The Late Bronze Age in the West and the Aegean Oxford Handbooks Online 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). Page 1 of 9 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Brown University; date: 17 March 2015 The Late Bronze Age in the West and the Aegean 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 Page 2 of 9 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. 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