Hittite kings had neither the organisational capacity nor the
manpower to contemplate an expansion of their sovereignty over
these or any other conquered lands that lay far from their centre of
power. Hattusili’s campaigns were little more than smash and grab
raids–conquest for conquest’s sake.
That said, the king’s exploits had won him a reputation as a
great warrior, one of the most important attributes of kingship in
Near Eastern royal ideology. His achievements on the battlefield,
far surpassing in their range those of thefirst Labarna, were amply
demonstrated by the cartloads of plunder brought back from the
sacked cities, plunder that would swell the treasuries of Hittite
palaces and temples, with a portion set aside for the king’sofficers
and other loyal adherents as a reward for their services. Beyond
that, Hattusili’s battlefield successes served to demonstrate to his
enemies the already formidable military capabilities of hisfledgling
kingdom. Hatti was now a force to be reckoned with.
Before leaving this part of our story, we should mention one
important side-effect of Hattusili’s Syrian campaigns. Indirectly,
these campaigns were responsible for the introduction, or
reintroduction, of writing into Anatolia, following the end of
the Assyrian colony period. This was because scribes from the
conquered cities were almost certainly among the prisoners
brought to Hattusa as part of the king’s war-booty. Employed in the
capital’s palace and temple bureaucracies, the imported scribes
became thefirst producers of written documents in the Hittite
world. They did so using a cuneiform script–but it was the script
used to record the Babylonian version of the Akkadian language,
not the Assyrian version used by the merchant colonists. Perhaps
soon after their arrival, a local scribal class began to develop.
And though the Babylonian language probably remained for a time
the official language of the Hittite bureaucracy, Hittite scribes
eventually began using their own language for the written
documents, probably from the middle of the sixteenth century.
In a kind of transitional stage, documents were written in both
languages–what we call bilinguals.
THE DAWN OF THE HITTITE ERA 33