Warriors of Anatolia by Trevor Bryce;

Author:Trevor Bryce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hittites, Late Bronze Age, Ancient Near East, Anatolia
ISBN: 9781786725288
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

NO SEX PLEASE,

WE’RE HITTITE

This title should not of course be taken too literally. If it were strictly true, the Hittite kingdom would never have got going, let alone lasted 500 years. But a number of sexual practices were strictly forbidden in the Hittite world, and others permitted only with clear conditions attached. Violations met with severe punishment.

THE HORROR OF INCEST

Incest was regarded with particular abhorrence, at least by Hatti’s royal authorities. King Suppiluliuma I makes this perfectly clear in his treaty with one of his vassal rulers. Provoked by reports of hanky-panky between closely related family members in the vassal state, he bans the practice and issues a grim warning:

For Hatti it is an important custom that a brother does not have sex with his sister or female cousin. It is not permitted. Whoever commits such an act is put to death. But your land is barbaric, for there a man regularly has sex with his sister or cousin. And if on occasion a sister of your wife, or the wife of a brother, or a female cousin comes to you, give her something to eat or drink. Both of you eat, drink, and make merry! But you must not desire to have sex with her. It is not permitted, and people are put to death as a result of that act.1

The fact that this is the only known occasion when a Hittite king interferes in the customs and domestic practices of one of his vassal states highlights the strong stand Hittite authorities took against incest, wherever in Hatti’s territories it occurred.

A large number of clauses in the Hittite Laws are devoted to sexual offences of this and other kinds. Bans on sex between family members extended from those mentioned above to sexual relations between mother and son, father and daughter, father and son, stepmother and son (unless the son’s father is deceased), son-in-law and mother-in-law. But there were exceptions. The law allowed a man to sleep with slave women who were sisters, and with their mother as well, without committing an offence. It also condoned sex between in-laws – in cases where the husband or wife of one of them had predeceased their spouse. Indeed it positively encouraged, if not actually mandated, what appears to be marriage between a widow and a male member of her husband’s family. Thus:

If a man has a wife, and the man dies, his brother shall take his widow as wife. (If the brother dies), his father shall take her. When afterwards his father dies, his (i.e. the father’s) brother shall take the woman whom he had.2

This recalls the biblically attested custom of levirate marriage (from the Latin levir, ‘brother-in-law’). Deuteronomy 25:5–6 tells us that if brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family but become the wife of another of the brothers. The first son of the new union must bear the name of the first husband ‘so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel’.

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