there are some very problematic aspects of it. Firstly, Hattusili may
have ruled for 30 or more years. If so, then taken at face value, his
Annals cover only a small chunk of his reign, perhaps an early part
of it. But we must remember that the surviving version of the
Annals is not the original one, just the last in a line of copies made
by successive generations of scribes. This one is probably to be
dated to the thirteenth century, three or four centuries after the
original was composed.
So how closely does thisfinal version represent theoriginalone?
Let me make a suggestion. We know that early in the fourteenth
century the Hittite kingdom was almost wiped out by enemy forces
and Hattusa itself was razed to the ground. (I’ll come to this.) Many
of the city’s existing records must have been lost during the
disaster. But perhaps through being accidentally baked during the
fires which destroyed the tablet-archive rooms, some tablets
survived, either intact, or in fragments. This is exactly the situation
we have today with the retrieval of many accidentally baked tablets
and tablet-fragments. I suggest that fragmentary chunks of clay
copies of the Annals did survive, even if the greater part of the
document was lost. From these chunks, the later scribes tried to
piece together a sequence of events recorded in the Annals in their
efforts to recreate the document. What they did was to make a
reasonably coherent compilation of the surviving pieces, compres-
sing the episodes these pieces recorded into a period offive years.
But in so doing, they lumped together events that may in fact have
taken place many years apart–if Hattusili did have a long reign.
He may well have conducted a number of campaigns into Syria
throughout this reign. But one thing clear is that he never
succeeded in capturing what must have been his prime objective in
Syria– the city of Aleppo, capital of the kingdom of Yamhad.
By the end of his reign, Aleppo was still intact.
Hattusili’s military achievements in Syria and other lands were
impressive, even if from our perspective his campaigns in foreign
regions look like sheer naked adventurism, with few lasting
benefits, political, strategic, or material, for his kingdom. There was
absolutely no prospect that the Syrian lands and cities which fell to
his armies would ever be incorporated into his own kingdom. Early
32 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA