Hittites and Anatolian Ethnic Diversity 137that is, identification labels, to the figures of deities or Hittite kings or other members
of Hittite royalty.
How do we explain this phenomenon—the use by Hittite royalty of the script and lan-
guage of a subject population for their public monuments? Was the hieroglyphic script
considered more appropriate than the official cuneiform script because it was visually
more impressive, more suited to public display? That is a commonly held assumption.
However, the explanation may be a more pragmatic one. Th. van den Hout (2007:
226–41) argues that, by the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, Luwian speakers formed
the majority of the population in and around the capital as well as in large parts of west-
ern, south-central, and southeastern Anatolia. He proposes that, while the ruling class
considered it important to maintain the status of Nesite as the traditional and official
language of power, its public inscriptions were aimed at the majority of the homeland’s
population—proclaiming the achievements of their royal authors in the language of
this population.
This may help explain the survival of the hieroglyphic Luwian script in the centuries
following the collapse of the Hittite Empire. In the empire’s wake, a number of Iron Age
kingdoms that we call “Neo-Hittite” emerged in northern Syria and southeastern Anato-
lia (Bryce 2012). The term implies that these new kingdoms maintained some of the most
important features of Late Bronze Age Hittite culture. This is best illustrated by what
may have been the first, and was certainly one of the most important, of the Neo-Hittite
kingdoms, Carchemish on the Euphrates. The first king of Neo-Hittite Carchemish,
Kuzi-Teshub, was the son of the last attested viceroy of Late Bronze Age Carchemish,
Talmi-Teshub. Architectural and sculptural features of Carchemish and other Neo-Hittite
cities reflect Hittite imperial architectural and artistic traditions. Some of the rulers of
the new kingdoms had the same names as those of the old imperial line—for example,
Larbarna, Suppiluliuma, Muwattalli, and Hattusili. Most significantly, the hieroglyphic
Luwian epigraphic tradition is preserved in the official monumental inscriptions of a num-
ber of Neo-Hittite cities. On the other hand, the Hittite cuneiform tradition totally dis-
appeared. There is no evidence that the cuneiform script was ever used in the Neo-Hittite
world, or indeed that the Nesite language, the official language of the Late Bronze Age
kingdom, survived the empire’s fall.
The Hittites’ Successors in Iron Age Anatolia
All this has led many scholars to believe that, after the fall, large numbers of peoples
migrated from the Anatolian plateau to southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria where
the Neo-Hittite kingdoms emerged. Such an assumption raises a wide range of questions
and problems that cannot be dealt with here. However, there is no doubt that, after
the empire’s collapse, major changes occurred in the ethnopolitical character of Anato-
lia, associated with population shifts and the arrival of new population groups. In the
west, following the disappearance of the Arzawa kingdoms and other Late Bronze Age
states and communities, new populations began to settle the Aegean coastal regions and
their hinterlands. Fresh waves of peoples from the Greek world migrated eastward in the
last two centuries of the second millennium, and found new homelands along the coast
and its offshore islands. Notable among these were (a) Aeolian Greeks, originating from