The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

(lu) #1
The New Warfare

amount of which has survived (one would have expected, for
example, that the chariot would appear in the frescoes of the
Mari palace).
For Anatolia, matters are less clear. The "Anittas Text" in-
dicates that when Anittas captured Salatiwara he found in that
city (or possibly encountered in battle there) forty teams of
horses. 68 Anittas is known to have been a formidable king in
central Anatolia ca. 1800 B.C. The "Anittas Text" comes down
to us in three scribal copies (all in the Hittite language), one
from the sixteenth century B.C. and two from the thirteenth. 69
The forty "chariots" that those forty teams mentioned in the
text imply 70 may have been parade or prestige vehicles: we have
seen that the king of Chagar Bazar, ca. 1800 B.C., had a stable
of more than twenty horses, comprising various two- and
three-horse teams. A difficulty for translators is that in the
"Anittas Text" the reference to the teams stands between a ref-
erence to a fourteen-hundred-man garrison and a reference to
silver and gold, and it is not clear whether the text presented
the teams as contributing to the defense of Salatiwara, or as
part of the plunder that Anittas took from the town. 71 In ana-
lyzing the several scribal copies of this text, Houwink ten Gate


  1. For a transcription and translation of the text, see E. Neu, Der
    Anitta-Text (Studien zu den Bogazkiiy-Texten, 18) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
    1974), 10-15.

  2. Ibid., 3 and 6.

  3. Where there are teams of horses there must also be "chariots,"
    although in the "Anittas Text" only in Copy B, from the thirteenth cen-
    tury, are chariots (GISH.GIGIR.MESH) explicitly mentioned; this copy also
    omits the numeral "forty."

  4. See Neu's translation of lines 64-71 of the document (Der An-
    itta-Text, 15):
    Noch im selben Jahr zog ich gegen [ ] [Salatiua]ra zu Felde.
    Der Mann von Salatiuara machte sich zusammen mit seinen
    Sohnen (Leuten?) auf und ging
    [entjgegen; sein Land und seine Stadt (ver)liess er,
    und er besetzte den Fluss Hulanna.
    Ne{shas ] umging [ihn]


IOI
Free download pdf