The annals and lost golden statue of the hittite king hattusili i

Abstract

Clay tablets excavated from the Hittite capital Hattusa supposedly record five years of the military exploits of the early Hittite king Hattusili I (c. 1650-1620). The document, commonly known as Hat-tusili’s ‘Annals’, refers to a golden statue (of the king) housed in silver-plated surrounds. These surrounds probably formed part of a sanctuary dedicated to the king. Here what was probably the chief version of the Annals was recorded, on the statue itself, on its surrounds, or both. Both are now lost, and we are left with only the clay tablet account of the Annals – or what survives of it. Major inconsistencies in this account and a number of significant omissions from it, suggest that the clay tablets which record it were merely fragments of a much larger composition covering most or all the king’s reign. These fragments were all that remained of the Annals when the statue and the sanctuary(?) which housed it were destroyed by fire in Hittite times, whether accidentally or by enemy action. I suggest that Hittite scribes later tried to put together a sequence of events from the scraps of information found on the Annals’ remaining fragments, in their efforts to recreate all they could of the document. What they did was to make a reasonably coherent compilation of the surviving pieces, compressing the episodes they recorded into a period of five years. But in so doing, they put together events that may have taken place years apart, in an attempt to provide a continuous account of Hat-tusili’s achievements, though a much distorted one with major omissions.