The Trojans and Their Neighbours by Bryce Trevor;

Author:Bryce, Trevor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

5

TROY’S ROLE AND STATUS IN THE NEAR EASTERN WORLD

RELATIONS WITH THE NEIGHBOURS

This tablet which I have made for you, Alaksandu, must be read out to you three times every year, and you, Alaksandu, must know it (thoroughly).

Early in the thirteenth century, the Hittite Great King Muwattalli drew up a treaty with a man called Alaksandu, ruler of the kingdom of Wilusa. We have identified Wilusa with Ilios/Troy. On the understanding that this identification still lacks firm proof, we will use it as our starting point for investigating Troy’s role in the history of the Late Bronze Age Near East and its relations with its Near Eastern contemporaries.1 The treaty makes clear that Wilusa was a vassal state of the Hittite empire, and one of four western Anatolian kingdoms called the Arzawa Lands.2 The other three were Mira-Kuwaliya, the Seha River Land and, further to the east, the kingdom of Hapalla. A fifth Arzawan state, Arzawa ‘Minor’, had probably been eliminated some three decades earlier by Muwattalli’s father Mursili.3

As was the case with its fellow Arzawan states, Wilusa’s relations with Hatti fluctuated markedly throughout the Late Bronze Age. Unfortunately, its fragmentary history is known to us only from information contained in Hittite texts. Wilusa itself has left no written records, at least none that have so far come to light. What we know about it is presented to us almost entirely from a Hittite perspective. It first appears, in the form Wilusiya, as the penultimate member in a list of twenty-two countries that had formed an anti-Hittite alliance in the reign of the Hittite king Tudhaliya I/II4 early in the fourteenth century. From the name Assuwa, apparently a collective term embracing all these countries, the alliance is often referred to as the Assuwan Confederacy. Tudhaliya had earlier conducted a campaign to the west against a coalition of hostile states, which included several of the Arzawa Lands–Arzawa Minor, the Seha River Land and Hapalla–and was now obliged for a second time to deal with a coalition of anti-Hittite forces. On both occasions he was victorious, though the western states continued to threaten the security of the Hittite world.

Already in the reign of the first Hittite king for whom we have written records, Hattusili I (c.1650–1620), we hear of a Hittite campaign against Arzawan territory. Left unchecked, the military alliances which the western states were prone to form could eventually pose a serious threat to the security of the Hittite homeland itself, as was dramatically demonstrated in the dark days of Tudhaliya III’s reign in the first half of the fourteenth century, when enemy forces from Arzawa invaded and occupied large portions of Hittite territory up to the boundaries of the Halys (Hittite Marassantiya) River.5 What made the danger all the greater was the intrusion of a Mycenaean kingdom into western Anatolia and its readiness to support anti-Hittite insurrectionist activity there. Like it or not, the Hittites had to establish some form of permanent authority in the west, primarily for reasons of their own security.

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