Near Eastern Historyof a Hittite tribe or nation, we need not even try to imagine
how a Hittite tribal assembly might have worked, or how such
an institution could have survived among the Proto-Anatolian
speakers of Hatti through the long period during which they
were a well-integrated minority in a civilized land. We know
of the pankus only from the seventeenth century to the fif-
teenth, and there is no reason to suppose that it existed before
the creation of the imperial kingship at Hattusas.
The most likely explanation of the pankus is that it was a
convocation of the Great King's vassals, each of whom had at
his command a small troop of soldiers. Although some histo-
rians have imagined the army of the Hittite king as a militia
of the "Hittite nation," perhaps similar to Alaric's Visigoths,
it was in fact drawn from various language groups, and many
of the most important units were "mercenary" (we can not even
be certain that the majority of the troops serving in this Hittite
monarchy spoke Hittite). Thus in the Hittite Law Code there
appear "the Manda warriors" and "the Sala warriors" alongside
various local units. 31 It is becoming clear that in the second
millennium a generic term for "mercenary soldiers" was the
word bapiru or the Sumerogram SA.GAZ. The hapiru (or SA. GAZ)
appear in fourteen documents from the period of the Hittite
Empire and have recently turned up in two texts from the Old
Kingdom. 52 In these two texts, which Heinrich Otten dates to
the seventeenth or sixteenth century, "the troops from Hatti
and the SA.GAZ troops" appear almost as a formula, and it ap-
pears that the king's relationship to the mercenaries was no
different from his relationship to the militias conscripted from
the towns of Hatti. 33 Both the SA.GAZ units and the units from
- See E. Neufeld, The Hittite Laws (London: Luzac&Co., 1951),
18 (Section 54 of the code), and commentary on page 168. - H. Otten, "Zwei althethitische Belege zu den Hapiru
(SA.GAZ)," ZA 52 (1957): 216-23. - Of the SA.GAZ in the period of the Hittite Old Kingdom, Otten
concludes ("Zwei althethitische Belege," 223): "Ihre militarische Dienst-
leistung ist offenkundig. Deutlich wird jetzt, dass die diesbeziiglichen
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