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The Late Bronze Age in the West and the Aegean

The Late Bronze Age in the West and the Aegean Trevor Bryce The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE) Edited by Gregory McMahon and Sharon Steadman

Print Publication Date: Sep 2011 Subject: Archaeology, Archaeology of the Near East Online Publication Date: Nov DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376142.013.0015 2012

Abstract and Keywords

This article presents data on western Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age, wherein it was the homeland of a wide range of states and population groups. The most important and most powerful of these was a group of kingdoms that are attested in Hittite texts as the Arzawa Lands. Most scholars associate the development of these kingdoms with Luwian-speaking populations who had occupied large parts of Anatolia from (at least) the early second millennium BCE. The most enduring link between Anatolia's Late Bronze Age civilizations and their first- millennium-BCE successors is provided by the Lukka people, one of the Luwian-speaking population groups of southwestern Anatolia. They were almost certainly among the most important agents for the continuity and spread of Luwian culture in southern Anatolia throughout the first millennium BCE.

Keywords: western Anatolia, Arzawa Lands, Lukka people, Luwian culture

In this chapter, the phrase “western Anatolia” encompasses the regions extending along Anatolia’s western and southwestern coasts, from the Troad in the north to Lukka in the south, and inland to the regions stretching north and south of the (Classical) Hermus and Maeander Rivers. During the Late Bronze Age, these regions were occupied by an array of states and population groups known to us from numerous references to them in the tablet archives of the Hittite capital Ḫattuša.

Arzawa: The Historical Background

Prominent among the western Anatolian territories was a land called Arzawa (variant Arzawiya). This land appears a number of times in the Ḫattuša texts, often in conflict with the kingdom of Ḫatti. It is first attested in the reign of the Hittite king Ḫattušili I (r. 1650–1620 B.C.E.),1 who conducted a brief raid into Arzawan territory (§3 of Annals of Ḫattušili I, trans. Gary Beckman in Chavalas 2006:220), perhaps in the context of disputes over the frontier areas that lay between Arzawa and Ḫatti. In the following century, Arzawiya was listed among the cities and countries that rose against the Hittites during the reign of the Hittite king Ammuna (Beckman in Chavalas 2006:231). In addition, around 1400 B.C.E., Arzawa appeared among the (p. 364) western countries that fought against and were conquered by the Hittite king Tudḫaliya I/II2 (Garstang and Gurney 1959:121). Despite the apparent decisiveness of Tudḫaliya’s western campaigns, hostilities between Arzawa and Ḫatti continued through the following decades, culminating in the invasion by Arzawan forces of Hittite subject territory in the reign of Tudḫaliya III (early to mid- fourteenth century B.C.E.), and their occupation of this territory up to the southwestern boundaries of the so-called Hittite homeland in north-central Anatolia (Bryce 2005:146–47). The success of their military operations, at the same time that other enemy forces were launching massive incursions into the homeland from other directions, prompted Amenhotep III, pharaoh of Egypt, to make diplomatic overtures to the Arzawan king Tarḫundaradu, offering him a marriage alliance, no doubt in the expectation that Arzawa was about to replace Ḫatti as the superpower of the Anatolian region (Moran 1992:31; see Beal, chapter 26 in this volume).

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However, his approach to Tarḫundaradu was premature. The Hittites regained their lost territories in a series of retaliatory military campaigns of which the Hittite prince Šuppiluliuma, son of Tudḫaliya, appears to have been the principal architect (for more on the Hittite Empire, see Beal, chapter 26 in this volume). One of Šuppiluliuma’s major tasks was to drive the Arzawans from the occupied territories in the southwest, in the region called the Lower Land. He apparently succeeded in doing so after a series of hard-fought contests. Nevertheless, Arzawa continued to threaten Ḫatti’s western and southwestern frontier territories. An abortive Hittite campaign against the Arzawan leader Anzapaḫḫadu served to emphasize that the Arzawans remained a formidable military opponent. When Anzapaḫḫadu refused a demand from Šuppiluliuma to return refugees from Hittite authority, Šuppiluliuma dispatched to the region an army led by his commander Ḫimuili to enforce his demand. The Hittite army was ambushed and destroyed, and Šuppiluliuma was obliged to take the field at the head of another expeditionary force to complete the mission (from the “Deeds of Šuppiluliuma,” trans. Harry A. Hoffner Jr. in Hallo and Younger 2003:vol. 1, 188). After his accession to the Hittite throne, he installed one of his ablest military commanders, Ḫannutti, as governor of the Lower Land, clearly intending this region to serve as a base for further military operations against Arzawan territories (Bryce 2005:151).

The Geographical Extent and Political and Ethnic Composition of the Arzawa Lands

From these scattered pieces of information, it is clear that Arzawa constituted a major threat to the security of the kingdom of Ḫatti from the kingdom’s early days, and at one point in the fourteenth century B.C.E. may have come close to achieving (p. 365) political and military supremacy over much of the Anatolian region, even including the land of Ḫatti. That at least seems to be the implication of Amenhotep III’s approach to Tarḫundaradu. But what do we actually know of Arzawa, its geographical extent, and political composition? In a broad sense, the territories comprising this land stretched from the Aegean coast through much of western Anatolia, from the Troad region in the northwest probably to the western edges of the Plain of Konya. Most scholars believe that these territories had been settled by large numbers of Luwian-speaking peoples during the early centuries of the second millennium B.C.E. This belief is based to some extent on the fact that the name “Luwiya” in early versions of the Hittite laws (§§5, 19–21, 23a, trans. Harry A. Hoffner Jr. in Hallo and Younger 2003:vol. 2, 107, 108) is replaced by “Arzawa” in later versions. It is generally assumed that the regions to which the two names refer were virtually one and the same. This leads to the further assumption that the Arzawa lands were occupied by Luwian-speaking population groups. But the explanation for the name replacement remains a matter for debate. Recently, Yakubovich has argued that the Arzawa regions were settled predominantly by ancestors of the Carian population groups, who occupied a large part of southwestern Anatolia from the late second millennium B.C.E. onward, as attested in Classical texts (see later discussion). He argues that what Luwian presence there was in the west may have been due (in part at least) to population deportation from south-central Anatolia, a major area of Luwian settlement, in the aftermath of Arzawan attacks on the Lower Land (Yakubovich 2009; and see Yakubovich, chapter 23 in this volume, for additional discussion of Luwian). For the more traditional view, that substantial numbers of Luwian speakers had spread into western Anatolia by the Late Bronze Age and were responsible for the formation of the Arzawa states, see Bryce in Melchert (2003:27–38). In any case, there seems no doubt that the Arzawan regions, and western Anatolia in general, had a substantial Indo-European population in the Late Bronze Age (Luwian and Carian are both Indo-European languages), although these regions almost certainly contained a large non-Indo- European population as well, whose ancestral roots may have extended back many generations—indeed many centuries—before the arrival of the first Indo-Europeans.

As a geopolitical term, Arzawa is used in Hittite texts sometimes in a purely generic sense, sometimes more specifically to refer to up to five states or kingdoms constituting the Arzawa Lands. The clearest references to individual Arzawan kingdoms are to be found in the texts of the Hittite king Muršili II, son and (second) successor of Šuppiluliuma, and Muwattalli II, Muršili’s own son and successor (see Beal, chapter 26 in this volume). What was apparently the most important of these kingdoms became a prime target of Muršili’s early military campaigns. On his accession, Muršili was confronted with aggression by many neighboring enemy countries and widespread rebellions among his own subject territories. In the west, Arzawa played a leading role in the uprisings. Here, a king of Arzawa called Uḫḫaziti sought to win or force Hittite subject states in the region away from their allegiance and provided asylum for refugees from Hittite authority. Muršili invaded and conquered Uḫḫaziti’s kingdom in a campaign he conducted against Arzawa in the third (p. 366) and fourth years of his reign, though Uḫḫaziti himself avoided capture by fleeing to an offshore island (trans. Beal in Hallo and Younger 2003:vol. 2, 85–86). Many

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scholars believe that Uḫḫaziti’s kingdom served as a political and military nucleus of the Arzawa lands. For this reason, it is commonly referred to as Arzawa Minor (or Arzawa Proper). Uḫḫaziti’s royal seat was located at Apaša, almost certainly to be identified with the site at Ayasuluk, near Classical Ephesus (Büyükkolancı 2000). Here, perhaps, the invasion of Hittite territory in the reign of the Hittite king Tudḫaliya III was organized under the leadership of the above-mentioned Tarḫundaradu, who was conceivably one of Uḫḫaziti’s predecessors on the throne at Apaša. After his victories in Arzawan territory, Muršili may have decided to end all further threats posed to his kingdom by Arzawa Minor by evacuating its population and allocating its territory to neighboring states. He claims to have deported 65,000 (or 66,000) of its inhabitants to the Hittite homeland. According to a proposal first put forward by S. Heinhold-Krahmer (1977:136–47), Arzawa Minor now ceased to exist.

Very likely the greatest (if not the sole) beneficiary of its dismantling was the kingdom called Mira. This was one of four western Anatolian kingdoms commonly designated as Arzawa lands. The others were Šeḫa River Land, Wiluša, and Ḫapalla. Ḫapalla was the easternmost of these lands and is probably to be located in central-western Anatolia to the northwest of the Hittite Lower Land. As a follow-up to his Arzawan campaigns, Muršili sought to consolidate his authority in the west by imposing vassal status on the kingdoms of the region. Treaties that he drew up with the rulers of three of them—Targašnalli of Ḫapalla, Kupanta-Kurunta of Mira-Kuwaliya, and Manapa- Tarḫunda of Šeḫa River Land—are still partially extant (Beckman 1999:74–82, 82–86, 69–73 respectively). Also extant is a treaty which Muršili’s son and successor Muwattalli II drew up with Alakšandu, king of Wiluša (Beckman 1999:87–93). This treaty partly confirms the identity of the above-mentioned lands as members of the Arzawa complex: “You are the four kings of the Arzawa lands: you Alakšandu, Manapa-Tarḫunda [modern correction from Manapa-Kurunta in the original], Kupanta-Kurunta, and Ura-Ḫattuša” (assumed to have been king of Ḫapalla at the time) (Alakšandu treaty §14, after Beckman 1999:90). Could the Arzawa lands have once formed part of a single united kingdom of Arzawa, before their division into separate independent states? None of the surviving Arzawa texts give any indication of this. In fact, in one of the earliest of these texts, Arzawa (Minor?), Šeḫa River Land, and Ḫapalla are listed quite separately among the countries against which Tudḫaliya I/II campaigned on his first of four campaigns in the west (Garstang and Gurney 1959:121). Wiluša (in the form Wilušiya) is the only “Arzawa land” to appear in a list of twenty-two countries forming what is commonly known as the Aššuwan Confederacy (Aššuwa was the name of the region in which they lay), which Tudḫaliya defeated on his second campaign (Garstang and Gurney 1959:121–22). The Arzawan countries may sometimes have combined their forces for large-scale military operations, particularly against powerful enemies like the Hittites. But the confederacies they formed included states and peoples who were not part of the Arzawa complex, and on some occasions confederacies with an (p. 367) Arzawan component did not extend to all the Arzawa lands. There is no indication that any sense of kinship ties or a common ethnic background had anything to do with the formation of these confederacies.

Nonetheless, Arzawa played a leading role in many of the western military alliances. The Arzawa lands are the only known western states with whose rulers Hittite kings, at least from Muršili II onward, drew up treaties. They are thus accorded a status that clearly differentiated them from other western Anatolian peoples and communities, with whom Hittite relations were apparently less formal and more irregular. The largest and most powerful of the Arzawa states, at least from the late fourteenth century B.C.E. onward, was the kingdom of Mira. I have referred to the likelihood that Muršili II incorporated much if not all of what we have called Arzawa Minor into its territory. It was further increased by the addition of a land called Kuwaliya. The latter has been plausibly located by Hawkins (1998:22–24) near the headwaters of the Maeander River, its chief city perhaps to be identified with the site of Beycesultan. The kingdom’s northern boundary may have been marked in part by an inscribed monument located twenty-eight kilometers east of İzmir, in a pass through the Tmolus Mountain Range. The relief of an armed human figure is accompanied by a weathered inscription in Luwian hieroglyphs. The inscription, recently deciphered by Hawkins (1998:4–10), identifies the figure as a king of Mira called Tarkašnawa. This man occupied Mira’s throne in the final decades of the thirteenth century B.C.E., during the reign of the Hittite king Tudḫaliya IV, and may well have been accorded by Tudḫaliya the status of a regional overlord, with extensive authority over much of the western Anatolian coastal region (see Bryce 2005:306–8).

To the north of Mira lay the country called Šeḫa River Land. Around 1318 B.C.E., the kingdom’s ruler Manapa- Tarḫunda rebelled against Muršili II but resubmitted to Hittite authority to save his capital from destruction when Muršili’s army prepared to lay siege to it (trans. Beal in Hallo and Younger 2003:vol. 2, 86; Beckman 1999:83 §4; see Beal, chapter 26 in this volume). Muršili accepted his submission, allegedly after Manapa-Tarḫunda had sent to him a deputation consisting of his mother and other elderly citizens to plead for mercy. Its territory was expanded

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to include a land called Appawiya (otherwise unknown), and the island Lazpa (Greek Lesbos) was also a dependency of it (see Houwink ten Cate 1985–86:44–46). A northwestern location for the kingdom thus seems assured, and the Šeḫa River itself is probably to be identified with the Classical Caicus (modern Bakır) or the Hermus (modern Gediz) River.

The other western Anatolian state included by the Hittite king Muwattalli II among the Arzawa lands is the kingdom of Wiluša. From a letter written by Manapa-Tarḫunda to his Hittite overlord Muwattalli II (Houwink ten Cate 1985– 86:34–64), we learn that a Hittite army dispatched to Wiluša to restore order in the country proceeded into it by way of Šeḫa River Land. We may conclude from this that Wiluša lay north of Šeḫa River Land (because Mira was almost certainly the latter’s immediate neighbor to the south), and if so, the only space left for it in coastal Anatolia is the northwest corner, that is, the region the Classical Greeks called the Troad. (p. 368) We thus appear to have geographical support for the identification of Wiluša with Troy/(W)ilios, as first suggested by the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer in the 1920s and much debated since then. Most scholars now accept the identification—prompting fresh scrutiny of the Hittite texts that refer to Wiluša (see Jablonka, chapter 32 in this volume).

As already noted, the name first appears in Hittite texts, in the form Wilušiya, in the list of western countries forming the anti-Hittite Aššuwan Confederacy, ca. 1400 B.C.E. It is the penultimate name on the list. Taruiša, the last name, has been equated with Homeric Troia. In the Iliad, (W)ilios and Troia are used interchangeably for the city of Priam. A possible explanation for this is that their Hittite equivalents, Wilušiya and Taruiša, were originally separate but adjoining countries that subsequently merged, with local tradition preserving the latter’s name until it resurfaced in the form Troia as an alternative to Ilios in Homeric tradition. Some time after the destruction of the Aššuwan Confederacy, Wiluša became one of Ḫatti’s vassal states, and in the early decades of the thirteenth century B.C.E., its king Alakšandu concluded a treaty with Muwattalli II, as noted. Wiluša may have been occupied by enemy forces on at least one occasion during the thirteenth century B.C.E., and/or destabilized by uprisings among its own population (Bryce 2006:184). Toward the end of the century, its last known ruler, Walmu, appears to have been driven from his throne but was restored to it by the Hittite king Tudḫaliya IV (Beckman 1999:145).

A number of attempts have been made to link the snippets of information provided about Wiluša in Hittite texts with the Greek tradition of a Trojan War (e.g., Latacz 2004). In my view, none have been convincing (see Bryce 2006:182–86). Although the Late Bronze Age Level at Troy (Troy VI) does have a few (very superficial) similarities to the city of Priam described in Homer’s Iliad, the destruction of this level, probably in the early decades of the thirteenth century B.C.E. (see Mountjoy 1999), almost certainly predates any of the thirteenth-century references to Wiluša. Also, none of the passages referring to Wiluša associate it with Late Bronze Age Greeks, with the probable exception of the so-called Tawagalawa letter, referred to below.

Aḫḫiyawa and its Role in Western Anatolia

Among the tablets found in Ḫattuša, there are twenty-six (mostly edited by Sommer in 1932), the majority of them very fragmentary, which refer to a land called Aḫḫiyawa, and sometimes to a king of Aḫḫiyawa. All are written in Hittite cuneiform. The now widely accepted identification of Aḫḫiyawa with the Late Bronze Age Greek world dates back to the 1920s when Forrer (1924) argued that Aḫḫiyawa was (p. 369) the Hittite form of the Greek name Achaiwia, an archaic form of Achaia. He noted that “Achaian” is one of the three names by which the Greeks are known in the Iliad. Late Bronze Age Greeks are now commonly referred to as Mycenaeans, a name coined in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann from Mycenae, the archetypal Late Bronze Greek site, and in Greek legendary tradition the seat of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War. On the basis of its Mycenaean identification, the term Aḫḫiyawa appears to be used in Hittite texts (1) as a general ethnogeographical designation encompassing all areas of Mycenaean settlement, both in mainland Greece and overseas; (2) to designate a specific Mycenaean kingdom, at least one of whose rulers corresponded with his counterpart in Ḫatti; and (3) to designate this kingdom in a broader sense, including the territories attached to it as political and military dependencies. Mycenae is generally assumed to have been the seat of the kingdom called Aḫḫiyawa in Hittite texts, but Thebes in Boeotia has also been suggested (see, e.g., Latacz 2004:242–44). What is of particular importance in the identification of the Mycenaean world with Aḫḫiyawa is that the Aḫḫiyawa texts provide our very first written sources of information on the contacts, relationships, and interactions between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds.

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This information provides a valuable complement to the relevant archaeological data—which on their own have told us little about the nature of Aegean–Near Eastern contacts in the Late Bronze Age. Mycenaean products have come to light at a large number of sites along Anatolia’s Aegean coast as well as in Rhodes, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Levant. But the evidence for an actual Mycenaean presence in these regions is extremely sparse. Mycenaean settlements on Rhodes and other islands of the Dodecanese may have been no more than merchant enclaves within a native population, and we have no evidence that Mycenaeans ever established settlements in Cyprus or on the Levantine coast. Indeed, it is questionable whether the presence of Mycenaean artifacts at the great majority of sites where they were found indicate that Mycenaean merchants themselves were directly involved in trading activities at these sites. Much of the trade in Mycenaean products may have been in the hands of intermediaries, like the merchant-operators of the ill-fated vessels that foundered off the coast of southwestern Anatolia (the Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya wrecks). The only clear evidence we have for significant Mycenaean settlement anywhere in the Near Eastern region is at Miletus on the southwestern Anatolian coast, at the mouth of the Maeander River, and at the site now called Müsgebi, further to the south, where a large number of Late Helladic IIIA–C chamber tombs have come to light (Mee 1978:137–42).

The earliest archaeologically attested Aegean settlers at Miletus were immigrants from Minoan Crete. Two periods of Minoan settlement have been identified. The first dates to the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000–1650 B.C.E.; Miletus Level III), extending from the Middle Minoan IA to the Middle Minoan IIB Period. The second postdates the destruction of the city ca. 1650 B.C.E., and belongs to the first of the city’s three Late Bronze Age phases (Level IV). Evidence of the earlier period of Minoan settlement is provided, according to the site’s excavator W.-D. Niemeier, by (p. 370) a substantial quantity of Minoan domestic ware and a couple of Minoan-type seals and a seal impression that may be indicative of a Minoan administration (Niemeier 2005:3). Evidence of the later period is provided by Minoan-type kitchenware (including tripod cooking pots and large quantities of domestic pottery) and fragments of frescoes, Minoan in both technique and content, from the wall of a building that may have been used for cultic purposes.

The destruction of the second Minoan settlement in the first half of the fifteenth century B.C.E. may have been due to Mycenaean conquerors. A Mycenaean settlement was perhaps established on the site at this time, if we can so judge from the substantial quantity of Mycenaean pottery and a number of Mycenaean-type tombs found at Miletus and dating to this period (Miletus V). But the clearest evidence for Mycenaean settlement belongs to Level VI, in the city’s third and final Late Bronze Age phase beginning ca. 1400 B.C.E. The city’s fortifications, Mycenaean-type pottery, domestic architecture, and burial practices all seem to indicate that the city in this phase of its existence was predominantly a Mycenaean settlement, though still with a significant admixture of Anatolian elements. (For comprehensive treatments of both the Minoan and the Mycenaean presence in western Anatolia, see Niemeier 1998, 2005.)

In this context we can begin correlating archaeological data about western Anatolia with information provided by Hittite texts. In these texts, Miletus is called Milawata, or Millawanda. The Hittite king Muršili II reports that in his third regnal year, ca. 1318 B.C.E., he dispatched a Hittite army to destroy Milawata for joining an alliance with a king of Aḫḫiyawa (Goetze 1933:36–37). The implication is that Milawata was considered a Hittite subject territory at that time and had broken its allegiance to Ḫatti. In the same year, the Arzawan king Uḫḫaziti was forced to flee Hittite authority, as we have noted, taking refuge on one of the offshore islands that were under the control of the Aḫḫiyawan king (see Beal, chapter 26 in this volume). In a letter that a Hittite king, almost certainly Ḫattušili III, grandson and second successor of Muršili, wrote to his Aḫḫiyawan counterpart (the first part of the letter that must have contained both author’s and recipient’s names is now lost), Aḫḫiyawa again appears to have been a disruptive force in the western Anatolian region (Garstang and Gurney 1959:111–14; Sommer 1932:2–194). On this occasion, its king was accused of supporting the activities of a man called Piyamaradu, leader of anti-Hittite resistance movements in the west. (Piyamaradu is in fact the principal subject of the letter that is commonly but inappropriately referred to as the Tawagalawa letter.) The Hittite king sought Aḫḫiyawan cooperation in putting an end to his operations in Hittite subject territory. In this letter also, the author indicates that Wiluša had once been the subject of a dispute, perhaps even a military conflict, in which he had engaged with his Aḫḫiyawan counterpart (see Güterbock 1986:37).

Hittite texts thus provide an important additional dimension to the study of Late Bronze Age Greek contacts with western Anatolia. On the basis of archaeological evidence alone, we might conclude that these contacts were confined to trading activities (which were perhaps conducted in many cases by intermediaries), (p. 371) of which the Mycenaean settlement established ca. 1400 B.C.E. at Miletus may have provided the focal point, in the wake of

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earlier Minoan trading colonies on the site. But written evidence makes clear that Aḫḫiyawans were politically and militarily involved in the region as well. Already around the end of the fifteenth century B.C.E., an Aḫḫiyawan leader called Attarššiya (Attariššiya) had established a base in western Anatolia and had at his disposal a small army of infantry and 100 chariots (Beckman 1999:156). He appears not to have had the status of a king (LUGAL) (see Bryce 2006:102). But his military enterprises may have paved the way for later Aḫḫiyawan kings to attempt to establish control over parts of the Anatolian coastlands, perhaps using disaffected Hittite subjects as the agents for the expansion of their interests in this region. Inevitably, this constituted a serious challenge to Hittite sovereignty in the western Anatolian states. Disaffection with Hittite rule in a number of these states may well have encouraged Aḫḫiyawan enterprise. In the face of this challenge, and in the light of the Hittites’ general reluctance to commit their military resources to repeated campaigns in the west, Hittite kings may have sought to resolve the crises in the region by diplomacy wherever possible rather than by force. Thus it is likely that Miletus, though subject to Ḫatti in the early years of Muršili II’s reign, was ceded by the end of the century to a king of Aḫḫiyawa, and henceforth became subject territory of this king, as acknowledged by Ḫattušili in the Tawagalawa letter. This is consistent with the archaeological data, which indicate that Miletus was a substantially Mycenaean settlement at this time (extracts in Garstang and Gurney 1959:111–15; Sommer 1932:2–196).

In the course of his letter, Ḫattušili refers to his addressee as “My Brother,” and “Great King,” thus ranking him as one of the Great Kings of the Near Eastern world. (Other members of this exclusive group were the rulers of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt.) But it is very likely that the use of these honorifics in the Hittite letter may simply be a piece of ad hoc political expediency, used by Ḫattušili to win the goodwill and cooperation of his addressee, rather than a genuine acknowledgment of the Aḫḫiyawan’s actual status in the Near Eastern world. None of the other Great Kings make even a passing reference to a king of Aḫḫiyawa (or for that matter to a country called Aḫḫiyawa), let alone accord such a king a status equal to their own. But if Ḫattušili did seek by diplomatic means to win Aḫḫiyawan cooperation in restoring stability to the Hittites’ western states, his efforts appear to have failed. Aḫḫiyawa continued to threaten the Hittites’ hold over their western territories. In the reign of Ḫattušili’s son and successor, Tudḫaliya IV, an Aḫḫiyawan king (perhaps the successor of Ḫattušili’s addressee) was accused of aiding and abetting another anti-Hittite rebellion in the west. In this case, the uprising was led by a man called Tarḫunaradu who had seized the throne of Šeḫa River Land from its legitimate Hittite-endorsed occupant (Bryce 2005:304–5).

Quite possibly, the Aḫḫiyawan king’s support of the rebel was one of the factors that prompted Tudḫaliya to set about removing the Aḫḫiyawan presence once and for all from western Anatolia—if we may so conjecture from a document dated to Tudḫaliya’s reign and commonly known as the Milawata letter (Beckman 1999:144–46). The letter is very fragmentary, and its interpretation is problematic. (p. 372) But one of the conclusions to be drawn from it is that Tudḫaliya eventually succeeded in restoring Milawata/Miletus to Hittite overlordship. If so, he would thus have deprived the Aḫḫiyawan king of his only known base of operations in Anatolia. It is just possible that the end of the Aḫḫiyawan power in Anatolia is reflected in the draft of a treaty that Tudḫaliya drew up with his Syrian vassal Šaušgamuwa, ruler of the kingdom called Amurru. Originally, the king of Aḫḫiyawa was among the Great Kings listed on the tablet. But his name was removed by having a line drawn through it while the clay was still soft (Beckman 1999:106 §11). There are of course a number of possible explanations for the erasure.

Other Western Anatolian Peoples

In addition to the Arzawan kingdoms, the western Anatolian geopolitical complex consisted of a number of peoples, countries, and communities over which Hittite influence was less direct. The country called Maša was one of these. It probably lay in the northwestern sector of Anatolia. The name has been linked, very conjecturally, with the Maeonians of Classical legendary tradition, whose homeland lay at the base of Mt. Tmolus (modern Boz Dağı) in the region of Lydia. Apparently governed by a council of elders rather than a king, Maša was not part of the Hittite vassal system—though the Hittites took military action against it when it provided asylum for a rebel Hittite vassal who sought refuge there (Bryce 2005:212–14). A contingent from Maša fought on the Hittite side in the battle of Qadesh, probably in a mercenary capacity (Gardiner 1960:8). In a recently discovered inscription in Ḫattuša, the so-called Südburg inscription, Maša is listed among the western lands conquered and annexed by the last Hittite king Šuppiluliuma II (1207–B.C.E.) (Hawkins 1995:22–23). It thus appears to have been incorporated into Hittite subject territory as the kingdom of Ḫatti was entering its final years.

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Also in the west lay the country Karkiša, which like Maša was governed by a council of elders. It, too, remained independent of Hittite authority, sometimes collaborating with the Hittites, sometimes in conflict with them. The name Karkiša may be etymologically linked with that of Caria, a country occupying a large part of southwestern Anatolia during the Classical Period. Herodotus (1.171) states that the Carians came there as immigrants from the Aegean islands, after being displaced from their original homelands by Ionian and Dorian Greeks. But he notes that the Carians themselves claimed that they were native Anatolians, and had always been called Carians. Homer’s reference to them in the Iliad (2.867) as “speakers of a barbarian language” clearly distinguishes them from immigrant Greeks. Though we cannot draw any firm conclusions from these literary sources, it remains a distinct possibility that the Carians of the Classical Period had ancestral roots in Late Bronze Age Anatolia—consistent with Yakubovich’s theory that the occupants of the Arzawa lands were at least in part of proto-Carian stock.

(p. 373) A further, and perhaps more clear-cut, example of population continuity between the Late Bronze and Iron Ages is provided by the inhabitants of Lukka, or the Lukka lands. Lukka-people, who were among the Luwian- speaking population groups, are referred to relatively frequently in Hittite texts, with an occasional reference to them in Egyptian records as well (see Bryce in Melchert 2003:40–45). We can conclude from the Hittite sources that the term Lukka was used not in reference to a state with a clearly defined political organization but to a conglomerate of independent communities, with close ethnic affinities and lying within a roughly definable region in southwestern Anatolia, extending from the western end of Pamphylia through Lycaonia, Pisidia, and Lycia (the later Classical names). Furthermore, although it seems clear that there was a central Lukka region, a “Lukka homeland,” various elements of the Lukka population may have been widely scattered through southern and western Anatolia, and may in some cases have settled temporarily or permanently in states with formal political organizations. The first millennium B.C.E. country called Lycia (Lykia) in Classical texts was almost certainly part of the region occupied by the Late Bronze Age Lukka people. Indeed the name Lycia appears to have been derived from Lukka—though unwittingly, since Classical tradition assigned various Greek etymologies (all false) to the name. In their own language, the Lycians called their country Trm̃misa and themselves Trm̃mili. The Lycian language, attested in ca. 200 inscriptions carved in stone (mainly on rock-cut tombs), has a number of affinities with the Bronze Age Luwian language (see Melchert, chapter 31, and Yakubovich, chapter 23 in this volume). Some of the major Lycian deities are of Bronze Age origin. In addition, Luwian onomastic elements are found in the inscriptions of Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, Isauria, Lycaonia, and Cilicia, with a particular concentration of Luwian names in Lycia and Cilicia Tracheia/Aspera (Rough Cilicia) (Houwink ten Cate 1965). These areas almost certainly continued to be inhabited by peoples of Luwian ethnic origin until at least the early first millennium C.E. They provide the most enduring link we have between Anatolia’s Late Bronze Age civilizations and their successors in the Iron Age and Classical Periods.

Conclusion

During the Late Bronze Age, western Anatolia was the homeland of a wide range of states and population groups. The most important and most powerful of these was a group of kingdoms that are attested in Hittite texts as the Arzawa Lands. Most scholars associate the development of these kingdoms with Luwian-speaking populations who had occupied large parts of Anatolia from (at least) the early second millennium B.C.E. Though their rulers became vassals of the Great King of Ḫatti, they frequently took up arms against their overlord and were prone to forming military confederacies, which ultimately threatened the security of Hittite core (p. 374) territory. Interference in western Anatolian affairs by rulers from a land called Aḫḫiyawa in Hittite texts further increased the region’s volatility. Almost all scholars now agree that Aḫḫiyawa refers to the Mycenaean Greek world. Miletus, called Milawata (Millawanda) in Hittite texts, became for a time subject territory of a king of Aḫḫiyawa, and the base for Aḫḫiyawan enterprises in the region. The city had previously been settled, in the Middle and early Late Bronze Ages, by immigrants from Minoan Crete. Maša and Karkiša were among the western Anatolian lands that remained independent of Hittite control. Karkiša’s population may have had ethnic links with the later Carians. But the most enduring link between Anatolia’s Late Bronze Age civilizations and their first millennium B.C.E. successors is provided by the Lukka people, one of the Luwian-speaking population groups of southwestern Anatolia. They were almost certainly among the most important agents for the continuity and spread of Luwian culture in southern Anatolia throughout the first millennium B.C.E.

References

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Büyükkolancı, Mustafa. 2000. Excavations on Ayasuluk Hill in Selçuk/Turkey. A Contribution to the Early History of Ephesus. In Die Ägäis und das Westliche Mittelmeer. Beziehungen und Wechselwirkungen 8. bis 5. Jh. v. Chr. (Archäologischen Forschungen Bd 4), Akten des Symposions, Vienna, March 24–27, 1999, ed. Friedrich Krinzinger, 39–43. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

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(p. 375) Forrer, Emil. 1924. Die Griechen in den Boghazköi-Texten. Orientalische Literaturzeitung 27: 113–18.

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Niemeier, Wolfgang-Dietrich. 2005. Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, and Ionians in Western Asia Minor. New Excavations in Bronze Age Miletus-Milawata. In The Greeks in the East, ed. Alexandra Villing, 1–36. London: British Museum.

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Yakubovich, Ilya. 2009. Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language. Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics, vol. 2. Leiden: Brill.

Notes:

(1) . All regnal dates are approximate, and are based on the so-called Middle Chronology.

(2) . It is uncertain whether there were one or two Hittite kings of this name in the late fourteenth to early thirteenth century B.C.E.

Trevor Bryce Trevor Bryce is Honorary Research Consultant at the University of Queensland and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

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