Mittani had to be broken. Far better to do this through diplomatic
negotiation than by force of arms. A Hittite alliance with Aleppo, if
not actual control of it, was a crucial step towards ridding Syria of
its Mittanian overlord.
Like many of the rulers of Syrian states throughout history,
Aleppo’s king faced the threat of being crushed between two major
players in their contests for supremacy over the region–in this
case, Hatti and Mittani. Neutrality was impossible. The Aleppan
had to decide which of the two powers posed the greater threat to
his kingdom if he opposed it and supported the other. Initially, it
seems, he chose to support Hatti. That meant abandoning his
Mittanian allegiance and bringing down upon himself the wrath of
the Mittanian king. But he calculated that the best chance for his
kingdom’s survival lay with Hatti, and so he made peace with
Tudhaliya. The Mittanian king would have none of this, and
persuaded, or intimidated, him into switching back to his former
allegiance. Infuriated, Tudhaliya unleashed his troops on the city
and destroyed it. Allegedly both the Aleppan and the Mittanian
kings perished during Tudhaliya’s onslaughts.
Now I should say that much of this information comes from the
preamble to a treaty concluded a century or more after the events
recorded here. The treaty was drawn up in thefirst decades of the
thirteenth century by the Hittite king Muwattalli II with Aleppo’s
current king Talmi-Sharrumma.^1 Aleppo was now a vassal state of
the Hittite empire, and Talmi-Sharrumma was warned of the dire
consequences to his kingdom if he violated his obligations to his
overlord. Muwattalli reinforced this warning by recounting what
allegedly happened when Aleppo broke its peace accord with Hatti
in earlier days.
How much of this information is reliable – given that the
preambles to Hittite treaties are often biased and selective in their
accounts of the past? We can probably accept the basic truth of a
Hittite campaign conducted into Syria by Tudhaliya, the setback
this may have caused to Mittanian imperialist enterprises, and the
re-emergence of Hatti under Tudhaliya’s leadership as an
international power. But we should be highly sceptical about the
extent of the damage this inflicted on the Mittanian empire
60 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA