northern and eastern frontiers, and extending their power and
influence southeastwards into Syria, and when they faced the
constant threat of destruction by the powerful Mittanian army, why
did they bother with the west at all?
Before answering this question, I’d like to relate a personal
anecdote. When I was a young student, one of my favourite pieces of
art from the ancient world was the bull-jumping fresco discovered at
Knossos in Minoan Crete. A reproduction of it hung for many years
on the wall of my study. But when Ifinally realised my dream of
visiting Crete and seeing the original of this‘masterpiece’of ancient
art, my initial response was one of deep disappointment. With the
exception of a few small faded fragments, what I saw was almost
entirely reconstruction, pure guesswork – though of course the
intelligent, informed guesswork of experts in thefield. And as my
disappointment receded, I accepted that it was better to make what
we could of the few scraps that were left to us and to try to recreate
the composition to which these scraps belonged than to do nothing.
At least the reconstruction gives us a partial glimpse into the world of
the original, inaccurate though its details may be.
The same applies to our attempts to reconstruct the history of
the Hittites. More often than not, we have to try to recreate this
history from fragmentary texts which often represent only a small
fraction of the documents of which they were a part. It’s rather like
attempting to do a thousand-piece jigsaw when only a few pieces of
the original are left and we have to use our imagination and powers
of deduction to supply the missing pieces–fully aware that we’ll
often get it only partly right, or almost completely wrong.
The remains of Tudhaliya’s ‘Annals’ are a case in point.
We have a number of isolated scraps of information from them–
our‘jigsaw pieces’–which we use in our attempts to reconstruct
the history of the king’s reign. What makes this reconstruction
more difficult is that we cannot unreservedly accept at face value
the information that it, and texts like it, contain. There may be a
significant difference between the true facts of an episode and what
the author who records it wants us to believe. All the documents
that provide us with a basis for reconstructing Hittite history are
slanted to present their composers in the most favourable light.
64 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA