cooks, the bakers, the ploughmen, and the gardeners, and
made them their servants [...]^3Arnuwanda simply did not have the resources to mount effective
armed resistance to the invaders. All he could do was try to keep
them from advancing further into the homeland by drawing up a
series of pacts or treaties with them, no doubt conceding to them
much Hittite territory they had already won. Similarly, he sought to
secure his lands south of the homeland by treaties he concluded
with the peoples and cities there, like the important port-city of Ura
on the southeastern coast. And he sought to renew Hittite influence
over Kizzuwatna by settling in the kingdom military colonists from
a region called Ismerika binding them in allegiance to him. The
treaty in which he did so still survives.^4
Yet all this was little more than band-aid diplomacy, and in any
case was overshadowed by alarming news from the east. Mittani was
on the rise again! It had a new king, Artatama, probably the son and
successor of Saushtatar. What made this news worse still was that
Egypt had once more cast an aggressive eye on the Syrian region,
under two successive pharaohs, Amenhotep II and Tuthmosis IV.
Worst of all, the second of these pharaohs made an alliance with the
Mittanian king, cemented by a marriage between the two royal
houses. No longer would the two Great Kingsfight over Syrian
territory. They reached an amicable agreement to divide it between
them. Egypt won control of Qadesh on the Orontes river, along with
the Syrian coastal states of Amurru and Ugarit. All territory beyond
in northern Syria was conceded to Mittani. This agreement left no
room for any form of Hittite influence in the region where
Arnuwanda’s father appears to have effectively campaigned just a
short time before. But the loss of this influence was soon to prove the
least of the Hittites’problems.
72 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA