Okay, so I have now finished reading The Ahhiyawa Texts by Gary M. Beckman, Trevor R. Bryce and Eric H. Cline, and I can tell you all about it. Well, not “all” actually. The only way to get “all” of it is to read it yourself. But I can tell you all about the parts that made me squee, or go “that’s so amazing!” or just made me stop and ponder the implications. (Though, of course, some of the implications are more for my novels than for reality, but…)
So, to start at the beginning, The Ahhiyawa Texts is a collection, translation and analysis of all the Hittite texts that mention the Ahhiyawa, a group of people of the Late Bronze Age (LBA for short) that are now pretty much universally accepted as being the Mycenaean Greeks. (The term is related to the Homeric term Achaian.) It also includes a few texts that don’t directly mention the Ahhiyawa, but do mention a person known to have worked for/with them. Unfortunately, it does not include the Alaksandu Treaty, despite the fact that anyone interested in the LBA interactions of the Greeks and the Hittites would want to read it, what with it being addressed to a man with a Greek name, and the fact that he’s the king of freakin’ Troy. So I was disappointed that it wasn’t in there, but…well, I’ve read the text of it elsewhere, so it’s not a huge deal; I just would have liked a more up-to-date translation, and one that matched the rest of the translations.
Now, everyone has their own reason for reading a book like this. My reasons are twofold. One, I’m working on a book set 20 years after the Trojan War that has the offspring of a number of major mythical characters going to Hattusa to meet with the Great King of the Hittite Empire, so having the best possible understanding of the relations between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites is obviously very important. And two, I’m generally interested in how myths are created, shaped and formed. Now, a lot of Greek myths have obvious Indo-European roots, and thusly bear strong similarities to dozens of myths from all over the continents of Europe and Asia. But there are also a number of them that don’t adhere to the basic Indo-European myths. Generally speaking, these tend to be myths about human beings, with little to no divine intervention, and even when the gods are involved, they’re not the ones moving the story, just shaping it from a distance. Those are the ones where you have to look to something more local and precise to determine their roots. Not to say that they’re all based on historical reality (of course they aren’t) but there’s always going to be something that sparked a myth, whether an historical event, a cultural peculiarity, or just some guy having a really bad dream and telling all his friends about it without making it clear it was a dream. (Okay, I have no idea if that ever happened, but it seems like the kind of thing that could have happened.)
In short, I was specifically interested in looking at how the historical reality of the LBA might have affected the classical Greek perceptions of the past of the Heroic Age. But only within reason.
So, moving from my motives back to the book, the introduction of course spends a while talking about the way the academic community has interpreted the identifier Ahhiyawa. Because while the linguistic link to Achaian is pretty easy to make (especially since the earlier Hittite texts refer to the Ahhiya rather than the Ahhiaywa) it still poses problems, in that all the Linear B tablets discovered at Mycenaean sites make it very clear that Mycenaean Greece, like Classical Greece, was not a unified state like modern Greece; the palatial centers of the LBA were independent polities just as the city-states of the historic era were independent polities. This meant that there was no King of the Ahhiyawa, if the Ahhiyawa were the Mycenaeans, and yet it was to such a person that the Great King of the Hittites was addressing himself in one of the few letters that (partially) survives of their correspondence.
The two main ways this discrepancy is explained are as follows. One, that the Hittite king was writing to the king of a particular Mycenaean citadel–Miletus (Millawanda) on his own continent, or Mycenae or Thebes–and it’s merely by association that other Mycenaean Greeks might also be referred to as Ahhiyawa. (As the term “Frank” became a commonly used appellation for all European Christians during the era of the Crusades, even though the Franks were only one small subset of that group.) The other is that there was, in fact, some form of cooperation or even overlordship between the different Mycenaean citadels, with one of the local lords having greater power than the others. The first explanation doesn’t work terribly well, because the Great King refers to the King of the Ahhiyawa as “my brother,” a political term for addressing an equal, which Hittite kings reserved for men of their own power level, like the Pharaoh in Egypt. So for the King of the Ahhiyawa to be a mere wanax, controlling only a single palatial center, seems unlikely. Also, as is pointed out in the introduction, some of the references to the level of military power at the King of the Ahhiyawa’s disposal is far greater than that which was available in Pylos at the time of its destruction. (Sadly, Linear B tablets were never meant to be kept, so all we have, as far as Mycenaean records goes, are the tablets that were fire-hardened and thus preserved even as their city burned down.) That leaves the second explanation, that the different palatial centers must have cooperated with each other, at least to a certain extent, in their dealings with the people of Anatolia. There are mythical and historical precedents for this, of course, though naturally the historical ones come later: the alliance of several of the Greek city-states in the face of Xerxes’ invasion, followed by the Delian League, which led to the so-called Athenian Empire, the closest one gets to a single ruler over a number of allegedly independent Greek city-states before the Macedonian conquest of Greece. The mythical precedent is likely to come more easily to mind, though: Agamemnon lorded it over all the other Greek kings at Troy, and if the real Hittites had met the mythical Greeks instead of the real ones, they surely would have seen Agamemnon as the equal of their own king.
Bottom line, although Ahhiyawa = Achaian seems logical, and almost no one is still arguing against it, it isn’t absolutely proven, and it isn’t absolutely perfect, either. But, as the book points out several times, if that isn’t what the Hittites called the Mycenaeans, then they’re unrepresented in the massive Hittite archival texts, despite that we know for a fact they were active on the edges of Hittite territory, given the large number of Mycenaean artifacts found at coastal sites, particularly Miletus (Millawanda) and Ephesus (Apasa). So we have to just assume that we’re right about that equation, and move onwards.
Now that I’ve finished the set-up, I’m going to be a bit less structured, and follow my post-it notes in the book (how did I read this kind of book before I learned I could do that?) to point out the moments in the individual texts that I found most exciting.
We're All Mad Here! 