The Coming of the GreeksHatti were personally bound to the king, and he to them, by
formidable oaths. The military oath was taken by all com-
manders, whether of local levies or of professional troops, and
invited upon the oath-breaker (whether king or vassal) a long
and horrible catalog of divine punishments. 34
That the Hittite king and his army were quite divorced from
the subjects over whom he ruled has long been apparent. As
summarized by Gurney, "the conclusion seems to be clear: the
Hittite state was the creation of an exclusive caste superim-
posed on the indigenous population of the country, which had
originally been loosely organized in a number of independent
townships." 35 Whatever the nature of his petty kingship at
Kushshara may have been, it is evident that the imperial mon-
archy which Hattusilis established at Hattusas was quite irreg-
ular and unprecedented (the assertion that it was typical of
primitive Indo-European monarchies is unfounded: quite apart
from the fact that Hittite speakers did not constitute a nation,
we .have no evidence that the PIE speakers lived under monar-
chies). 36 In the Hittite Old Kingdom no fixed principle of
succession applied until late in the sixteenth century B.C.,
when the criterion of primogeniture was established by Teli-
Belege sich auf die Zeit des Alien Reiches, also auf die Periode der Konsoli-
dierung des hethitischen Staates in Anatolien vor 1500 v. Chr (17.lid. Jh.)
konzentrieren. Neu tritt dabei ihre rechtliche Stellung zum Hofe hervor,
indem der Konig sich eidlich zur Einhaltung von Abmachungen verpfli-
chtet, wobei die Hapiri anderen militarischen Formationen und Chargen of-
fensichtlich gleichgestellt werden. Das zeigt eine soziale Lage dieser Hapiri
auf, wie sie bisher den Texten nicht zu entnehmen war."
- In the form that it has come down to us, the oath dates from
the fifteenth century B.C. See N. Oettinger, Die militarishce Eidder Hethiter
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976). - Gurney, TheHittites, 68—69. 'n CAH II, i: 252, Gurney ob-
serves that at Hattusas "there was a sharp cleavage between the government
and the governed." - I skirted this problem in Basileus. The Evidence for Kingship in
Geometric Greece (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), but plan to return to
it in a future study.