Near Eastern Historypinus. Although the king would designate a member of his
family (or of the queen's family) as his successor, the death of a
king was often an occasion for intrigue and bloodshed. On such
occasions, the pankus seems ultimately to have decided the
succession. At any rate, the "fighting men" of the pankus seem
to have been persons of some standing, on a level with the
courtiers and grandees, and there is no possibility whatever
that the pankus was an assembly of all adult male Hittite
speakers. Weaned as most of us have been on national histories,
we have tended to imagine that the Hittite king was dependent
upon a "Hittite" court and a "Hittite" army, but such a pic-
ture is anachronistic. As Gurney observed, "there is no textual
support for the view that this class division had a racial ba-
sis." 37 Many Hittite speakers were among the governed, and
within the "government" there were several groups whose first
language was something other than Hittite.
In summary, although the Hittite Old Kingdom was in no
sense a national monarchy, neither did it—like the Kassite
kingdom in Babylon or the Aryan kingdom in Mitanni—rep-
resent a takeover by an intruder from a foreign land. At the
outset, it was undoubtedly perceived by the people of Hatti as
a dreadful novelty, to be escaped from at all costs (the annals
of Hattusilis I reveal that at one point, except for his citadel at
Hattusas, all of Hatti was in revolt against him). But it was
created by the king of Kushshara, who was a native of Hatti
and a devout worshiper of Hatti's gods. With every victory and
every sack of an enemy city, the Great Kings proved to them-
selves and to their subjects that the gods looked with favor
upon the kingdom. And so, eventually it seems to have won a
measure of esteem (though hardly of affection) from the people
of the land.
The period in which "the coming of the Greeks" must some-
where fall—the end of the third millennium and the first half
of the second—is illuminated for us only in the Near East.
- Gurney, CAR II, i: 252.
7-f