The chariots of Ahhiyawa

Change, Continuity, and Connectivity: North-Eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the Bronze Age and in the early Iron Age , 2018

The paper is written as a part of project ‘The Trojan Catalogue (Hom. Il. 2.816-877) and the Peoples of western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. A Study of the Homeric Text in the Light of Hittite Sources and Classical Geographical Tradition’ (2015/19/P/HS3/04161), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665778 with the National Science Centre, Poland. This paper deals with both, archaeological evidence for cultural links between the Mycenaean world and western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age, and the Ahhiyawa problem that is based on nearly thirty Hittite texts (among the thousands that had been found in the archives of the Hittite capital Hattusa, modern Boğazkale about 150 km as the crow flies east of Ankara), in which the term “Ahhiya(wa)” appears.² Both issues are indeed connected and must not be treated separately, although there are still many scholars to do so. What is more, concerning the former “there is an unfortunate tendency in much...

2010

Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, 2018

HITTITE AHHIYAWAN POLITICS AS SEEN FROM THE TABLETS: A REACTION TO TREVOR BRYCE'S ARTICLE FROM A HITTITOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE The relationships between Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire with its power-base in central Anatolia belong to the most controversial and intensely discussed themes of Late Bronze Age history. Sometimes associated with this discussion is a search for 'European' origins, which I have to submit that I find rather problematic. I do not think it makes much sense to project an alleged contrast much less an opposition between 'Europe' and 'Asia' to any time before the direct historical context of the altercation between the city-states of Greece and the Persian Empire which gave rise to such counterposition in the concrete context of a political and military conflict. Prior to this, the Mycenaean and Hittite worlds shared a great deal of similarities but also numerous differences. Whether these were fetishised as identities shaped by an East vs West dynamic is impossible to tell from the nature of the sources at our disposal, but my feeling is that it is rather unlikely that they were. Such an identity-founding narrative is clearly not what Trevor Bryce means when he seeks the earliest example of a written document in 'European' literature in a fragmentary letter written in Hittite found at the Hittite capital in central Anatolia (AhT 6, KUB 26.91). However, the naming of identities such as these demonstrates the febrile and dangerous background against which the debates concerning Mycenaean-Hittite contacts are played out. It is thus of the highest importance that these debates are conducted with the closest attention to the contextual peculiarities of the primary source material on both sides and that these sources are interrogated only for the information that they can be expected to give us from the perspective of their historical use-contexts.

History: Reviews of New Books, 2019

STAMPOLIDIS, N. – Ç. MANER – K. KOPANIAS (eds.): NOSTOI. Indigenous Culture, Migration and Integration in the Aegean Islands and Western Anatolia during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (Istanbul 2015) 81‒114., 2015

Western Anatolia played a more or less prominent role in a number of archaeological and historical scenarios over the years, notwithstanding the fact that, despite more than a century of research, we still largely know only the coastal sites. The vast area between the coast and the Anatolian plateau is known only from surveys, with the sole exception of Beycesultan. It is therefore necessary to develop a new chronological periodisation and cultural scheme, appropriate to the fragmentary survey material and lacking stratigraphies. Both will be proposed in this paper. Using the latest information on Troy, Liman Tepe, Bademgediği Tepe, and Miletus together with firsthand knowledge of material from both East Aegean littoral islands and the West Anatolian inland sites, the article discusses the available settlement structure, makes use of some basic GIS applications, draws eventual cultural boundaries based on pottery distribution, and attempts to compare the thus gained archaeological groupings with the currently valid so-called Hittite political geography for Western Anatolia. Finally, it proposes some lines of thought concerning the identity of the population in the individual archaeologically identifiable cultural groupings.

JEMAHS, 2019