The World

In 1250, Hattusili negotiated with the king of Ahhiyawa, Tawagalawa (Eteocles), and in a letter only part of which survives wrote: ‘Now as we have come to an agreement about Wilusa over which we went to war …’. The timing is roughly right for a war in which the Trojans, backed by their Hattian allies, fought the Mycenaeans, possibly descendants of Aryan invaders. Based at Mycenae in the Peloponnese, they were ruled by kings and sword-swinging, chariot-riding warrior aristocrats who wassailed in the draughty halls of fortresses. They now worshipped male and female gods, and their battle-scarred bodies sporting golden masks were buried with bronze swords. But they were also Eurasian traders.^*

The war ended in the burning of Troy, confirmed by archaeological excavations. The backing of Hatti explains why little Troy could defy a coalition of Greeks. But these Hattian letters suggest that the ‘Trojan war’, later celebrated in The Iliad, was, if it happened at all, a sideshow in Hatti’s long struggle to control the Greeks.

Fifteen years after Kadesh, Rameses II and Hattusili III signed an ‘Eternal Peace’, pledging ‘great peace and great brotherhood between themselves for ever’, co-signed by Queen Puduhepa. She not only mediated between the many offspring of the king by concubines, officiated at religious festivals and sat as a judge, but – always acute, sarcastic, haughty – also negotiated the marriage of her daughter to Rameses. Nefertari sent her ‘sister’ a golden twelve-strand necklace and a luxurious dyed garment. But Puduhepa negotiated very frankly with Rameses.

‘My sister, you promised to give me your daughter,’ wrote Rameses. ‘That’s what you wrote. But you’ve withheld her and are angry with me. Why?’

‘I’ve indeed withheld my daughter,’ replied Puduhepa. ‘And you will certainly approve of my reasons. The treasure house of Hatti was burned [by rebels].’ Puduhepa teased Rameses: ‘Does my brother possess nothing at all? … My brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense. That’s not worthy of your reputation or your status.’ No one else in the world would speak to Rameses the Great like that. Then she boasted of her daughter’s charms: ‘With whom shall I compare the daughter of heaven and earth whom I shall give to my brother?’ But ‘I want her made superior to all the other daughters of Great Kings.’

In 1246 BC, Rameses and Puduhepa were ready. ‘Wonderful, wonderful is this situation,’ exclaimed Rameses. ‘The Sun God and the Storm God, the gods of Egypt and Hatti, have granted our two countries peace for ever!’ Puduhepa set off with her daughter, accompanied by a trove of ‘gold, silver, much bronze, slaves, horses without limit, cattle, goats, rams by the myriad!’ Puduhepa bade her daughter goodbye at the frontier and thereafter Rameses ‘loved her more than anything’, but when no children appeared, her father blamed Rameses. ‘You’ve sired no son with my daughter,’ wrote Hattusili. ‘Isn’t it possible?’ Since Rameses had sired over a hundred children, this cast an unfair aspersion. At the apogee of their empires, the super-monarchs were discussing a summit. ‘Though we Great Kings are brothers, one has never seen the other,’ wrote Puduhepa to Rameses, so they decided to meet in Canaan. But the summit never happened. Hattusili faced challenges from the Aegean to the Euphrates, and Rameses ruled for far too long, sixty-seven years, and by the time he died at ninety, twisted by arthritis, tormented with dental problems (all revealed by his mummy), his elderly son had to cope with attacks on all his frontiers^* but especially on the Mediterranean, where all the powers now faced a catastrophe. No one knows what caused it, but it is probable that a synchronicity of climate, natural disaster, pandemics, greed and systemic implosion sparked movements on some faraway steppe that unleashed a stampede migration in which maritime marauders shattered the rich cities of the Mediterranean and western Asia. The raiders sound like Greeks, the Egyptians called them ‘Sea Peoples’ but they came by land too, sporting new iron breastplates and leg greaves, wielding stabbing swords and shields, all made by the smelting of iron ore and meteoric iron to make a stronger metal. Iron had been known for a long time and it is likely that the smelting process developed slowly in many places, starting in India and spreading via the sophisticated blacksmiths of Hatti to Europe and Africa.^*