Mursili has left us a damning account of her abuse of power.
He speaks of her domineering behaviour in the royal palace and
beyond it, her extravagance, her habit of stripping the palace of its
treasures to lavish on her favourites, and her introduction of
undesirable foreign customs into the land. His father apparently did
nothing to rein her in, probably because of his preoccupation with
campaigns abroad, and after his death she continued all her
destructive, disruptive practices: ‘As she governed the house of
the king and the Land of Hatti in the lifetime of my father, likewise in
the lifetime of my brother she governed them’, Mursili complains. But
evenafter his own accession, he did little to curb her behaviour–until
his own beloved wife fell gravely ill and died. That was thefinal straw.
Holding his stepmother directly responsible for her death (and she
may indeed have seen her stepson’s wife as a threat to her dominance
of the royal household), he put her on trial for murder. She was found
guilty and banished from the palace.^4 (Hittite kings were extremely
reluctant to punish errant members of their family with more than
banishment, even those who were guilty of the most serious crimes.)
But she was not the last of the Hittite royal consorts to prove a
disruptive influence in the kingdom, or at least within the royal
court. Indeed not long after her fall from grace, another Hittite
queen called Tanuhepa (Danuhepa) fell foul of the king. She may
have been a later wife of Mursili, or else the wife of his son and
successor Muwattalli. In any case, she became embroiled in a
dispute with Muwattalli, apparently over acts of profanation which
she had committed, and was placed on trial by the king. Like the
Babylonian Tawananna, she was found guilty and sent into exile.
THE FORMIDABLEPUDUHEPA
But the most powerful and most famous Hittite queen of all was the
wife of Mursili’s son and third successor Hattusili III. Her name was
Puduhepa. As we’ve noted in the previous chapter, she was the
daughter of a Hurrian priest in Kizzuwatna, and became the wife of
Hattusili when he was returning home from Syria. The Hittite throne
was still at that time occupied by Muwattalli, and the succession
passed from him to his son Urhi-Teshub. But as we’ve seen, Urhi-
200 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA