L'Anatolia occidentale nel medio regno ittita.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Review

By STEFANO DE MARTINO. Eothen. Collana di studi sulle civilta dell'Oriente antico, vol. 5. Florence: IL VANTAGIO EDITORE, 1996. Pp. 123.

Hittitologists have long made good use of the prologue to the Telipinu Proclamation to establish the framework for reconstructions of Old Hittite history, and we have enjoyed an ever-increasing number of narrative sources (royal annals, introductions to treaties, hieroglyphic display inscriptions, etc.) on which to base our accounts of the Empire. In contrast, only a few documents provide information on the Middle Hittite period (fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries B.C.E.), and many of these have come to us in very poor condition. In addition, until about twenty-five years ago, texts originally composed during the reigns of the Middle Hittite kings Tudhaliya I and lI and Arnuwanda I were misattributed to their late successors Tudhaliya IV and Arnuwanda III. Consequently, Middle Hittite times, in which the foundations for imperial expansion were laid, remain the least understood epoch of the history of Hatti.

Interestingly enough, the first primary evidence concerning the Hittites to become available to modern scholarship pertains precisely to the latter years of this period: copies of letters (in Hittite!) exchanged by Amenophis III and Tarhuntaradu of Arzawa in southwestern Anatolia, which were discovered among the Amarna correspondence and initially published in 1889-90 (EA 31 = VBoT 1 and EA 32 = VBoT2). In the first of these letters the Egyptian remarks that "the land of Hattusa is shattered(??)," and requests that his correspondent send him exotic Kaskaean slaves. Since this people dwelt in north-central Anatolia between Hattusa and the Black Sea, Tarhuntaradu might be expected to have access to them only if the Hittite state was in decline. And indeed, we now know that the Middle Hittite period witnessed a struggle between Hatti and Arzawa for the domination of the peninsula of Asia Minor, a conflict which was ultimately resolved only with the conquest and dismemberment of Arzawa by Mursili II in the late fourteenth century.

The work under review is devoted to the elucidation of the early course of this contest. Within its short compass the author presents a concise and persuasive synthesis of the evidence available from both contemporary and later Hittite documents. Building on a suggestion of M. Forlanini, de Martino (pp...