CHAPTER 11

Intermediaries of

the Gods: The Great

Kings of Hatti

B

efore we see how Hittite history unfolded after
Suppiluliuma’s death, let’s focus for a while on the Great
Kings of Hatti as a group. They were the most powerful
men in the Hittite world, and indeed in the whole of the Near
Eastern world for much of the last half of the Late Bronze Age. I’ve
already spoken of the kings’role as the military leaders of their
people and the warrior culture they embodied, and I’ll have more
to say about this below. But equally important were the kings’
other major roles and responsibilities. What were these? And who
ensured they were carried out?
First, let’s briefly recapitulate something we talked about earlier.
One of the remarkable features of the Hittite kingdom is that
through the 500 years of its existence, supreme power in the land was
exercised, almost without interruption, by a single royal dynasty,
founded some time in the early seventeenth century. Even after the
collapse of the kingdom in the early twelfth century, members of this
dynasty continued to hold sway in the Euphrates region, notably at
Carchemish, for at least several more generations. What makes the
dynasty’s longevity all the more remarkable is that it came from a
minority ethnic group within the kingdom, speakers of the Indo-
European language called Nesite. Indo-European speakers had been
in Anatolia for many generations, probably many centuries before