male heir. The king himself decided (I believe) who his successor
would be, and called upon his subjects to honour his decision.
Generally, he would choose a successor from his own immediate
family, unless circumstances forced him to select someone from a
collateral line, typically a nephew, to be his heir.
In these circumstances, if Labarna I no longer had any sons to
succeed him, did he choose a daughter, who now assumed the name
Tawananna as a formal title, to become the kingdom’snewruler?
And was she the immediate royal predecessor of Hattusili? This
could explain why she was named in his titulature. If she had no sons
of her own, or no suitable sons, the royal succession could still be
kept within the same family group if it passed to her nephew, her
brother’s son. This brother, I suggest, was thefirst Labarna’s son who
was originally destined to rule the kingdom but may not have
survived the uprising in Sanahuitta. King Telipinu was later to rule
that the husband of one of the king’s daughters could become his
adopted son and successor. But we have no evidence that such a
provision existed, or was ever put into practice, before Telipinu.
An obvious objection to my idea is that there was never a later
occasion in Hittite history when the kingdom was ruled by a queen,
nor is there any other reference to this supposed female ruler in any
other text. But female rule was not entirely without precedent in the
history of the region. Already in the Assyrian colony period, we learn
from the merchant texts that queens sometimes ruled over the cities
through which the traders’caravans passed. And a mythological
tradition preserved in Hittite records has as one of its main characters
a‘queen of Kanesh’, who accomplished the prodigious feat of bearing
30 sons in a single year.^2 Fairytale though this part of the text is (it
becomes progressively more historical later on), it nevertheless
indicates that the notion of a ruling queen was not entirely
inconceivable. And if we want a historical parallel from another Great
Kingdom, we need only go to Egypt where against all tradition and
precedent a woman became ruler more than 150 years after
Tawananna’s‘reign’–the pharaoh Hatshepsut. After her death, her
successor Tuthmosis III set about erasing her images and other
records of her reign. Was the name of the Tawananna also later
expunged from official Hittite records, for reasons unknown to us?
198 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA