quickly as possible, and grazing lands stocked with sheep and cattle,
in order to keep the population alive while the city was in the
process of becoming fully functional.
All in all, there were good reasons why Hattusa, a city which was
highly vulnerable to the forces of nature and to attacks by its
enemies, and which lay on the very fringe of the lands it came to
rule, should never have become the royal capital. But the fact was
that it did. And for a time, the kingdom over which it held sway
became the greatest political and military power in the Near
Eastern world.
THEHITTITES ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE
Hattusili took a major step towards elevating Hatti to Great
Kingdom status by leading a number of campaigns across the
Taurus range into Syria. Two of these are recorded in what survives
of the king’s Annals, which werefirst inscribed on or very close to a
now lost golden statue.^7 The logistics alone of transporting a large
army, from north-central Anatolia southeastwards across the
Taurus into Syria must have been complex and daunting. (We’ll
talk about campaign logistics inChapter 18.)And once his army
had arrived in Syria, the military operations on which he embarked
entailed enormous risks. For all the cities he attacked were subjects
or allies of the powerful kingdom of Yamhad, the first Great
Kingdom of Syria. (You mightn’t have heard of Yamhad before, but
you’ll certainly know the name of its royal capital Aleppo.) An
attack on any of Yamhad’s subjects or allies was in effect an attack
on Yamhad itself. Almost inevitably, such action would bring upon
the invader the Great Kingdom’s full military might.
But Hattusili pressed on regardless. Well aware that he was
lighting aflame that could engulf himself and his entire army if the
wind blew the wrong way, he besieged, sacked and destroyed one of
Aleppo’s most important allies, the city of Alalah (modern Tell
Atchana) on the northern bend of the Orontes river, and then went
on to ravage several more of Yamhad’s protégés. Yet he got away
with it! For reasons unknown to us, the king of Yamhad failed to
take any retaliatory action (unless such action was recorded in a
THE DAWN OF THE HITTITE ERA 29