recessed surfacefilled with wax. Anything written on them could
simply be erased and the tablets used again once a particular record
had reached its use-by date.
Records intended to last for longer periods, or indefinitely, were
inscribed on clay tablets. But since the tablets were unbaked, with
very few exceptions in the Near Eastern world, their contents needed
to be copied repeatedly on fresh tablets before the older ones
crumbled away. Important documents were individually labelled,
classified and stored by category on wooden shelves in the archive
rooms of the temples and palaces. All these were by nature official
documents, produced by the palace and temple bureaucracies. Very
few archives of private individuals have come to light anywhere in
the Hittite world; the most notable have been found in houses of
prominent merchants and other citizens of Ugarit, capital of one of
the Hittites’subject-states in northwestern Syria.
Yet none of the archives, official or private, would have
survived for long after the fall of the Hittite kingdom were they
not accidentally baked during the conflagrations which destroyed
part of the capital and other centres of the Hittite world. When
Figure 2.1 Scribes at work.
HOW DO THE HITTITES TELL US ABOUT THEMSELVES? 19