the buildings which housed the tablet-archives were destroyed by
fire, the shelves on which the tablets were stored disintegrated and
their contents were shattered and scattered on thefloors. In the
process, they were often baked and have thus survived to the
present day. Even so, the vast majority of written records from
the Hittite capital and from most other centres of the kingdom are
lost to us for all time.
And we have almost zero chance of everfinding the originals of
some of the most noteworthy documents of the Hittite world, like
the famous treaty between the pharaoh Ramesses II and his Hittite
counterpart Hattusili III. We know from copies of this treaty that it
was originally inscribed on tablets of silver. Tablets made of gold
and bronze, and perhaps also iron, a very precious metal in the
Bronze Age, were also used for inscribing important documents.
But all such tablets have disappeared–with one exception. Quite
by chance, during excavations in 1986 of a ramp just outside one of
Hattusa’s gates (the‘Sphinx Gate’), an intact bronze tablet was
discovered, fully preserved and in excellent condition. It records a
treaty between a Hittite king, Tudhaliya IV, and one of his most
important subject-rulers, a member of the Hittite royal family
called Kurunta. As we shall see (Chapter 23),it contains some very
significant historical information. We can hardly hope to be as
lucky again. But who knows?
WHAT DO THEHITTITES TELL US ABOUT THEMSELVES?
So we have now come to the point where we can ask two basic
questions: What information do the surviving tablets contain?
How can we use this information to reconstruct a picture of the
history and civilisation of the Hittite world? Fragmentary though
the tablets often are, they are very wide-ranging in the topics they
cover. Their contents include (a) sets of royal‘Annals’, narrative
accounts of a king’s military achievements; (b) treaties drawn up
between kings and their foreign peers and subject-rulers; (c) letters
exchanged between kings (and sometimes other members of their
families), foreign peers, subject-rulers and high officials; (d) royal
edicts or proclamations in which a king makes pronouncements on
20 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA