130 Trevor R. Bryce
though central, southern, and western Anatolia during the second millennium, called
the Luwians, so identified by passages in the Hittite texts designated by the termluwili
(“[written] in the language of Luwiya”). (3) A group called the speakers of the Nesite lan-
guage. By modern convention, we call this language “Hittite.” From the Nesite-speaking
population group, the royal Hittite dynasty emerged.
A remarkable feature of this dynasty is that, throughout its 500-year history, the succes-
sion remained the prerogative of a small group of families. There were occasional coups,
when a king was removed by a usurper. However, most contests for the throne arose
from rival claims by members of the original royal line, or by those linked to it by mar-
riage. This means that the blood of the founder of the Hittite dynasty still ran in the
veins of its last member five centuries later. Indeed, many of the rulers of the Iron Age
Neo-Hittite kingdoms may have had genetic links with the earliest kings of Late Bronze
Age Hatti.
However, the Indo-European element from which the Hittite kingdom’s ruling class
came may never have been a majority in the kingdom. Quite possibly, its population was
mostly of Hattian origin, at least in its early years. Elements of Hattian culture, including
remnants of the Hattian language, survive in a small number of passages in texts from
the Hittite archives. The language is identified by the termhattili(“in the language of
Hatti”), and we are provided with the names of Hattian deities and a number of per-
sonal and place names. Also preserved in the small corpus of Hittite mythological texts
are myths of Hattian origin. The Hattian language may have died out early in the Hit-
tite period, but many Hattian traditions and customs became integral features of Hittite
society. Of course, one of the most important of the Hattians’ legacies to their Hittite
successors is the name of their land—Hatti. The Hittites never used a specific ethnic term
to identify themselves. They simply referred to themselves as the people of the Land of
Hatti. That is, they identified themselves by reference to the region in which they lived,
adopting a name that probably went back long before written records began. The pop-
ulation of the capital, the homeland, and the Hittite realm at large was so diverse in its
composition that it would have been impossible to use a single, all-embracing term to
designate it.
The Luwians, Luwiya, and Arzawa
Let us consider some of the main aspects of this ethnic diversity. We should begin with
the peoples identified in Hittite texts as those who spoke “in the language of Luwiya.”
The Luwians, as we call them, were the most populous and widespread of all Late Bronze
Age Anatolia’s inhabitants. As with the other Indo-European-speaking populations, they
may have entered the Anatolian peninsula during the third millennium from an unknown
homeland, perhaps somewhere north of the Black Sea (but there are other possibilities).
We do not know whether they came in a series of waves, or as a single large movement,
initially perhaps undifferentiated from other Indo-European groups. However, during
the early centuries of the second millennium, they dispersed widely through many parts
of Anatolia. Most scholars believe that large numbers of Luwian-speaking groups had
occupied substantial areas of western Anatolia by the beginning of the Late Bronze Age.
One of the main reasons for locating Luwians in the west has to do with references to