Brotherhood of Kings

Around 1250 BC, Hattusili III, king of the Hittites (Central Turkey), asked Ramesses II to send him a doctor to help his sister conceive. The Egyptian ruler pointed out that, as the lady in question was well over 50, even a doctor arriving with exotic medicines was unlikely to be successful. Nevertheless, he continued, one never knows what miracles the gods might wreak, so to please his ‘brother’ the requested expert would be despatched. The messenger bearing the Egyptian response was also in charge of some gifts; their details are not preserved as the letter was written in Akkadian cuneiform (the language of Babylonia) on a clay tablet, the end of which has crumbled.

Several facts are worth noting: given its fabric, the letter has largely survived; the language was not that spoken by either correspondent; tone and content indicate a close intimacy between the Hittite and Egyptian courts, emphasised by the fact that the two kings address each other as ‘brother’. This is just one piece of evidence illuminating the close yet shifting diplomatic links which tied kingdoms and empires of the Near East together in the period c.1500-1200 BC. Their number included (at various times) Egypt, the Hittite region, Mittani (north Syria), Assyria (north Iraq), Babylonia (south Iraq), Elam (southwest Iran), Cyprus and Arzawa (western Turkey). Relations were unstable as powers waxed and waned – the Hittites and a burgeoning Assyrian empire destroyed Mittani, which had enjoyed close links with Egypt for a century, c.1350 BC; Arzawa was broken up by the Hittites c.1330 BC; Ramesses II had fought a major battle against the Hittites just 20 years before this letter. But this very instability made the forming of alliances to preserve frontiers against common enemies essential. And they were cemented by sworn treaties, intermarriage at the royal level, regular exchanges of ambassadors and gifts. Recognition of a treaty partner as an equal was signalled by the use of the familial term ‘brother’. And such acknowledged equality did not necessarily correlate with a polity’s power. When the powerful Assyrian king, who had conquered a substantial stretch of Hittite territory in Syria, wrote to his neighbour that they might establish brotherhood, he was rudely rebuffed: ‘As for brotherhood – were we perhaps born of the same mother or father?’Yet the tiny kingdom of Cyprus, sitting on major copper resources, enjoyed ‘brotherhood’ with the mighty Egyptian empire.

The delicately balanced system is documented by clutches of surviving correspondence using Akkadian as the lingua franca. The most important batch was found at the site of Amarna in Egypt and dates to the middle of the 14th century. More has come from the Hittite realm and from the rich port of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, while random references elsewhere show that such interactions spanned the whole period. It is now, moreover, certain that they existed in analogous form considerably earlier. Excavation has just brought to light the fragment of a letter sent to Egypt from Babylon c.1700 BC. And, as Amanda Podany shows, the smaller, ephemeral kingdoms of the preceding seven centuries had maintained similar diplomatic ties, illustrated by the archives of Mari (c. 1800, north Syria) and Ebla (c. 2400, northwest Syria). She uses this material to illuminate the continuous intensive interconnections, which stretched further to affect the Aegean, Central Asia, Indus Valley and Persian Gulf. Her chatty style occasionally risks reducing complexities to triteness, but generally this is avoided and she is careful to signal problems in the very full notes. This is a lively, enjoyable book, effectively hiding the fact that it is based on an enormous amount of painstaking research.