documents. Sometimes they appended short notes to the official
communications, personal postscripts for their scribal colleagues at
the other end. Thus after writing down His Majesty’s instructions to
aTapikkaofficial about action to be taken over enemy troop
movements in his region, the scribe adds a note of his own:
To Uzzu, my beloved brother(-scribe), from your beloved
brother Surihinili: I hope all is well with you. May the gods
keep you safe! Just to say that everything isfine with your
house (in Hattusa). And everything isfine with your wife.
There’s nothing for you to worry about. My beloved brother,
do send back your greetings to me.Sometimes the tone of these notes is not so cordial. It seems that
one of Uzzu’s brother-scribes in Hattusa had sent him a maid-
servant on loan. Problems arose when the maid started pinching
the family silver (or the Hittiteequivalent). Uzzu complained
repeatedly until his correspondent wearily replied‘You keep
writing to me about my maid. I don’twanttohearanything
more!’This prompted Uzzu to take the matter into his own hands
by threatening to punish her himself, probably with a good
beating. Her owner had no desire to receive back damaged
goods, so he wrote to Uzzu:‘See that you hand her over to the
messenger in good condition and he will bring her back to
me. And whatever the girl has stolen you can take threefold
compensation for it.’I rather like these little appendages. Ephemeral
and trivial though they may be, they bring us very closely in touch,
for a moment, with ordinary people in the Hittite world, as well as
providing some light relief in an otherwise very grim period in the
kingdom’s history.
HATTI UNDER EXISTENTIAL THREAT
It is almost certainly to Tudhaliya’s reign, some time during the
first half of the fourteenth century, that we can assign the events
referred to in a document by a later king, Hattusili III. We are
presented with a scenario of apocalyptic proportions:
FROM NEAR EXTINCTION TO THE THRESHOLD OF SUPREMACY 75