Warlords of Hatti: The Greatest Television Series Never Made

Ancient Anatolia, Antiquity

Some might say that we live in an age of reboots and remakes.1 The adjacent need for already known or otherwise established material often leads those working in media-production to the past. As a result, many historical figures have a section about their appearances in popular culture tacked onto their Wikipedia-page, for example.2 But there is a lot of potential here, be it pertaining to relatively less famous periods and persons, that still remains untapped. Such is the case with the reigns and other adventures of the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I and his royal prodigy, who ruled the Kingdom of the Hittites – roughly ancient Anatolia and sometimes parts of Syria – during the fourteenth and thirteenth century BCE.3 These men presided over a period of war, diplomacy, and intrigue that would put the average season of HBO’s famous serial Game of Thrones to shame – and which included court shenanigans in Ancient Egypt, for crying out loud!4 So, consider this my unofficial application for Hollywood and join me in summarizing the outline of the greatest television series never made: Warlords of Hatti.

The Kingdom of the Hittites already had an extensive and turbulent existence, before our hypothetical series would take place. To set the scene, for once not in a metaphorical sense, we therefore first need to acquire some background knowledge about ancient Anatolia and the Hittites. Thus we can better appreciate the unlikely circumstances of Šuppiluliuma’s initial rise to power and everything he achieved and failed at afterwards. But a simple blog cannot – and should not try to! – give a comprehensive overview of the history of ancient Anatolia or even merely of the Kingdom of the Hittites. For those who want to know more, I can heartily recommend Trevor Bryce’s The Kingdom of the Hittites, specifically the new edition from 2005.5 Because a person’s fascination with the Hittites may start small, but can last a lifetime.

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Hatti before the Hittites

Despite the long shadow of their fascinating kingdom, the Hittites are but interlopers in the long and varied history of ancient Anatolia.6 This is the westernmost peninsula of West-Asia, situated between the Black Sea in the north and the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and today part of the modern state of Türkiye. Its salient geographical features are, in the first place, the Anatolian plateau and thereupon the famous river Kızılırmak – called the Maraššantiya by the Hittites – which made a u-shaped trajectory across interior of the peninsula. In the west there were coastal plains and river valleys that drained in the Aegean and in the east we find mountainous regions with hot summers and exceedingly cold winters. Meanwhile the southeasternmost region, today called Cilicia, functioned as the gateway to the lands that we now designate as Syria, the Levant, and – further afield – Mesopotamia.7 Consequently, in the ancient world Anatolia formed one of the proverbial bridgeheads between Europe and the further Near East.

It is therefore not very surprising that some of our earliest evidence for human habitation in this area is trade-related. We already find some of the first attested communities here being involved with the exchange of obsidian, for example.8 Though the organization of these communities differed throughout the various locales. The people living on the central plateau experienced divergent influences than those in the southeastern part of the peninsula, to name one difference, and they took later to sedentary life.9 Those influences, including the eventual practice of systematic agriculture, largely came from Syria and Mesopotamia – which makes the circumstances surroungding the initial rise of the Hittite state, to put it mildly, interesting.10

But the earliest societies for which we have sources that allow us to make such statements, cannot be conclusively connected to the Hittites. First there were beautiful ritual sites and proto-cities that remain silent to us. Like the skillfully carved pillars with anthropomorphic Mischwesen at Göbekli Tepe and the practical rectangular houses of Çatalhöyük, which we both visited before.11 With the rise of the city-states in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE, urban nodes developed in parts of Anatolia that facilitated long-distance trade.12 And around the halfway point of the third millennium BCE, we find several small but prosperous states in various parts of the peninsula.13 It is in the following period, that we encounter the first general designation of the area as a whole, that being the land of Hatti.14 The most famous of these small states was centered on the city of Kaneš, which at the brink of the second millennium BCE hosted a small exclave with merchants from Aššur, then one of the city-states in northern Mesopotamia. The letters of these merchants give us a glimpse in their lives at the time, including the role of women in these ventures, the various modes of societal organization they encountered, and the endless usefulness of donkeys.15 And it is Kaneš which gave the Hittites the names that they would use for themselves and their language.

The Kingdom of the Hittites

There is still a lively scholarly debate over when and from where the speakers of the Hittite language would have arrived in ancient Anatolia.16 But what we can say with some confidence is that in the seventeenth century BCE the initial push to form the Kingdom of the Hittites was firmly underway and that the ruling dynasty associated themselves with the old state of Kaneš. The Hittite’s designation for themselves, the people from Neša, as well as for their language, Nešili, also point in this direction.17 Like with their origins and time of arrival, the role of the Hittites in their titular kingdom has still not been definitively established. It is undeniably true that the Hittite language was employed for administrative documents, in addition to historical, religious, personal, and literary texts.18 But the Hittite kings themselves kept referring to their domain as the Land of Hatti and many of the place and personal names, religious and ritual terms, and perhaps even the origins of some state institutions can be traced back to an elusive Hattian culture and ditto language, that were perhaps part of the earlier world of smaller Anatolian states, which we discussed above.19 Though for most of the presented evidence for Hattic influence on the Hittite state, one can find scholars who dispute such a reading of our sources.20 In the end, we may agree with Marc van de Mieroop, that the only thing we know for certain, is when the Hittite language – sorry, Nešili – begins to appear in our texts.21

Where we have a better grasp on things, is the rise of the Kingdom of the Hittites and their monarchs. Though written sources are scarce in the period after the departure of the epistolary enthusiasts that were the Assyrian merchants, we can reconstruct the rapid creation of a larger kingdom in Anatolia.22 First and only for a short while under one Pitḫana and his son Anitta, who ruled from Kaneš. And not long thereafter we encounter Ḫattušili I, who accomplished a similar feat from the city of Kuššara. It is the latter realm that we now call the Kingdom of the Hittites. Ḫattušili made Ḫattuša in the bend of the Maraššantiya river his capital and perhaps took his name from this town.23 After some of the dynastic troubles that would characterize the Kingdom of the Hittites for most of its existence, Muršili I – the king’s grandson – took the throne. He proceeded to lead his army to the south and in 1595 BCE he plundered the famed city of Babylon in the heart of Mesopotamia.24 If those living in Mesopotamia can indeed at least partly be held responsible for the way in which human societies developed in Anatolia, this encounter with some of the inheritors of that influence, was perhaps not what one might have hoped for…

Muršili’s daring expedition can be considered the high point of this earlier phase of the Hittie state.25 As after his death dynastic tensions again reared their ugly head and many of the following reigns were marred by assassinations, conspiracies, and other forms of infighting that would make any family dinner during the holidays awkward. And after a short reprieve from such dynastic atrocities during the reign of king Telipinu in the late sixteenth century BCE, the kingdom was the subject of more troubles, including various rebellions.26 But it was these circumstances that provide the stage on which our television series would take place.

The Rise of Šuppiluliuma I

The title of my proposed series, Warlords of Hatti, is of course chosen to draw in viewers. Because Hittite monarchs like Šuppiluliuma I were much more than just leaders of armies.27 But it was his martial skill – and perhaps a family murder, which was by this point a Hittite royal tradition – that facilitated his rise to the throne and the subsequent increase of Hittite influence in West-Asia. After the dead of king Muwatalli I in the late fifteenth century BCE, naturally by assassination, the ensuing struggle for the throne saw one Tudḫaliya I take power.28 This succession is considered by modern scholars to have begun a new phase in Hittite history.29 The new monarch stabilized the kingdom for a time, but only a few decades and kings later – during the reign of a second or a third Tudḫaliya, we are simply not sure – the Hittites seem to have lost control of much of their former domain. And so this Tudḫaliya saw himself and his retinue confined to the city of Samuḫa in eastern Anatolia, while a state centered on the western shores of the peninsula became the dominant power.30 Part of the king’s entourage was his young son Šuppiluliuma and it was with his help that Tudḫaliya achieved the restoration of the earlier Kingdom of the Hittites. Though our sources are mostly written afterwards by later monarchs and they may have tried to enlarge the role of Šuppiluliuma, who was their own forebear.31

And they may have had good reasons to do so, because not all the deeds of Šuppiluliuma were immediately endearing – even by the standards for a Bronze Age monarch! Though he initially seemed to have supported the designated successor of his father, who was named – you guessed it! – Tudḫaliya, Šuppiluliuma all too soon took the throne for himself. This happened around the hallway point of the fourteenth century BCE. And though the death of Tudḫaliya the Younger was attributed to others, we may assume that Šuppiluliuma was at least involved.32 It is this murder, according to Šuppiluliuma’s own son and eventual successor Muršili II, which was the ultimate reason for much of the hardship that would befall the dynasty in later years.

But until such grim days would eventually come to pass, Šuppiluliuma appears to have enjoyed much success, from conquests to statecraft.33 One of his crowning achievements was stabilizing his expanded empire through a combination of warfare, diplomacy, and dynastic maneuvering, especially pertaining to those places that were difficult to reach from the capital Ḫattuša. To that end he made two of his five sons viceroys in two important Syrian cities – because that is how far Hittite power reached by then – Carchemiš and Aleppo. And these sons, Šarri-Kušuḫ (formerly known as Piyaššili) and Telipinu, were formidable administrators and leaders in their own right who would make interesting characters for our television series.34 But the greatest opportunity for Šuppiluliuma and his royal prodigy came shortly before these arrangements were completed. And it was not through a battle or by managing cities, but when a message from Egypt arrived.

The Egyptian Affair

This message would perhaps be a fitting ending of our first season of Warlords of Hatti. Because after the rise of Šuppiluliuma and the consolidation of both his and Hittite power in Anatolia and Syria, who would not be excited to visit the land of the Nile and wonder how it could possibly get involved in our story thus far? Our second season would then open with the court in Egypt. The pharaoh, assumed to be Tutankhamon – yes, that Tutankhamon – has died. And his widow, Ankhesenamun, seeks to shore up her position, considering her many rivals at court.35 The Egyptian queen therefore contacts Šuppiluliuma of Hatti with a simple request: to marry one of his sons. Upon hearing this request be read, the king is said to have exclaimed, “Such a thing has never happened to me in my whole life!”36 And can you blame him?

Subsequently Šuppiluliuma rushes at the chance to make the most of this opportunity. And with that, I mean that he sends an envoy to investigate the veracity of the message. This earns him another, more irritated missive from the Egyptian queen. Thus convinced, Šuppiluliuma sends one of his younger sons, Zannanza, to Egypt. But an alternative history in which the Kingdom of Egypt and the Kingdom of the Hittites are ruled by offshoots of the same dynasty would not come to past. Zannanza is murdered on his way to his new wife and Ankhesenamun is briefly married off to Ay, a career bureaucrat who had now taken the Egyptian throne.37 Bend on revenge, Šuppiluliuma harkens back to what he knew best: war. These wars would win him some of the Egyptian dominions in Syria and expand the Hittite Empire to the height of its influence thus far, but it would also spell disaster – both for the people of Hatti and for the king himself.

The Plague and the Regrets of Mursili II

After all his intrigues, wars, and politicking, it would be a plague – presumably brought home by prisoners of war – that spelled the end for Šuppiluliuma, as well as claiming the life of his immediate successor, the capable and thoroughly prepared Arnuwanda.38 After the earlier death of Zannanza and with Šarri-Kušuḫ  and Telipinu being viceroys in Syria, the throne came to Šuppiluliuma’s youngest son, the eventual Muršili II. And he could be an endearing secondary protagonist for our series. As this young lad would have to surmount a number of obstacles in order to prove that he was not just a child, too soon burdened with responsibilities which he could not yet handle. Though, perhaps his youth and inexperience were exaggerated in later annals to make his achievements all the more impressive?39 But impressive they were, because the Hittite royal house once again had to fight to hold onto their empire – as Šuppiluliuma himself had once done alongside his father. But with the support of Šarri-Kušuḫ and Telipinu, Muršili succeeded in stabilizing the Kingdom of the Hittites for a time.40

Though his successes would rival that of his father, Muršili was a king who was blessed, or perhaps – as Trevor Bryce wryly notes – cursed, with a healthy disdain for the way the former had taken the throne. Through his prayers and other appeals to the gods, we can surmise that Muršili was a sensitive man who attributed the terrible plague that ravaged the kingdom for years to his father’s misdeeds and who agonized over hard decisions.41 The latter included stripping his scheming stepmother Tawananna, Šuppiluliuma’s second wife and the ruling queen, from her powers. Former queen-consorts exerted a lot of power in Hittite society, even after their husband had died, but Tawananna apparently had gone too far. It may not have helped that Muršili suspected her of killing his beloved wife, Gassulawiya.42 Regardless of the actual blame, it remains heartbreaking to witness the many ways in which we can see Muršili trying to make amends with the gods. And though he left his own son, Muwatalli II, a stable state to rule, a new array of perils would never be far away. Muwatalli had to fight another round with Egypt, repopulate the devastated parts of the kingdom and even defang his own meddlesome stepmother, Danuḫepa.43 But that is a story for another time – or a third season?

Conclusion: Neglected History

Like with the tales about the Anzû bird last week, one might read or hear about these fascinating events from the distant past and wonder why they have only partly filtered through to our current popular culture. This has to do with the fact that what we learn about history is connected to who does the telling. Because history, as Michael-Rolph Trouillot definitively showed, is influenced by the power structures that exist in the societies that historians inhabit, including the way in which such works are supposed to be written and about who. Even if one wants to break that mold, one still has to contend with the pre-existing knowledge and expectations of one’s public.44 As a result of such characteristics of the historian’s craft, there is often not much significance attached to the Hittites in countries that are not Türkiye.45 But it is not only the policies in currently existing states and the history that is therein prioritized which obscure large parts of the tale of humankind for most people who do not study our shared past professionally. We can also observe a – perhaps sometimes unwitting? – multifaceted marginalization of the historical realities of persons who are assumed to have belonged to groups whose role in history has regularly not been deemed all that important until rather recently.46

And to bring their stories into the limelight could be part of the goal of the Bildung offered by blogs such as these – next to providing Hollywood with ideas for awesome new projects. Because it is important to teach those parts of history that you have missed out on during your school years and which – partly because of this – have not yet figured as much in films, books, television series, board- and roleplay games, or post stamps. And while doing this, the people who were regularly systematically left out of earlier works on history, do deserve to finally get a semblance of the same attention that kings and generals are used to by now. Even I have in the preceding hardly talked about the formidable women who played pivotal roles during the rule of all the Hittite kings that we met today – from Ḫattušili I to Muwatalli II – or anyone who did not have a prominent place at the Hittite or Egyptian court, for that matter.47 We will therefore soon venture to delve again into some of the histories of forgotten persons and into the times and tides of everyday life in the past. An endeavor in which mighty monarchs and their fortunes are, for one time, minor interests at best. And this kind of history is, I would wager, also worth material for many a television series!

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References

  1. Anna Westerståhl Stenport & Garrett Traylor, “The Eradication of Memory: Film Adaptations and Algorithms of the Digital”, Cinema Journal 2015, 55 (1), p. 74-94; Justin Wyatt, “On the Limits of Nostalgia: Understanding the Marketplace for Remaking and Rebooting the Hollywood Musical”, in: Matthew Leggatt (ed.), Was It Yesterday? Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television (New York: State University of New York Press, 2021), p. 121.
  2. For an introduction to the scholarship on history as it is disseminated to online sources like Wikipedia, see: Robert S. Wolff, “The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia”, in: Jack Dougherty & Kristen Nawrotzki (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), p. 64-71.
  3. Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2. Though this specific Hittite king did get a role in several novels with a varying degree of historical accuracy, most famously in: Janet E. Morris, I, the Sun: A Novel of the Empire of Hatti (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1983).
  4. Inbar Shaham, “The Wheel of Power in HBO’s Game of Thrones”, Mythlore 2022, 40 (2), p. 56, note 2, 58-62, 69-70.
  5. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites.
  6. Gojko Barjamovic, “Before the Kingdom of the Hittites: Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age”, in: Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller & Daniel T. Potts (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 497-565, Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 8.
  7. Barjamovic, “Before the Kingdom of the Hittites”, p. 497-8; James G. MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire: An Overview”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 1085; Karl W. Butzer, “Environmental Change in the Near East and Human Impact on the Land”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 128-129. For the various other names of the Maraššantiya river, see: Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 9, 393, note 3.
  8. Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, “Prehistoric Western Asia”, in: Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller & Daniel T. Potts (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 30; Barjamovic, “Before the Kingdom of the Hittites”, p. 501.
  9. Akkermans, “Prehistoric Western Asia”, p. 37-38.
  10. MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1086-1087; Akkermans, “Prehistoric Western Asia”, p. 37, 46.
  11. For Göbekli Tepe, see: Chris Scarre, “The World Transformed: From Foragers and Farmers to States and Empires,” in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 188; Trevor Watkins, “From Mobile Foragers to Complex Societies in Southwest Asia”, in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 210-211, 216-217. For Çatalhöyük, see: Louise Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 42-45; Watkins, “From Mobile Foragers to Complex Societies in Southwest Asia”, p. 220-223.
  12. Guillermo Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 63-64.
  13. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 9; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1085-1086.
  14. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 9.
  15. For these examples, see: Cécile Michel, Women of Assur and Kanesh: Texts from the Archives Of Assyrian Merchants (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020); Nancy Highcock, “Assyrians Abroad: Expanding Borders Through Mobile Identities in the Middle Bronze Age”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 2018, 4 (1), p. 77, 86. For the Kaneš-letters in general, see: Cécile Michel, Correspondance des Marchands de Kaniš au Début du IIe Millénaire avant J.-C. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001); Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 218-237.
  16. Marc Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, in: Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller & Daniel T. Potts (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 529; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2016), p. 128; Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 11-20; David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 43. For a critical discussion of some of the older methodologies that used to be deployed in this kind of research, see: Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy, Translated by Soraia Tabatabai (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), p. 183-184.
  17. Ilya Yakubovich, “Hittite”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 222; Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, p. 44.
  18. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 16-17; Yakubovich, “Hittite”, p. 221-225.
  19. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 16; Trevor Bryce, “The Hittie Empire”, in: Daniel Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archeology of the Ancient Near East (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. 725; Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 530.
  20. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 16; Craig Melchert, “Prehistory”, in: Craig Melchert (ed.), The Luwians (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 16.
  21. Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 128.
  22. Bryce, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 723.
  23. Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 538-540; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1088;Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 128-129.
  24. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 99.
  25. MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1089.
  26. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 103-111.
  27. To be a Hittite king meant to fulfill a lot of duties concerning a range of spheres, including the handling of religious affairs and safeguarding the loyalties of the vassals that controlled large parts of the Kingdom of the Hittites, see: Gary Beckman, “Royal Ideology and State Administration in Hittite Anatolia”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 529-538; Trevor Bryce, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 730, 732-735. For Šuppiluliuma specifically, see: Amir Gilan, “The “Šuppiluliuma Conundrum”: A Hittite King between Religious Piety and Political Performance”, in: Kathryn R. Morgan (ed.), Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics: Acting Politically Correct in the Ancient World (Chicago: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago, 2024), p. 193-208.
  28. Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 561; Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 123; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1090-1091.
  29. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 121.
  30. Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 573-574; Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 147; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1091-1092.
  31. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 148.
  32. Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 574-575; Boaz Stavi, “The Genealogy of Šuppiluliuma I”, Altorientalische Forschungen 2012, 38 (2), p. 231.
  33. Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 575-583.
  34. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 179-180; Trevor Bryce, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 730; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1092-1093; Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 547.
  35. Bryce, The Kingdon of the Hittites, p. 178-183; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1093. The Egyptian queen is today also known as Ankhesenpaaten, see: Bryce, The Kingdon of the Hittites, p. 179.
  36. Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East 169. For this attributed quote, see: Bryce, The Kingdon of the Hittites, p. 178.
  37. Marc van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 207.
  38. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 188-191; Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 169.
  39. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 191-197; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, p. 305-306.
  40. He even managed to place the sons of Šarri-Kušuḫ and Telipinu on their respective fathers’ viceregal thrones after their death and so continued Šuppiluliuma’s arrangements in Syria, see: Billie Jean Collins, The Hittites and their World (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), p. 51.
  41. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 220; Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 575, 584.
  42. Weeden, “The Hittite Empire”, p. 588; Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 207-210; Hripsime Haroutunian, “Religious Personnel: Anatolia”, in: Sarah Iles Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 299. It is important to note that ‘Tawananna’ was the title for a reigning queen and may not have been the stepmother’s own name, see: Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 92-94. Shoshana Bin-Nun, The Tawananna in the Hittite Kingdom (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975); Liverani, The Ancient Near East, p. 256.
  43. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 221-245; MacQueen, “The History of Anatolia and of the Hittite Empire”, p. 1094-1095; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, p. 307.
  44. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 19, 56, 73, 97. The conditions described here are especially salient for the earlier histography on the Hittites, see: Weeden, “The Hittie Empire”, p. 533-534.
  45. Eva von Dassow, “Nation Building in the Plain of Antioch from Hatti to Hatay”, in: Agnès Garcia-Ventura & Lorenzo Verderame (eds.), Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), p. 193, 197; Selim Ferruh Adali & Hakan Erol, “The Historiography of Assyriology in Turkey: A Short Survey”, in: Agnès Garcia-Ventura & Lorenzo Verderame (eds.), Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), p. 213-214. The Hittites also figured obliquely in Syrian nation building, see: Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, “The Future of the Past: How the Past Contributes to the Construction of Syrian National Identity”, in: Agnès Garcia-Ventura & Lorenzo Verderame (eds.), Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), p. 333.
  46. Shaham, “The Wheel of Power in HBO’s Game of Thrones”, 70-71. For an instructive example, that being the marginalization of women in the history writing on Wikipedia, despite the best efforts of dedicated authors, see: Martha Saxton, “Wikipedia and Women’s History: A Classroom Experience”, in: Jack Dougherty & Kristen Nawrotzki (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), p. 91-92.
  47. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, p. 86-94, 242.