seems that hostility towards the king did not extend to all
members of his family. Hattusili’s own children appear to have
enjoyed considerable popularsupport. And even the rejected
nephew may have been unfairly maligned. He had been dumped
by the king after a number of confrontations between the two, for
which the nephew was perhaps not altogether to blame. The fact
that though he has been banished from the capital, the king
assures the assembly that he will be granted a generous severance
package may well indicate that he was not without influential
supporters. The promise Hattusili gives may have been a tacit
admission of this, to dampen down any resentment at his sacking.
What emerges clearly from the Testament is that the kingdom’s
subjects were not challenging the right of the current royal
dynasty to rule their land. Quite the opposite. Much of the
discontent seems to have arisen from a fear that the kingship
would pass out of its hands. It was the king, not his dynasty, who
was the object of such apparent hostility in the land.
Then there is the question of the setting for the Testament–
the city of Kussar, ancestral home of the royal family. What was
the king doing there? Kussar may well have continued to
occupy an important place in the kingdom, and perhaps Hattusili
was visiting it on a tour of inspection of all his major cities when
he fell ill. Another possibility is that if there were continuing
instability in the kingdom at this time, Hattusili may have decided
it was safer for him to leave Hattusa and return to Kussar–at
least until the problems relating to the succession had been fully
resolved.
We should question too whether the Testament really belongs
to the end of Hattusili’s life. Was it a deathbed speech, as often
assumed? It may well be that the king recovered from his illness,
perhaps a fever of some kind. On the basis of a brief but puzzling
reference in a later document (to which we shall come), it’s possible
that he not only recovered his health, but continued his campaigns
in Syria and was killed there. Indeed, we cannot be sure that he had
even begun his Syrian campaigns by this time. It would be
reasonable to assume that he ventured so far from home, taking
with him the substantial resources required for military enterprises
38 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA