We know this from letters exchanged between Puduhepa and
Ramesses. Some of the exchanges were acrimonious, with the pharaoh
rebuking Puduhepa for undue delays in sending him his princess.
Puduhepa in return accused the pharaoh of being mercenary: he was
interested only in the gifts he’d receive from Hattusa as part of the
marriage-settlement.^6 (At least that is what she originally wrote. But
theversionwehaveofherletterisonlyadraft,andshemaywellhave
toned down her language in the letter’sfinal version.)
But all arrangements werefinally completed, and the princess
despatched to Egypt where Ramesses received her with all due
pomp and ceremony. Indeed, he wrote in rapturous terms about
her to her parents.^7 Unfortunately, the royal couple did not live
happily ever after. Besotted though he may have been with his
Hittite bride at the outset, Ramesses did not make her his chief wife,
as Hattusili and Puduhepa had expected from the marriage-
settlement. And to Hattusili’s great disappointment the union
produced no heirs. In a thinly veiled criticism of Ramesses’
manhood (or lack of it), Hattusili complained of the union’s failure
to bear fruit, suggesting that the pharaoh was not up to the job.
Quite unfairly! The pharaoh’s loins proved extremely fruitful on
many other occasions, as evidenced by the well over 100 offspring
sired by them, at times when they weren’t girt for battle. But as far
as we can tell, nary a one of them had a Hittite mother. Indeed, it
seems that the Hittite princess later disappeared into obscurity,
consigned to a royal harem in the Faiyum Oasis west of the Nile.
There is no trace of her existence when some years later a second
daughter of Hattusili was sent to Egypt to wed the pharaoh.
Let’s spare a thought for these royal women. In a sense, they
were little better than glorified sex slaves, used as mere tools to
advance the affairs of state, ending up, after a secluded and
privileged life in their father’s court, in totally alien locations,
knowing nothing of the local languages or customs, and probably
relegated to a harem-like existence where obscurity was probably
the least cruel of the treatments to which they were subjected.
There were of course obvious exceptions to all this, most notably
Suppiluliuma’s Babylonian queen who dominated and disrupted
the royal household through the last years of her husband’s reign,
154 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA