Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
81. Lisa Wilhelmi: Bronze Age Diplomacy
Lisa Wilhelmi discusses the international system in the ancient Middlle East. The 14th century BC tablets from Amarna in Egypt, and tablets from the royal archives in Hattusa (Türkiye), reveal diplomatic exchanges between the great powers that ruled the region. What did they want from each other? Who and what moved around, and why?
2:00 what does "international" mean?
3:09 what sources our sources say?
5:22 were the letters preserved or did they just survive?
6:50 what language do they use?
8:37 were they equal partners?
10:34 do resources buy membership of the great powers club?
12:15 how did they talk to each other?
14:35 what messages are they sending each other?
16:38 political theatre?
18:32 how princesses were chosen
19:40 did princesses take part in the correspondence?
20:13 why was cuneiform the method of communication?
23:51 cultural exchange
26:52 lost in translation?
Music by Ruba Hillawi
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Hello and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon.
Ellie Bennett:And my name is Ellie. Each episode, we talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.
Jon Taylor:In the 14th century BC, the Middle East was dominated by a club of great powers. The rulers of these lands may never have met each other, but they were in constant communication. They called each other "brother", and were bound by a series of diplomatic marriages. Like all families, sometimes they got on well; at other times, there were squabbles. What did these great kings say to each other? What did they want and why, who and what was moving around to fuel the international system, and why was cuneiform the method of communication?
Ellie Bennett:So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest.
Jon Taylor:Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Lisa Wilhelmi:It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Lisa Wilhelmi:Yeah, my name is Lisa Wilhelmi. I work at the Frei Universitaet in Berlin. I am an assyriologist by training. I ended up working on Hittite things rather a lot in the last 15 to 20 years. And I now work in the Institute for Computational Ancient Studies in the F.U.
Jon Taylor:Okay, thank you. So today we're going to talk about the international age of the ancient Middle East. Can we introduce the topic? OK, so what does "international" mean in this sense, and who are the people who are involved in this age?
Lisa Wilhelmi:Yeah, when we talk about the international age of the ancient Middle East, we usually talk about a period that is roughly the second third of the second millennium BC, so the late Bronze Age in that area. We also call this period the Amana period, for reasons of text discoveries, which we can come back to later. But international age really means that we have a period in which we have a number of great powers that engage in international diplomacy, in contact, in exchanging letters, but also goods and people. We're talking about an area that stretches from Egypt to Anatolia to Mesopotamia. So, of course, not international in our sense of the modern world, but international for that period in time.
Jon Taylor:Okay, so what texts do we have? What sources do we have that tell us about diplomatic contacts, and what kind of picture do they paint of this world? What are they saying to each other?
Lisa Wilhelmi:So we have a set of letters that comes from a place called Tell El-Amarna, which is a site in Egypt. And this is why we also speak of the Amarna age that preserves the correspondence of two Egyptian pharaohs, namely Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. And these letters are an exchange with other international powers like the Hittite king, the king of Mitanni, the kings of Assyria and Babylonia, but also some other kings that are further away from this area. We also then have, in later periods, texts that come from the Hittite capital, Hattusa, that demonstrate exchange with Babylonia and Assyria. We have state treaties from this later period that also tell us more about the international relations. And we see that the topics are quite varied. So the picture that these texts paint is one of a sort of equilibrium of power in this period. What we don't have in this period is one big kingdom or empire that dictate the political sphere. But we have several kingdoms that are somewhat on a par in their power balance, and this necessitates these kings to negotiate with each other, to engage in an exchange of luxury items. But also princesses for dynastic marriages and so on.
There's also an exchange:of experts--something like medical experts, for instance--or scribal experts. And in general, we see a relatively respectful exchange, although, of course, we have topics where there is some sort of contempt or some sort of, let's say, conflict involved.
Jon Taylor:Why did these texts survive, then? Are they deliberately preserved for future reference? Are they accidental? Were they thrown out and we just happened to find them? How representative are they?
Lisa Wilhelmi:I think that we have to assume that these texts were not necessarily preserved for future reference. Although, having said that, with some of the things that are kept in the Hittite archives, in particular, we have things that are preserved over a number of centuries. And maybe these were preserved for record keeping purposes to refer back to them in later periods. And we know that sometimes texts can refer back to things that have happened in the past, especially when it comes to political relations. But generally, letters were more or less written and then stored for a relatively short period of time while they were relevant for political exchange. I would assume that most of these discoveries were accidental. We can see that there is reference to letters or to other exchange for which we don't have the actual evidence. So very often, we will find references to a letter that has been sent. We have quotes from this letter that has been received, these sorts of things, and we don't have the actual manuscript that the reference goes back to, so there would have been a lot more than we actually have at the moment.
Ellie Bennett:You've given a very long laundry list of the different cultures that these letters go towards. So that's Egyptians, Hittites, Mitannians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. They all speak literally different languages. Are these documents all in the same language? Would they be expected to speak a similar language amongst themselves?
Lisa Wilhelmi:Yes. So these letters that we have are all written in cuneiform script and the absolute majority of the examples that we have preserved written in Akkadian. Akkadian, or Assyro-Babylonian, was the diplomatic language of the period, and it seems that with the adaption of cuneiform to communicate with other powers. These kings also adopted the Akkadian language as diplomatic language. We have examples that are not written in Akkadian, but these are very far and few between. There's one very long letter from a Mitannian king to an Egyptian pharaoh in Hurrian. But this is an exception. And then there's a couple of letters that were written, not by the Hittite kings, actually, but by the kings of Arzawa, which is a country that is located to the west of the Hittite kingdom, to the Egyptian pharaoh. Actually, it's one letter and one response. So in the vast majority of the time, these were written in Akkadian. So people were trained to write diplomatic Akkadian with all of their associated formula of introduction to letters, greeting formula, and so on and so on.
Ellie Bennett:And I guess that leads into my next question of if diplomacy is forefront of your mind, does that mean that everyone in these letters from these different cultures are considered politically equal partners?
Lisa Wilhelmi:This is actually a tricky question, because in general, yes, these are all considered equal partners, and they address each other as "my brother" in their letters, which suggests an equal standing. But you do have some examples of kingdoms not being quite on the same level at the same time. So while we see all of these political actors that we've mentioned--Assyria, Babylonia, Mitanni, Hittite, and Egypt--engaging in this diplomatic exchange. They're not all on the same level of power all at the same time. There are shifts in territorial dominance over particular regions, and you are not automatically part of this club, so to speak, of big brothers. You kind of have to earn your right, and it seems that you earn your right to be part of this club by how much dominance or how much territory you control. So in the instance of an Assyrian king that was up and coming at some point, we see that reflected in the letters. There is a letter that this Assyrian king sends to the Egyptian pharaoh, and it evokes a reaction from the Babylonian king of the same period, who writes to the Egyptian king saying, "why does this Assyrian king write to you of his own accord? He should be my subject, and he's not allowed to just reach out to you, because he's not on a par with us." And there's another example of a similar nature, with a Hittite King that also reprimands an Assyrian king, saying, "Why do you write to me as a brother? Are we born of the same mother?" So you're not automatically part of the club. You have to be accepted into the club.
Ellie Bennett:Is there any example where that bucks the trend of this? So like someone who may not have a large territory, but a really important resource? Or is this just across the board, only people who meet the territorial qualification, as it were, is allowed into the club?
Lisa Wilhelmi:That's a good question. Actually, I think with all of these powers, there are different things that they bring to the table. The Assyrians, the Mitanni kingdom, and also the Hittites, to some extent, they're all quarreling over an area in northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria that is very rich in resources. So in those instances, it's probably more to do with political power and military dominance. The Egyptians, on the other hand, who are also powerful and have extended their territory into the Levant, their main asset is gold. So this is something that everybody wants from the Egyptians, and a lot of the letters are actually centered on this need, this one for gold. We have many requests for gold to build temples or do other things with. We have complaints about one king having been sent more gold than another king, and whether this means that he is not regarded his equal, or that the Pharaoh doesn't love him as much as this other king. These sorts of things. But I think every single political entity brings something slightly different. That means that they're considered powerful and part of the club.
Ellie Bennett:So when thinking of the logistics of when they're talking to each other, we've mentioned letters, but is this the primary way that the states and rulers speak to each other? So did they have to travel long distances in person to talk to each other? What were the logistics of these rulers talking to each other?
Lisa Wilhelmi:I think we can exclude any personal meetings of rulers at the time. There is a case of two rulers who were planning to meet at some point. This is the Hittite king Hattusili III, and Rameses the second of Egypt, after, or sort of in the process of negotiation for the peace treaty. And we know that this meeting probably never took place. So I think we can be relatively certain that there were no sort of summit meetings like we know them from modern diplomatic relations. There is a lot of letters that are being exchanged back and forth, and we know of messengers that carry these letters from one court to the other. Very often, these messengers seem to have traveled in pairs. So you would have like an Egyptian messenger and a messenger of Mitanni paired up as a team, so to speak, and traveling from one court to the other, carrying with them correspondence. But then also the gifts that were exchanged between the kings and the entourage of the kings. You would also have, in the process of all of this, the transferal of princesses that were being married off to a king in another country. So we have to consider it a fairly lengthy process of drafting letters and documents, maybe also drafts for treaties that are supposed to be concluded, then getting together all of the gifts that are being exchanged, maybe getting together diplomats that travel with the goods and everything, and then it takes some weeks to get from one court to another, and then the whole process is repeated again and again.
Jon Taylor:Could you say a little bit more about what they say to each other in these correspondences? What do they want? Why are they sending messages across such huge distances?
Lisa Wilhelmi:A lot of it has to do, I think, with establishing their own power base, but also being informed on what goes on in the other countries we know. That there were spies that were located in these places that would feed information back, maybe with people traveling for trade or things like that. So all sorts of questions that are being addressed, and these can range from your subject in area XYZ, incurred on the territory of my subject in that area. How do you propose to regulate this? Can you not talk to them? Can you stop them from doing this, please? Or there are things like experts of a particular profession that were sent to one court and there's an inquiry about what has happened to them. Why are they not returning back to their place of origin? Then there's, of course, the request for resources like gold and so on. There's proposals for marriage. There's oftentimes questions about how the corresponding partner is in relations with other corresponding partners, sort of gauging power shifts and trying to work out who's in contact with whom. And it kind of seems that all of this feeds into a maintaining some sort of stability. Although, of course, there's always little quarrels and there's military conflicts in border regions. But on the whole, it seems like it upholds a level of stability that enables exchange and trade in the area.
Jon Taylor:Do you think there's a little bit of political theatre going on as well? So is there like an internal audience? If you're the king and you're trying to enforce your authority at home, maybe it helps if every so often some character turns up from an incredible distance away that no one's ever traveled there, and they have these fancy clothes, and they lay a pile of gold in front of you and make a big deal. And do you think that's part of it as well?
Lisa Wilhelmi:Oh yes, absolutely. I would think that that is a big part of it. There's one letter, actually, from an Assyrian king, I think it is, that complains about the quality of the gold. It says,"Oh, look, you've sent me this gold, and it's substandard. It's really not good. And I opened the box and I displayed it to my subjects, and everybody was weeping because the Egyptian king hasn't sent me the adequate type of gold". So there's absolutely an element of this. There's also an element of presenting yourself very internationally, if you have wives that come from different areas, it also demonstrates your power and your connections. And this is quite interesting, actually, because the Egyptian princesses were never married off to anybody outside of Egypt, whereas Babylonian princesses, Assyrian princesses, Hittite princes, etc, they were married off to other regions. And there's one letter that reflects on this and says, "Why do you not send me a princess?" A letter from Babylon to Egypt,"Why can you not send me a princess to marry?" And the Egyptian Pharaoh says, "Well, we've never done this. We don't marry off our princesses to outsiders." And then the Babylonian responds with, "Oh, but just, you know, send me any Egyptian girl and we'll just say she's a princess, and it will be fine. {LAUGHS} There's absolutely political show element going on.
Ellie Bennett:I wanted to ask about these princesses and royal marriages, just a little bit more as well. Like, do we know any of the mechanisms behind things like which princesses were chosen? Because any of the royal houses will likely have many princesses to choose from. So was there anything that was particularly prized or highlighted that would make someone a good princess in the letters? Or does it just seem to be there was a princess?
Lisa Wilhelmi:I don't recall anything specific right now, but in the case of the negotiations for marriage between a Hittite Princess and the Egyptian pharaoh in the process of this conclusion of the peace treaty, the princess that was being sent to Egypt was a daughter of the Hittite king, Hattusili III and his wife, Puduhepa, who was the queen, who was of a particular status. So possibly there was more emphasis on marrying someone who was also the daughter of the ruling queen.
Jon Taylor:Do we ever hear from these princesses again once they're married off? I mean, do they send their own letters when the ambassador comes? Does she pass a letter to take back home when they return, occasionally?
Lisa Wilhelmi:Yes, but we also have instances where they disappear and where this is something that is spoken about in the letters. There's a Babylonian princess there. She has disappeared at the Egyptian court, and when the messengers come to try and talk to her, they can't find her. So this is cause for problematic issues between the Egyptian and the Babylonian court.
Jon Taylor:I want to explore a little bit more this balance of power, and, first among equal, this kind of thing. So we've had the exchange of princesses and diplomatic marriages only goes one way. You can send to Egypt, but Egypt doesn't deign to send their princesses abroad. But when they talk to each other, they're using, presumably Babylonian origin, cuneiform and Akkadian. Why is this? How does this come about? Is this a practical reflection of the simple majority of the powers use cuneiform for some reason, therefore that's the choice? Is Egypt held to higher standards? So you follow the diplomatic protocols, but if you can't, then you can write in Hurrian and they'll understand or write in whatever, and they'll have somebody on hand? Whereas the other powers-Assyria, the Mitannians--have got no chance of reading hieroglyphs. Do we have maybe a legacy of earlier international connections, when Babylon was the culturally dominant partner, and that's why cuneiform is used, and it's just that those letters don't survive? What do you think is going on there?
Lisa Wilhelmi:I think there's several elements that feed into this. I think partly because cuneiform was transmitted relatively rapidly at the end of the third millennium to various regions across the ancient Middle East, and was starting to be used in Mari and Ebla in northern Syria fairly early on. There's a history of writing cuneiform in those regions. Also it then makes its way into Anatolia at the beginning of the second millennium BC. So these are all areas that have been exposed to cuneiform writing, and there is a tradition of writing in this script, and with this script, a tradition of learning Akkadian which was associated with it from very early on. So I think it would have been very difficult for the Egyptians to implement an exchange in hieroglyphic writing when they arrived to that scene relatively late on. It was only in the first to second third of the second millennium that they started to incur into the Levant and conquer territory there, and they were met, presumably, with an established culture of writing in cuneiform. So they don't only correspond with the big powers in cuneiform. In fact, they also correspond with their subjects in the Levant in cuneiform writing and in Akkadian language.
Jon Taylor:It's quite interesting they don't force their vassals to communicate in the language of their choice.
Lisa Wilhelmi:Yeah, it is, absolutely. I can only imagine that it must be because this tradition is so established that it would have been very difficult to try and force them to do otherwise. Also, this area is an area that is always in the process of negotiating where it belongs, you have continuous struggles between first Egypt and Mitanni, and then Egypt and the Hittites over predominance in that region. So maybe there's an element of not alienating smaller powers too much by trying to implement new mechanisms, although I'm sure that when they sent their own governors to the areas, they would have communicated in Egyptian with them. Just we don't have that preserved.
Ellie Bennett:I think that segues quite nicely into my question of mobility and the exchange of these messages and the people who are carrying them, and you've mentioned there is it's not just the people carrying the letters, it's not just the items, and not just princesses being exchanged, but scholars as well, and other people. So I was wondering if you could say a bit more about what that kind of mobility means for the dissemination of the different cultures in the region and the different kinds of knowledge.
Lisa Wilhelmi:I think it means that we actually have a period in which there's an awareness, at least in the capitals and in the bigger centres. Of course, we base most of our knowledge of this time period on text finds that come from centres of political power, or places where we have political structures, because this is where the texts come from. But in those places, I imagine that there was an awareness of other cultures, of international relations. And when you have people residing in your city who come from somewhere so far away, they will have dressed differently; they will have spoken a different language. They might have brought with them different types of foods or customs. So I imagine that that led to the awareness that there were other things out there. Having said that, the period that we're talking about is probably not one where we expect to find a completely monolingual or very isolated community anyway. Because we see that there are so many different languages spoken in areas that we're looking at, even when there's one that is predominantly written down in the texts that we have preserved. When you go to Mesopotamia, for instance, we have different types of people that come into the area all the time. We can see that they have personal names that are of different languages, other than Babylonian. We see in the Hittite capital that we have texts in a variety of languages, like Hattian, Luwian, etc, etc. So these are places that are not just dominated by one language and one culture. We need to be careful not to think about these places that we study as uniform places, where there's only one language that is being spoken or only one type of custom being performed. We generally see a very varied population with different language backgrounds and different influences coming in from different areas. So this would have only enlarged that variety.
Jon Taylor:Could I ask a follow up question to that, in that one of these letters turns up in Akkadian and the messenger hands it over to the Egyptian court scribe, and he goes up to the pharaoh and he explains what this guy wants to say. You know,"Your brother over here, great king, so-and-so says thus ...". Does he read that in Akkadian, and the pharaoh is expected to have some idea what's going on? Or is that scribe live translating? What's the dynamic there? Because you can imagine perhaps the way you phrase something in Akkadian might not come across quite the right way. It doesn't follow quite the same niceties that Egyptian might. Is there a risk of a diplomatic incident because of the translation issues?
Lisa Wilhelmi:Yeah, I think that's a really good question, actually, because this is something that we cannot fully grasp, and I think we need to think about this more. This is one of the things that I'm actually currently trying to look into with the correspondence between the Hittite king Hattusili III and his queen, Puduhepa, and Ramesses II in Egypt. And we don't actually know how exactly this happened. We must assume that these texts were translated for the kings, and then whatever the kings wanted to write back was drafted in their personal language, their native tongue, and then translated into the language of diplomacy, Akkadian, because we have in the Hittite archives quite a lot of drafts for letters that were to be sent out to partners in Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt that are in Hittite language and they lack certain formulae. Sometimes we can see that they're drafts for the letters that are then sent in Akkadian language eventually. So I think it is really difficult for us to judge whether these kings knew any Akkadian at all. We don't even know whether they wrote, whether they were able to write. There are a couple of meta facts on this issue. When we look at formulations in state treaties, for instance, where it says, "If a messenger comes to you and says to the you who X, Y, Z, and it is not the same as it says on the tablet, then please rely on what it says on the tablet." You should always consult the tablet, because that is what is the authorised version, so the messenger can say anything, but there is the authorised version of the text. But in a way, it is a process that involves many people. And of course, there's always a possibility to tweak here and there, and translations are never exact anyway. Even when I translate from German into English or from English into German, it's never exact, even though these languages are very, very closely related, and Egyptian and Hittite are not.
Jon Taylor:Do you have any final thoughts on the international age and its repercussions? Is there a message for today from the international age?
Lisa Wilhelmi:I guess, if there's one thing that we can learn from this international age is that there was a protocol of respect, and even though the different parties didn't always see eye to eye, and there were conflicts, and there were military struggles and all sorts, the protocol of respect was adhered to. And this is something that I would wish would be these days, too.
Jon Taylor:All right, thank you very much indeed.
Lisa Wilhelmi:Thank you very much for having me.
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