acceptance as a Great King by your peers, and once they accepted
you, they addressed you as their Royal Brother.
But let’s be clear that what I’ve referred to as a club was in no
sense a formal organisation, with written rules and regulations.
Your‘membership’was defined purely in terms of the recognition
accorded to you by other‘members’, by the diplomatic missions
they sent to your kingdom, and you to theirs, by the value of the
gifts included in a number of these missions, by their references to
you as a Great King and Royal Brother, by treaties they drew up
with you, and sometimes by marriage-alliances contracted with
your family. And of course recognition by foreign peers did much
to enhance your status among your own subjects. This was
certainly the case with Hattusili, who sought from Ramesses–and
was granted–acknowledgement as the legitimate Great King of
Hatti. This we learn from their correspondence. Such acknowl-
edgement was particularly important for a man who had usurped
his kingdom’s throne and at least initially received snubs from the
other two Great Kings, the rulers of Assyria and Babylon.
THEAMARNA LETTERS
We learn more about the diplomatic interactions between the
Royal Brothers by going back almost a century before the reigns of
Hattusili and Ramesses – to the time when one of the most
controversial of all pharaohs, Akhenaten (formerly called Amenho-
tep IV), was overlord of Egypt and its subject-territories. Akhenaten
built himself a new royal capital on the east bank of the Nile in
middle Egypt, and called it Akhetaten,‘Horizon Aten’, on the site
now called el-Amarna. Aten was the Sun God, and Akhenaten
devoted himself exclusively to his worship, at the expense of Egypt’s
traditional gods. This allegedly led him to neglect the affairs of his
kingdom, including his responsibilities to maintain Egypt’s status as
an international power. But many scholars now believe that this
negative image of the so-called‘heretic pharaoh’is considerably
overstated, due largely to the hostility towards him of the
conservative elements among his subjects, especially the traditional
priesthood of the land.
228 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA