the main campaign army against his Arzawan enemy. He was
joined by his brother Sharri-Kushuh with a contingent from Syria.
It took two years for Mursili to complete his Arzawan mission.
But by the end of that time, Uhhaziti had abandoned his capital and
fled to an offshore haven before the Hittite advance, his son who
had taken over command of his army was resoundingly defeated in
battle, and Mursili marched in triumph into his enemy’s land.
Ahhiyawa seems to have played no part at all in these operations,
beyond perhaps providing asylum for Uhhaziti. Moral rather than
military support may have been all it intended to offer anyhow to
those who claimed alliance with it, especially with the arrival of a
large Hittite army in the region.
Before returning to Hattusa, Mursili enforced the submission of
other rebel states in the region, reducing them, or reducing them
once more, to vassal status and subsequently drawing up treaties
with their rulers. These treaties were an important element in the
maintenance of Hittite authority over its vast empire. But we
should note here that Mursili’s main enemy, the ruler of‘Arzawa
Proper’, does notfigure in any of the treaty arrangements. In fact,
it’s very likely that Mursili solved this particular‘Arzawa problem’,
by totally eliminating the kingdom–with a mass evacuation of its
population back to the homeland (the king claims in his Annals
that he deported 65,000 or 66,000 of the kingdom’s inhabitants)–
and probably by assigning its territory to the neighbouring state
called Mira. Mira was also one of the Arzawa lands, and had
appparently remained loyal to its Hittite allegiance when so many
other states in the region had rebelled against it.
Deportation of the populations of conquered cities and
kingdoms became a regular practice of Hittite kings, especially
Suppiluliuma and Mursili in the wake of their conquests. The
numbers of deportees varied from a few hundred in some cases to
thousands in others –perhaps tens of thousands in the case of
‘Arzawa Proper’(though the number may be exaggerated). These
mass people-movements served two purposes: they reduced
substantially the strength of a kingdom’s human resources and
thus reduced the likelihood of further uprisings by that kingdom, at
least in the foreseeable future; and, very importantly, they helped
110 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA