with cartloads of treasure taken from his victims, provided the
king’s subjects with tangible evidence of his prowess as a great
warrior. This was an essential attribute of kingship. Interestingly,
though the king’s military campaigns and triumphs were recorded
in great detail in the texts, relief sculptures of the king as a warrior
are rare. And in striking contrast to Egyptian iconography and
Assyrian reliefs of a later age, surviving Hittite reliefs never portray
the king in battle. In the few cases where he is depicted as a warrior,
he is kitted out for battle in armour and with weapons, but in a
static position, sometimes in isolation and sometimes in the
presence of a god. War iconography plays little part in Hittite royal
propaganda.
The king’s other chief responsibility was to oversee the
administration of justice in his land. We can probably see a visual
symbol of this in the curved staff, often referred to by the Latin
wordlituus(from the similarly shaped staff carried by Roman
augurs), which the king sometimes holds in relief carvings where he
is depicted as a priest. The staff has been interpreted as a stylised
shepherd’s crook. In a broad sense, it might have symbolised the
king’s role as shepherd of his people, particularly as guardian of
those most in need of his protection. The symbol is used by the
Babylonian king Hammurabi in his Laws, where he portrays
himself as the arbiter of justice in his land, and particularly as the
protector of the weakest and most vulnerable of his subjects. In a
Hittite context too the‘shepherd’s crook’may reflect the king’s role
as the protector of his people in his role as Chief Justice. But unlike
Hammurabi and other Mesopotamian rulers, Hittite kings never
include the epithet‘Shepherd’ among their titles; in a Hittite
context, only the Sun God is called‘the Shepherd of Mankind’.
Many of the king’s judicial responsibilities could be and were
delegated to local officials within his administration, including
regional governors whose duties required them to act as circuit
judges, touring their provinces to preside over local assizes where
various civil and criminal cases were to be tried. But all the king’s
subjects had the right of appeal to His Majesty himself against a
verdict handed down to them at a lower court. Thus a priest in the
city of Emar on the Euphrates who was involved in a dispute with a
96 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA