140 Trevor R. Bryce
political and military dominance in Anatolia for much of its 500-year existence. Though
its royal family may have been of Indo-European origin, and preserved many elements
of its Indo-European legacy until its last days, the peoples over which it held sway was
made up of a large array of ethnic groups speaking different languages. Many had been
forcibly transplanted to the Hittite homeland in the aftermath of Hittite military vic-
tories. However, they were rapidly absorbed into the population of their conquerors.
Discrimination on ethnic grounds seems to have played no part in Hittite society. To
be a Hittite was to be a dweller in the Land of Hatti, whose subjection to the occupant
of the royal seat in Hattusa gave a sense of identity and coherence to all its inhabitants.
By the last century of the empire, Luwian-speaking population groups constituted the
largest and most widespread of all the empire’s component peoples. Their language and
hieroglyphic script were adopted by their overlords for their public monuments, for pro-
claiming their military achievements, and for honoring their gods. And their language
and script survived the fall of the empire, to become one of the chief hallmarks of the
Iron Age kingdoms that began to emerge shortly after the old kingdom fell. Luwian
population groups are the only clearly distinguishable survivors of the peoples of Late
Bronze Age Hatti. Their continuity is most clearly evident in various parts of southern
Anatolia, as reflected particularly in the inscriptions of Lycia and Cilicia Aspera. Else-
where throughout the Anatolia peninsula, other groups were establishing themselves,
most notably the Phrygians in central and western Anatolia, who, similar to the Luwians
and the Nesite-speaking Hittites, were of Indo-European origin. So too were the Greeks.
“Achaian” Greeks had already established a foothold on western Anatolian soil in the
Late Bronze Age, as indicated by the Ahhiyawa texts. In the centuries following the Hit-
tite Empire’s collapse, new waves of Greek immigrants came from the Greek mainland
and Aegean region, Aeolians and Ionians who settled primarily along Anatolia’s Aegean
coast. Greeks also colonized Anatolia’s southern coast. Here, they intermingled with and
eventually absorbed the Luwian-speaking groups of the region, the last of the identifiable
links with Anatolia’s Hittite-dominated Late Bronze Age past.
REFERENCESBeckman, Gary M., Trevor R. Bryce, and Eric H. Cline. 2011.TheAhhiyawaTexts. Atlanta: Society
of Biblical Literature.
Bryce, Trevor. 2002.Life and Society in the Hittite World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bryce, Trevor. 2005.The Kingdom of the Hittites, new ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bryce, Trevor. R. 2012.The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Çambel, Halet. 1999.CorpusofHieroglyphicLuwianInscriptions.Vol.II:Karatepe-Aslanta ̧s. Berlin
and New York: W. de Gruyter.
Hallo, William W. and K. L. Younger, eds. 2003.The Context of Scripture, Volume II. Leiden and
New York: Brill.
Hawkins, J. David. 2000.Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions. Vol. I: Inscriptions of the Iron
Age. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter.
Hout, Theo P. J. van den. 2007. “Institutions, Vernaculars, Publics: The Case of Second Mil-
lennium Anatolia.” In Seth L. Sanders, ed.,Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, 221–62.
Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Houwink ten Cate, Philo H. J. 1965.The Luwian Population Groups of Lycia and Cilicia Aspera
during the Hellenistic Period. Leiden: Brill.