He offered what amounted to an apology for entering Milawatan
territory, but declared that this was only to capture the fugitive and
was not intended as an act of hostility towards Ahhiyawa. What he
asked now was that his correspondent keep Piyamaradu on a leash,
preventing him from using Ahhiyawan territory as a base for
provoking further uprisings against Hittite authority in western
Anatolia, or– better still–hand him over to Hittite authority.
More generally, the letter sought to win the Ahhiyawan king’s
cooperation in stabilising the west, above all by not interfering in
Hittite subject-territory, or encouraging or supporting his acolytes
like Piyamaradu to do so.
In his attempt to butter up his correspondent and make him
more amenable to his requests, the Hittite king referred to him as a
‘Great King’ and called him ‘My Brother’. These terms were
generally strictly reserved for the genuine Great Kings of the Near
Eastern world, the pharaoh and the kings of Hatti, Assyria and
Babylon. On the assumption that the king of Ahhiyawa in the
Tawagalawa letter was the ruler of only one of many Mycenaean
states contemporary with the Late Bronze Age Near Eastern
kingdoms, it was a pure diplomaticfiction to accord him such a
status. After all, Mycenaean states, like Mycenae and Thebes, were
tiny in comparison to the Great Kingdoms which ruled the vast
stretches of land to their east. But in view of the capacity of the
Ahhiyawan king, whoever he was, to cause significant disruption in
the Hittites’western world, it was worthflattering him by according
him a status far above his actual worth in the hope of winning his
cooperation. And of course we must allow the possibility that
Hattusili had very little knowledge of the kingdom of Ahhiyawa.
He may really have believed that its size and resources warranted its
ruler’s membership in the Club of Royal Brothers.
We don’t know the outcome of the Hittite appeal, but it seems
not to have worked. For Piyamaradu continued to harass Hittite
territory in the west for years to come. And Ahhiyawa continued to
play a subversive and probably an increasingly active role, politically
and perhaps also militarily, in western Anatolian affairs.
That was but one of the problems inherited by Hattusili’s
successor Tudhaliya IV, who came to a throne which still bore the
194 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA