CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A VIEW FROM HATTUSA
Trevor Bryce
A
round 1595 BC,^1 the Hittite king Mursili I, fresh from his conquest of Aleppo
in northern Syria, led his troops east to the Euphrates, and then south along the
river to the city of Babylon. He attacked, stormed, plundered, and destroyed the city,
taking rich spoils from it and many prisoners-of-war. In military terms, this was a
momentous achievement for the ruler of the young kingdom of Hatti, which had
emerged in central Anatolia but a few decades earlier. Mursili’s predecessors had
established the kingdom’s dominance over much of eastern Anatolia. And his grand-
father Hattusili I, to whose throne he succeeded, had carried Hittite arms through
northern Syria across the Euphrates into Mesopotamia. Hattusili boasted that his
military triumphs exceeded even those of the great Akkadian king Sargon, whose
exploits served as a benchmark for all future warrior-kings. Now, by conquering both
Aleppo and Babylon, Mursili had matched, indeed surpassed, all that his grandfather
had achieved in the field of battle. His conquests were heralded by later kings as two
of the greatest triumphs of early Hittite history.^2
Very likely, a passage inserted in a Babylonian Chronicle of much later date also
refers to Mursili’s conquest. It states: ‘In the time of Samsuditana, the Hittites marched
against Akkad’ (Babylonian Chronicle 20 , line 11 , ed. Grayson 1975 : 156 ). Samsuditana
was the last ruler of the Old Babylonian Empire. If the Hittite campaign mentioned
in the Chronicle is, in fact, the same as that which Mursili conducted against Babylon,
then Mursili may well be assigned responsibility for bringing the Old Babylonian
Empire to an end. Some scholars, however, have doubts about conflating the Hittite
and Babylonian sources. They point out that the Hittite record of Mursili’s conquest
makes no reference to Samsuditana, and that the Babylonian text dates well after the
event to which it refers, and does not mention a specific Hittite king or indicate that
Babylon actually fell to the Hittites (see Manning 1999 : 357 , n. 1579 ). But it is
quite clear from Hittite sources that the Hittites never conducted more than one
campaign against Babylon, so that there really is no other event in Babylonian–Hittite
history to which the Babylonian Chronicle could refer. We can with some confidence
attribute to Mursili not only the fall of Babylon, but simultaneously the coup de grâce
delivered to the once great dynasty of King Hammurabi.
We have no information about what prompted Mursili’s expedition to Babylon.
There was certainly no prospect of his establishing any lasting form of Hittite authority