the reign of her stepson Arnuwanda and part of the reign of her
younger stepson Mursili, before she wasfinally banished from the
palace.
We hear of other instances where royal marriages came to a bad
ending. That was the fate of a marriage-alliance between two of
Hatti’s vassal kingdoms, Amurru and Ugarit. In an effort to bind
more closely together these neighbouring kingdoms, a princess of
Amurru had been wed to Ammishtamru (II), the recently installed
king of Ugarit. The marriage ended in divorce – apparently
because the princess had been found guilty of some serious offence,
perhaps adultery. She had been sent back to Amurru in disgrace.
But after she’d gone, her ex-husband kept brooding about her
behaviour and concluded that she had got off too lightly.
He promptly wrote to his ex-brother-in-law, the king of Amurru,
demanding that his sister be returned to Ugarit for appropriate
punishment; if the demand was refused, the aggrieved ex-husband
declared he would go to war with Amurru to enforce it.
The Amurrite king was in a bit of a dilemma. He didn’t want
war, but then again if he sent his sister back to Ugarit, he knew she
would almost certainly suffer a horrible death. Tudhaliya IV was
the Hittite king at this time, and the last thing he wanted was a war
between two of his most important Syrian vassals. Compromise
was essential, and Tudhaliya came up with one that both sides
accepted. The Amurrite king was to send his sister back to Ugarit,
in exchange for whom he would receive from Ugarit’s king a one-
off payment of 1,400 shekels of gold. That would help soothe his
grief as he farewelled his sister on her way back to her death in the
land of her ex-husband.^8
WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE
Our texts provide us with very little evidence about women
engaging in professional activities in Hittite society. We learn of no
women scribes or bureaucrats (preserves almost certainly exclusive
to the male sex, and very largely to male members of particular
family groups). And though there were certainly priestesses who
made up the personnel of many religious establishments and were
WOMEN,MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY 155