136 Trevor R. Bryce
own homelands and resettled in the Hittite capital, other parts of the homeland, and
sometimes in more remote frontier areas of the kingdom. The numbers transported after
each campaigns ranged from the hundreds to the thousands—and indeed sometimes
to the tens of thousands—according to Mursili II’s record of his conquests in the
Arzawa lands. The booty-people were used to serve in the king’s militia, to restock the
military and agricultural personnel of the homeland, to populate sparsely inhabited or
abandoned settlements in the homeland’s peripheral regions, and for a range of other
services, including temple duties and public works programs. To judge from the fact
that there are almost no references to transportees in the Hittite Laws, these persons
seem to have been fairly rapidly integrated into their new homeland, and soon became
legally indistinguishable from its other inhabitants. All were now Hittites—the people
who dwelt within the Land of Hatti. However, the impact of these new arrivals on the
overall ethnic profile of the kingdom must have been enormous. The ethnic composition
of the homeland population was in a constant state of flux, with the older established
population groups of the region—first the Hattians and then the speakers of the Nesite
language—becoming an increasingly smaller percentage of the total population.
The capital Hattusa provided a microcosm of all this. As I have commented elsewhere:
“A veritable babel of languages must have echoed through the thoroughfares and byways
of Hattusa—royal bureaucrats speaking the official Nesite language, Luwian-speaking
descendants of booty people brought back to the homeland from Hittite campaigns
in the west, Akkadian-speaking scribes and emissaries from the Babylonian king, mer-
chants and representatives of vassal rulers from the Syrian states speaking a range of
languages, Hurrian-speaking priests and diviners in the service of the city’s many temples,
Egyptian-speaking envoys and their retinues on business from the pharaoh and await-
ing an audience with the Hittite king. Even a few persistent echoes of the old Hattian
language might also have been heard” (Bryce 2002: 252).
The Significance of the Hieroglyphic
Luwian Inscriptions
However, by the last century of the empire, the most widely spoken language in the
Hittite homeland and in Anatolia at large was almost certainly Luwian. This explains
an interesting phenomenon in the Hittites’ written records. Throughout the empire’s
existence, the Nesite language, written in the cuneiform script, remained the official lan-
guage of Hatti. It was used in administrative documents, in letters and treaties exchanged
by Hittite kings with their Anatolian vassals, and in dispatches and bulletins exchanged
by the kings with their officials in the kingdom’s provincial centers. However, in the
empire’s last century, a new practice arose—the recording of a king’s achievements in
monumental form on rock or built stone surfaces, using the Luwian language written
in a hieroglyphic script. Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions first appear on royal seals
of late-sixteenth-century and early-fifteenth-century date. A number of hieroglyphic
inscriptions have survived in the form of graffiti and inscriptions on small metal objects.
However, the great majority of the inscriptions—about 80 in all—are monumental
texts on stone surfaces. Found mostly in the Hittite capital, but also distributed widely
throughout Anatolia, they record a king’s military exploits or are attached as epigraphs,