This week I'd like to introduce a guest blogger whose research fascinates me. Judith Starkston, novelist and book reviewer, sets her historical fiction and mysteries in the period of the Trojan War and the Hittite Empire. She blogs on these and other topics, as well as reviewing books,
. She has graciously agreed to share some of her research with us this week. A hearty welcome to Judith!
Until the 19th century when German businessman Heinrich Schliemann
followed his idiosyncratic dream and found Troy on the coast of Turkey
near the Hellespont, many people thought “Troy” was the stuff of myth. We
can now say with reasonable certainty that we know where Troy existed. A
contemporary dig, begun under the leadership of the German
archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, has confirmed the earlier identification
and revealed a great deal more about the nature of this famous city.
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| Heinrich Schliemann |
However, knowing the city’s location doesn’t tell us what
cultural/ethnic group the residents belonged to, what language they
spoke, what their religious system was.
If you read the
Iliad, you would think you had the
answer—the Trojans were basically Greeks. Rather like Star Trek, heroes
from the opposing sides in Homer’s poem can carry on conversations
without any translators. In the
Iliad
the Trojans have temples to Apollo and Athena, who were also Greek
gods. Based on Homer, scholars from past generations sometimes concluded
that the residents of Troy were culturally the same as the Greeks who
sailed across the Aegean to attack their city. When I started writing my
novel about Briseis, a woman taken captive by the Greeks, I assumed the
same thing.
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| Temple of Apollo Smintheon near Troy |
It’s true that Greeks in the Archaic period, well after the “Homeric”
period of Troy, colonized the western coast of Anatolia (modern
Turkey). It’s also true that the Greeks had powerful outposts there in
the relevant period—the Late Bronze Age, such as at Miletus (Milawata in
Hittite correspondence). Mycenaean Greek pottery and other signs of
trade influence have been found at Troy. The Trojans interacted with the
Greeks in ways both friendly and warlike.
Nonetheless, the assumption that the Trojans were a variety of Greek is wrong.
Part II: The Hittite Connection; The Trojans are Luwians
Scholarly opinion now leans toward identifying the Trojans as part of
the Luwian peoples who occupied large swaths of what we now call
Turkey, primarily in the Western and Southeastern portions, throughout
the Bronze Ages.
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| Map of the Hittite Empire, Luwian region shown on western part of map |
My primary source for the rest of this discussion is
The Luwians, ed. H. Craig Melchert.
So who were the Luwians and how does that connect the Trojans to the Hittites?
A key issue is that we know a lot about the Hittites from their
written records, but no such libraries of clay tablets have been found
in the western Luwian areas such as Troy. Most of what we know about the
Luwians is found in the Hittite texts which include a lot of Luwian
information in the Luwian language. It’s a lopsided filter through which
to view a people, but it’s the best we can do at this point until
tablets are found at a Luwian site. Hence the Hittite connection: If you
want to understand the Trojans/Luwians, by necessity you must examine
the Hittites. That is why so much of the information on this website is
about Hittites.
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| Cuneiform tablet |
Beyond the lack of extant tablets from Luwian sites, studying the
Hittites to understand the Luwians/Trojans is useful because they are
closely related culturally and religiously. If we could go back in time
and watch the two cultures, we would no doubt realize that the two
peoples did a number of things differently, but the similarities would
probably outnumber the differences overall. So in the absence of a large
body of information about the Luwians/Trojans, an historian or
historical fiction writer can turn to the Hittites and extrapolate with a
fair sense of being roughly on track.
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| Hittite bronze statue of a mother and child, possibly a goddess |
Part III: A summary of who the Luwians were and the ways the Luwians and Hittites influenced each other
The Luwians and Hittites were Indo-European. Scholars are still
debating at what time period these Indo-European groups arrived in the
area of Anatolia and from what region they might have come, but they
differ from their eastern neighbors such as the Assyrians, Babylonians,
etc. who have Semitic or other origins. Luwian, as a language, is part
of a closely related group including Hittite, Palaic, Lycian, Lydian,
and Carian. All of these languages of ancient Anatolia are derived from a
prehistoric language we may call “Proto-Anatolian” which in turn
derived from “Proto-Indo-European.” Indo-European encompasses most of
the languages of Europe—so to that extent the Luwians’ language and the
Luwians themselves are remote “cousins” of Greek, but they had separate
developments from very early on. (For more on
Indo-European)
Linguistically the Hittites and Luwians were close in many ways, and
language is a significant cultural determinor. The Hittite language
directly borrowed many Luwian words. Indeed by the height of the Hittite
empire, a majority of the residents of Hattusa, the Hittite capital,
spoke Luwian. The Hittite king and royal family spoke both Luwian and
Hittite.
We cannot be absolutely certain that Luwian, rather than Palaic or
some other similar language, was spoken in the region around Troy, but
it seems the most likely choice based on the evidence. The only piece of
writing from Troy, a hieroglyphic seal, is written in Luwian.
(Luwian was written in both cuneiform and hieroglyphics depending on
the context.) Also the oldest form of the name for Troy known to the
Hittites, Wilusiya-, is a Luwian formulation. The later Hittite name for
Troy is Wilusa.
The Luwians as a people never formed one unified state. By the Late
Bronze Age the western Luwian lands were roughly grouped into five
states, Troy/Wilusa being one of them. They occasionally acted together
in war. Treaties exist between these states and the huge Hittite empire
to the east of these lands. The Hittites are dominant in these treaties
and other correspondence between them. Although these Luwian areas are
frequently not formally part of the Hittite empire, they are under its
political influence.
A wide variety of religious influences between the Hittites and
Luwians can be found in the written evidence. Luwian cultic texts were
incorporated from an early period into the Hittite religious texts. That means the actual ritual practices of the Hittites would include Luwian elements.
In the Hittite law codes, there are mentions of separate penalties
for Luwians as opposed to Hittites. This means that the two peoples
interacted closely and constantly, but it also means that the Hittites
viewed the Luwians as a people separate from themselves.
Interesting historical footnote:
Why did Hittite texts survive and not Luwian?
Only one piece of writing has been found at Troy, a hieroglyphic
seal, so a logical assumption would seem at first to be that the Trojans
didn’t write or read. However, the Hittite side of correspondence and
treaties with the Trojans and others in this Luwian area are extant, so
we know that the kings of Troy/Wilusa had scribes and written records.
So why haven’t tablets at Troy been found? You’d think clay tablets
would survive—after all pottery shards pop up everywhere in
archaeological sites.
Pots are fired, clay tablets are not. Clay tablets melt away into the
dust unless a catastrophic fire burns so hot and long that the tablets
are in essence fired. The absence of a “library” at Troy may perhaps be
explained by something as simple and arbitrary as the lack of a
hot-enough destructive fire in the correct buildings.
What about Greeks and writing?
The Mycenaean Greeks were also literate—they wrote a form of Greek called Linear B and also corresponded with the Hittites.
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| Linear B tablet and drawing |
Unlike the Hittites, they did not use writing to record myths, laws,
and other interesting cultural documents. They used writing primarily as
financial record keeping.
Writing was lost to the Greek world after the Late Bronze Age and was
rediscovered with a new alphabetic writing system around the 8th
century BC. From that time on they used more or less the letters we are
familiar with as Greek. Around the time of this rebirth of literacy, the
oral poems we know as the
Iliad and
Odyssey were put into written form.
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Many thanks to Judith, who I hope will be back with more guest posts talking about her research into these long-ago civilizations.
