been correctly interpreted. Since libations were made only to gods,
this would imply that Tudhaliya now presented himself to his
people as a living god. The inscription is carved on stone blocks on
a site, probably a sanctuary, now called Emirgazi. It is located in
southern Anatolia on the Konya plain.^2
So what do we make of all this? Why the appearance of these
monuments, which dot the landscape of the Hittite realm in the last
century of its history, and not before? Why the (suggested)
assumption of divinity by a living king towards the end of this
century? And there is something else I haven’t yet talked about–
the inscriptions which often accompany these monuments.
THE HIEROGLYPHIC INSCRIPTIONS
Let’s deal with the inscriptions first. We should begin our
discussion of these by going back to the nineteenth-century
rediscoverers of the Hittites. You’ll recall that Charles Texier and
other explorers of the age found a mysterious hieroglyphic script
carved on blocks of stone and cliff-faces at various sites in
Anatolia and Syria. Later in the century, Archibald Henry Sayce
concluded that the inscriptions written in this script represented
the language of the people of a great empire–the Hittite empire.
He believed that this empire was centred in Syria but spread to the
westernmost parts of Anatolia. Now we’ve since established that
what was actually the Hittite (strictly Nesite) language was written
in a cuneiform script on clay tablets stored in the Hittite capital
Hattusa and other administrative centres of the kingdom. But
while Hittite/Nesite was the predominant language of the tablets,
we’ve noted that a number of other languages written in the
cuneiform script appear on the tablets as well. These include
passages in Luwian, spoken by another of the Indo-European
groups who settled in Anatolia.
But cuneiform was not the only script used for writing the
Luwian language. In fact, Luwian written in a hieroglyphic script
was the language used on the monuments scattered through
Anatolia and Syria. In other words, the Hittite royal dynasty used
not the Hittite language on the inscriptions of their public
INTERMEDIARIES OF THE GODS:THE GREAT KINGS OF HATTI 103