"16 Kassites, Hittites, Mitanni, Hana"

In the 250 years after the Babylonian king Hammurabi died in 1750 BCE, the Near East changed a great deal. And by 1500 BCE, new peoples, speaking languages called Hittite, Hurrian, and Kassite, were playing important roles. There were big new imperial kingdoms Yet the whole region was also coming out of a mysterious dark age, about 100 years long, when it appears few records were kept. This dark age is fascinating, an era that leaves us with more questions than answers. What we know is that the lands that dominated the Near East at the end of this era inherited many traditions of the Old Babylonian period, Let's look at the Kassites first. They were immigrants who were mentioned periodically through five generations and 150 years of Hammurabi's successors. We can't be sure where the Kassites came from. Some scholars think they came from the mountains northeast of Mesopotamia, though that's debated. But a dynasty of Kassite kings took control in southern Mesopotamia and had a remarkably successful regime that lasted centuries. Still, the Kassites are puzzling. Their language is unlike any other Mesopotamian tongue, at least what we know of it. They didn't write down their language, so we can't tell much about it. Kassite scribes learned the cuneiform writing system in Mesopotamian schools and used it to write the local Akkadian and Sumerian languages, rather than their own Kassite. The only things that seem to have been written in their own language were personal names and God's names. A lot of their names end in the sound ash. The names of some of their kings show this. Abiratash, Bornoboriash, Gandash, Karahardash, Kashtiliash, and the list goes on. These names are distinctive and clearly not native to Then there were the Hittites. They lived in what is now Turkey, ancient Anatolia, and they were the inheritors of the Anatolian civilization that had existed for hundreds of years in that region. The Hittites' ancestors had traded with the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia for textiles and tin, providing silver in exchange. Hittite was one of the Indo-European family of languages, so it's related to English, German, French, Latin, and so on, as well as to some Indian languages like Sanskrit. Hittite was the earliest Indo-European language to be written down, but people must have been speaking related Indo-European languages for thousands of years before the beginning of writing. The Hittites adopted the cuneiform writing system late in around maybe 1650 BCE, and unlike the Kassites, they did use it to write their own language. A third new powerful group of people spoke Hurrian, which wasn't Semitic or Indo-European and wasn't related to Sumerian either. In other words, like Kassite, Hurrian wasn't related to the dominant languages of Mesopotamia, but it had been spoken in northern Syria for centuries. Hittites, Hurrians, and Kassites are all mentioned in texts from the later years of Hammurabi's dynasty, though they weren't playing major roles just yet. Hammurabi had built an empire that extended north, beyond what is now the border between Iraq and Syria. The Kingdom of Mari, in the eastern part of Syria, seems to have marked the northern limit of this empire, and Hammurabi's successors struggled to maintain it. While dealing with rebellions, Hammurabi's son lost a lot of land to the south of Babylon. But he was victorious against a Kassite incursion. When he chose the name for his ninth year on the throne, he commemorated this victory. Still, during the years leading up to 1595 BCE, the Babylonian Empire shrank considerably. After the end of Hammurabi's empire, we're confronted with something of a mystery. Mesopotamian scholars are dependent on cuneiform texts to provide us with evidence of the historical events of each era. If tablets aren't found in the ground, we simply can't know what was going on. And that's just the situation for the 16th century BCE. In Mesopotamia and in Syria, very, very few documents have been discovered that can be dated to the period from 1595 to 1500 BCE. It's a classic dark age. It's as though someone drew a curtain over almost a whole century. Without documents, we end up without much to say, and a lot of questions unanswered. By the end of this dark age, so many things had changed. It wasn't just that the Kassites were now ruling Mesopotamia. There were also two powerful new empires in the north. The Hittite Empire was growing in Anatolia, and an empire called Mitanni, dominated by the Hurrians, was expanding across northern Mesopotamia and Syria. By 1500 BCE, even the Egyptians had become imperialistic. Previously, they had largely kept to the Nile Valley, but now they started campaigning in the Levant. So how did everything change? I'd like to take you through these mysteries by looking at them through the perspective of a kingdom I know well, though you might not have ever heard of it. It was called Hanna, and it was one of the few kingdoms that seems to have managed to survive from the later years of Hammurabi's dynasty through the dark age and into the time of the new empires that followed. Hanna was centered on the city of Terka, on the Euphrates River in Syria. In the time of the Old Babylonian Kingdom of Mari, during the 18th century BCE, Terka was one of Mari's provincial capitals. But it had already been a major city for hundreds of years. Way back in the 23rd century BCE, which was the time of Sargon, ruler of the Akkadian Empire, Terka was a major city, with a huge city wall and an important temple to the god of this region, whose name was Dagan. I worked on the archaeological excavation at Terka when I was in graduate school, and when I picked a topic for my doctoral dissertation, it was an obvious choice to focus on this fascinating ancient Hanna kingdom that once thrived there. Right away, I was struck by a fascinating puzzle. Ten different kings were named in clay tablets from Hanna. They were dated using the year names of these kings. All ten of the kings were local, but no one was quite sure of the order of their reigns. I decided to try to give the whole kingdom a basic timeline by putting the kings in order. Figuring out the correct sequence was a form of detective work. I looked at lots of details. The language had changed gradually over time, and so had the style of the script. Things like the position of cylinder seals, the width of the margins, and the size and shape of the tablets. These were features that the scribes altered gradually. I found that by analyzing these clues and observing the gradual stages in the changes, I could put the tablets in order. It helped, too, that a couple of kings gave their fathers' names, and that several generations of the same private families showed up in some of the documents. We already knew that at least some of the kings ruled during the Old Babylonian period. A French scholar named Olivier Rouault realized that one of the Hanna kings was named in a Babylonian year name from the time of Hammurabi's son. So that Hanna king was obviously contemporary with the reign of Hammurabi's son. Almost all the historians who had studied the Hanna texts up through the late 1980s had believed the Hanna kingdom existed before Hammurabi's empire ended in 1595 BCE. That is, before the Dark Age began. But they thought it hadn't continued afterwards. A huge new clue appeared when a German scholar published a Hanna text that was in a private collection. It contained distinctive phrases from the Hanna region, and was a lot like one of the tablets I had put at the end of the sequence. Scholars had thought those phrases had been only used in the Old Babylonian period. But this new tablet was dated almost 500 years after Hammurabi's reign, and 350 years after the end of the Old Babylonian period. The newly published tablet didn't have a year name of a Hanna king. The date on the contract was in the reign of a known king of Assyria who ruled from 1244 to 1208 BCE. I remember getting goosebumps as I read the German scholar's article. Some of those Hanna tablets that I had been working on must have been much closer in time to this later text, and therefore they were written much later than I'd anticipated. There were close parallels between a They really couldn't have been written much more than 50 years earlier. So that meant that the Hanna kings I'd carefully put in order, based on these subtle changes in the way scribes wrote the tablets, they hadn't ruled within 150 years of one another, but rather across the span of 500 years. And that meant some of them might have ruled during the enigmatic In other words, the Kingdom of Hanna might help answer some of the big questions about this fascinating era. And I believe it has done that. Well, sort of. The biggest problem is that there are still only a few dozen cuneiform tablets from Hanna that we know of. We now have the names of 18 local kings and a pretty good sense of the order of their reigns. But for most of the only one or two documents have been found. Imagine if you were trying to understand all of American history since about 1500, and you had maybe 60 documents to go on. And most of these were records of people buying and selling houses. You'd be missing a lot. So we're missing a lot about Hanna. Perhaps somewhere in the ground in Syria, there are royal archives for Hanna, like the ones at Mari, with thousands of undiscovered cuneiform tablets. These could be treaties, diplomatic letters, administrative texts, or omens. And perhaps someday someone will find them, and we'll have answers to so many of our questions. But that hasn't happened yet. So for now, here's some of what we know about Hanna, and how it fits into the big picture. After Hammurabi's reign, and just to the north of his imperial border, some local kings ruled Hanna, which was about the same size as Mari's old kingdom, and included much of the same territory. And these kings ruled from Terka, their capital. We know from contracts and letters found in the houses that life in Terka at this time was a lot like life in Hammurabi's empire. People bought and sold houses and fields. They lived near their relatives. They farmed and took out loans. They worshipped gods in local shrines. And during the reign of Hammurabi's son, Samsu-Iluna, they seemed to have been attacked by the Babylonian forces. We only know this because Samsu-Iluna wrote about it. There's no evidence for the attack in Terka itself. Maybe his victory was short-lived. Afterwards, a king with a foreign name took the throne at Terka. He was named Kashtilyashu. This is definitely a Kassite name. But it was about 200 years after this that the Kassites took control of Babylon. So on this basis, lots of historians have speculated that Terka was home to a Kassite kingdom ruled by Kashtilyashu, while Hammurabi's successors were still ruling in Babylon. But those historians must be wrong. I say this because among all the names in the Hanna contracts that survived from his time, Kashtilyashu had the only Kassite name. Everyone else had Amorite and Akkadian names. If this had been a Kassite kingdom, you'd expect at least some other Kassite people to have lived there besides the king. My guess is that he was a local king who admired the Kassites and took the name of one of their war leaders. After all, the Kassites had recently been giving trouble to the king of Babylon, and the people of Hanna probably supported them, since they also fought against Babylon. By 1650 BCE, just a few decades after the reign of Kashtilyashu, there was a new threat on the horizon. Maybe the people of Hanna were aware of it. Traveling north, up the Euphrates from Terka, you'd come to the kingdom of Yamhad, with its Quite suddenly, it seems, around 1630 BCE, Aleppo was attacked from the north by a Hittite king and his troops. Yamhad was able to repulse the attacks, but the people there would no doubt have worried, would the Hittites come back? The Hittites seemed not to have been a concern to the people of Mesopotamia before, but this Hittite king was more aggressive than previous kings had been. He'd already brought a lot of the Anatolian plateau under his control, and now he was eyeing the rich Mesopotamian kingdoms. The next Hittite king tried again to conquer Aleppo and, unlike his father, he was successful. A later inscription described it this way, he went to the city of Aleppo, destroyed Aleppo, and brought Aleppo's deportees and its goods to This must have been a terrifying time for the Mesopotamians and the Syrians. They were familiar with one another's kingdoms. They fought one another from time to time, but they understood the rules of combat and the reasons for the battles. They also had diplomatic relationships and treaties. But what to make of the Hittites? They weren't part of the diplomatic system. Hana wasn't that far away from Yamhad, so the people there almost certainly had heard about the Hittite attacks on Aleppo. And the next move by the Hittites changed Near Eastern history. The same king who destroyed Aleppo now launched an offensive right down the Euphrates. Unfortunately, we don't know almost any of the details. No one at the time wrote anything about it, though it was remembered later. It was the attack that brought an end to Hammurabi's dynasty. A later Hittite royal inscription describes the episode in just two sentences. Now, later, he, the Hittite king, went to Babylon and fought the Hurrian troops. Babylon's deportees and its goods he kept in Hattusa. That's the Hittite capital again. The last of Hammurabi's successors, Samsu-Ditana, disappears from history at this point. We also know that the Hittites stole the statue of the Babylonian city god Marduk and the statue of the god's wife Tsarpanitum from their glorious temples and took them away, probably also to Hattusa. What the Hittite king didn't do was to set up a government in the kingdom of Babylon. He raided the city, presumably destroyed lots of buildings, and went back home, taking the He left a power vacuum behind. Now, we know that the Kassites ended up filling this power vacuum. But how did they do so? Historians have been wondering about this for decades. Another clue about this era comes from a fascinating Kassite text. Suzanne Paulus, who's a historian at the University of Chicago, published it in 2014. In this document, other groups of peoples, not the Hittites, are credited with causing problems for Samsu-Ditana, the last king of the Babylonian dynasty. It suggests that the people of Hanna, Hinneans, along with the Kassites and another group of people called the Amorites, staged an uprising that might well have taken place before the Hittite attack. The inscription When, at the time of Samsu-Ditana, the borders of Sumer and Akkad were altered by the belligerence of the Amorites, the uprising of the Hinneans, and the army of the Kassites, the design of the land had been obliterated and its borders unmade. Perhaps Babylon was severely weakened from these rebellions before the Hittites were even involved. If so, the Kassites might already have been positioned to take power when the Hittites retreated back to their homeland. In any event, it's fairly clear from this inscription that the kingdom of Hanna was not on Babylon's side and might have helped the Hittites in their campaign. So, with the conquest of Babylon in 1595 BCE, we enter the Dark Age that I've been talking about. It's not until around 1450, 150 years later, that cuneiform documents started being written again in any significant numbers. And by then, the Kassite dynasty had been ruling central Mesopotamia for ages. Around the same time, we get documents from the new Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni in the north. So what happened? Well, there's one inscription that supposedly tells us something about what was going on right towards the beginning of the Kassite dynasty during the Dark Age. The inscription is credited to a king named Agum, and that was the name of an early Kassite king. We know this because the later kings kept lists of their ancestors, and Agum was on the list. The problem with this inscription is that it's known from a much, much later copy, and some scholars think that was a fake made by a later king to justify his control of certain lands. But it could also be a genuine copy of an inscription from the time of Agum. And for several reasons, I'm inclined to believe that. There are some details in the inscription that later scribes almost certainly wouldn't have known about. Anyway, what this Kassite king, Agum, celebrates in his inscription is the fact that he has brought about the return of the statues of the god Marduk and his divine wife to Babylon. This would have been a huge achievement and a way to convince the Babylonians to view him as a true successor to the dynasty of Hammurabi. When the statues were away in the land of the Hittites, the Babylonians would have felt that their city was missing its gods. A king who could bring them back must have had the gods' support. Meanwhile, the Hittites would have been respectful to the Babylonian statues while they had them. Like the Mesopotamians, the Hittites thought the gods lived inside their statues, and they definitely would have believed in the power of Marduk. We know that when the Hittites captured divine statues, they kept them as hostages in temples. But they also kept up their care and You didn't want to annoy a foreign god, so I'm sure they did the same for Marduk and his wife Tzapanitum. The Hittites wouldn't have damaged the statues, and the Babylonians would have been desperate to get them back. What the Kassite king Agum of Babylon says he did was to send an ambassador to negotiate for the return of the statues. His negotiations were successful, and arrangements were made for the statues to be returned. Here's a curious thing, though. He didn't say that this embassy went to the Hittite capital. What he says is, and I quote, I sent to a far-off land, to the land of the Hanaians, and Marduk and Tzapanitum did they conduct to me. So the statues came back not from the land of the Hittites, but from the land of Unfortunately, we don't know which of the Hanai kings was involved in these negotiations. But the inscription seems to confirm the idea that Hanai continued to thrive during the Dark Age, since Agum lived during that time. One striking thing about this episode is that the Kassite king Agum used long-distance diplomacy to get the statues back, and he probably initially had This is true even if, as he said, the statues ended up coming back from Hana, which was part way between the Hittite capital and Babylon. The Hittites hadn't been part of the diplomatic network up to this point, but afterward they took to diplomacy in a big way. The Hittites adopted all the diplomatic techniques that the Mesopotamians and Syrians had developed over hundreds of years. They used messengers, treaties, diplomatic letters, gifts, dynastic marriages, the whole thing. Maybe this interaction between the Hittites, the Kassite king Agum, and the Hana king, whoever he was at the time, was the impetus that brought the Hittites into the Near Eastern diplomatic world. Their negotiation over the divine statues was a precursor to the next great era, which would come to be dominated by diplomacy rather than warfare, but that was still decades off in the future. Still hidden in the darkness of the Dark Age are the beginnings of another great new power, the kingdom of Mitanni. Mitanni dominated northern Mesopotamia for about 150 years, starting around 1500 BCE. It had a largely Hurrian-speaking population. By the end of the Dark Age, Mitanni was a powerful empire, ruling an area that eventually stretched about 500 miles from east to west, from the eastern edge of northern Iraq across much of Syria to what is now southeast Turkey. We don't know how it began. One problem in the study of Mitanni is that its capital city hasn't been excavated yet, though scholars are sure where it was located. We have only a few documents that name the Mitannian kings, and as in the case of Hana, the sequence and dates of the kings aren't understood properly yet. It's just possible that Hana will again help with this puzzle. A handful of contracts found in Terka include references to kings who have similar names to the early kings of Mitanni. Does this mean that these are the earliest known Mitannian texts? Possibly not. The documents don't mention the land of Mitanni. The land around the city of Terka seems still to have been called Hana. But perhaps the dynasty that later ruled Mitanni had its roots in the region around Terka. We'll have to wait to see, hoping that more documents emerge to help us understand. Still, it's clear that by 1500 BCE, the kings of Mitanni and their troops were aggressively fighting in both the east and west. Around this time, a Mitannian king caused problems for a minor western king named Idrimi. He ruled from Aleppo around the end of the Dark Age, and he was forced into exile when the city was attacked. We know about Idrimi's life because he had his autobiography carved on his statue. Unfortunately, it doesn't say who attacked his city. While he was in his lonely exile, he consulted omens and oracles so that he could pick just the right moment to return. When the time was right, Idrimi gathered his allies and made treaties with them. They were united in their opposition to the king of Mitanni. Together, they launched a long campaign, but in the end it was unsuccessful. Idrimi ended up as a vassal of the Mitanni king and swore an oath to support him. This was acceptable, he wrote, because his ancestors had been vassals to previous Hurrian kings. Using the standard term for a vassal, he wrote that he was now a son of the king of Mitanni. Idrimi was given control of a small kingdom and was allowed to continue to fight and raid, but now he was fighting for the Mitannian king rather than against him. This story might have been typical of the time of the expansion in Mitanni. Former enemies of the empire were willing to become vassals because they were allowed to raid and loot in the areas where they fought and to get rich. Before this time, the area that Idrimi ruled and raided had been controlled by the Hittites. The Hittites were now in a weak position and had lost quite a bit of land to Mitanni, though they would soon gain strength again, soon enough. But Mitanni had another enemy as well, one that seemed to come out of nowhere. In 1504 BCE, according to records from Egypt, Egyptian troops charged into Mitanni, fighting all the way to the Euphrates. Egyptian forces had never made it this far north before. So by 1500 BCE, there were four major powers in the Near East, the Hittites, Egyptians, Mitannians, and Kassite Babylonians, and three of them had imperialistic aims. Only the Kassites seemed to have been uninterested in expanding their kingdom. Worse yet, the Hittites, Mitannians, and Egyptians all wanted to control the same coastal area of western Syria. They all had strong armies and powerful kings. So where was Hanna in all of this? We don't know yet. It might have been a vassal state of Mitanni or perhaps a vassal of Babylon, or maybe it was hanging on as an independent power. Hanna had survived through the Dark Age, but it never again seems to have played an important role in international affairs. I hope that at some point more documents from Hanna will be found and will help clarify this fascinating and puzzling era.