The most interesting feature of this clause is itsinitialinclusion of
the Ahhiyawan king amongst Tudhaliya’s peers, and then the
erasureof his name, by having a line drawn through it while the
treaty was still in draft form and the clay on which it was written
still damp and soft. This suggests to me that the scribe who had
drafted the treaty had simply copied the list of Great Kings from an
earlier, perhaps quite recent document, but that the Ahhiyawan
had suddenly lost this status; he therefore no longer warranted the
designation‘Great King’, at least in a Near Eastern context. If he
had lost control over Milawata, or withdrawn his sovereignty from
it, for whatever reason, that might explain his elimination from the
list. Perhaps Tudhaliya himself pointed out to the scribe when the
draft was read to him that the Ahhiyawan should no longer be
included among the Great Kings, and the reference to him was
crossed out. It would have been omitted entirely from thefinal
version.
THEASSYRIAN MENACE
Fear of Assyrian aggression against his eastern subject-territories
remained one of Tudhaliya’s chief concerns throughout his reign.
When a new king Tukulti-Ninurta occupied the Assyrian throne
c.1233, there were some prospects of a lasting peace being
established between the two kingdoms. Initially, the kings wrote to
each other in cordial terms. But Tudhaliya became increasingly
concerned about repeated Assyrian raids on Hittite border
territory, despite his Royal Brother’s denial of these, and about
Tukulti-Ninurta’s aggressive, overtly expansionist campaigns in
northern Mesopotamia against a number of Hurrian states in the
region. If these states fell to him, Tudhaliya reasoned, the Assyrian
might well turn his attention westwards to the lands across the
Euphrates, to Hittite subject-territory. Better to forestall this by
attacking the Assyrianfirst.
No longer accepting Tukulti-Ninurta’s assurance of peaceful
intentions towards Hatti, Tudhaliya launched a pre-emptive strike
against him in what is commonly called the battle of Nihriya,
probably in the region north or northeast of modern Diyarbakır.
THE EMPIRE’S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL 237