the courtiers, chief of the wine pourers, chief of the treasurers, chief of the scepter-bearers, and chief of the overseers of a thousand.

In particular they held the top military commands. Under them came a host of courtiers, bodyguards, grooms, cup-bearers, scepter-men, overseers of thousands, chamberlains, and warriors. These were the elite of Hittite society, and with the royal family, their leading members formed a hereditary nobility. This class possessed large estates, apparently fiefs conferred by kings on condition of providing military forces for the royal army. This is no doubt how the very effective — and expensive — chariot arm of the Hittite army was raised and trained.

Temples also had large estates, and formed virtual states within a state. Along with the vast royal estates and noble estates, much of the productive land must have been owned by a comparatively small section of society. The vast majority of the population lay outside this elite group. In 2 Kings , they are depicted as a people with their own kingdoms.

Despite the use of Hatti as the core of their territory, the Hittites should be distinguished from the Hattians, an earlier people who inhabited the same region until the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE , and spoke a different language, possibly in the Northwest Caucasian language group known as Hattic.

The Hittite military made successful use of chariots. Although their civilization thrived during the Bronze Age, the Hittites were the forerunners of the Iron Age and were manufacturing iron artifacts from as early as the 14th century BCE. Correspondence with rulers from other empires reveal a foreign demand for iron goods. The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Egypt and the Middle East.

The head of the Hittite state was the king, followed by the heir-apparent. However, some officials exercised independent authority over various branches of the government. It was superseded by the rank of the Gal Gestin Chief of the Wine Stewards , who, like the Gal Mesedi, was generally a member of the royal family.

It shows a Hittite king striding right, with a bow in his right hand and with his outstretched left hand holding a spear. From the rock-cut hieroglyphic inscription we can identify this as a representation of the Hittite king Tudhaliya, probably Tudhaliya IV.

The pillars which Sesostris erected in the conquered countries have for the most part disappeared; but in that part of Syria called Palestine, I myself saw them still standing.

In each case the figure is that of a man, four cubits and a span high, with a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, the rest of his costume being likewise half Egyptian, half Ethiopian. Hence it has been imagined by some of those who have seen these forms, that they are figures of Memnon; but such as think so err very widely from the truth. And so does Herodotus.

This was already recognized by Texier in his publication of the monument in Kiepert, who visited the Hittite monument in , also accepted this identification, but no one, from Herodotus on, suspected it could have anything to do with the Hittites, for they knew nothing about the Hittites. Ah well, this is only Herodotus, writing in the mid fifth century B.

My second example comes from Homer. Now Homer, if anyone, should know something about the Hittites and, indeed, many efforts have been made to find them in the Iliad or the Odyssey, either under their own name or disguised as Amazons.

Homer does speak of the Phrygians, a problem which bothered Strabo and is still an embarrassment to most Homeric scholars today.

So much did she weep for their loss that she was turned to stone:. All this was studied by W. Ramsay in who came to the conclusion that the stone figure of the weeping Niobe could be identified with a rock-cut relief on Mount Sipylos near Akpunar, in the Manisa region.

Ramsay did have his doubts:. Moreover, I have never been able to see it weep. This is what happens when you take your Classics too literally. We still know very little about the relief, but the iconography and style of carving make it unquestionably Hittite.

Charles Texier visited the site in ; his account and drawings were published five years later. The central male and female figures were identified as Astyages, son of Kyaxares, and Aryenis, the daughter of Alyattes, the scene being their royal wedding as described by Herodotus 1. We now know that Yazilikaya is a Hittite religious sanctuary, constructed by the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV around the middle of the 13th century B.

He carved his own image there, showing himself in the dress of a Hittite king with the royal staff of office, the Iituus, also carried by Etruscan judges.

He is identified by inscription, as are all the central figures at Yazilikaya. The point is that they made use of what was at hand. The ancient Greeks themselves had made identifications based upon what they knew from surviving history and traditions, and the European travellers were only following suit. In the surviving Greek literary traditions there is not a trace of anything that can be said to indicate Greek knowledge of the Hittite civilization of Bronze Age Anatolia.

It is against this historical background that we must evaluate the possibility of the Mycenaean Achaeans having been within the Hittite sphere of interest. There are a number of Hittite. Sommer asked what is for me the most significant question: What do these texts tell us about the land of Ahhiyawa? Well, I would answer, where else should he be!

One final question: is there any reason to believe that the Hittites would have, let alone must have, come into contact with Mycenaean civilization. Here we are dealing with what is really a problem in historical perspective.