Armies of allies crowd the mighty city of Priam, true, but they speak a thousand different tongues, fighters gathered here from all ends of the realm.
HOMER, Iliad1
THE STORY OF HELEN AND PARIS, Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon and Priam draws in visitors to the site of Troy from across the globe. While the impoverished archaeology there gives no quickfix impression of the hubbub of the Bronze Age city, the influx of tourists is curiously appropriate. Here there are many nationalities of men and women of all ages from all walks of life – just as it would have been three and half thousand years ago. Materials from Assyria, Babylon, Mycenaean Greece and Cyprus have been excavated at Troy – brought by traders whose quarters would have been in the town. Diplomatic texts show us correspondence between heads of state regularly passed in and out of Trojan gates: here there were chancelleries and scribes, diplomats and envoys. In the 13th century BC, this centrifugal power-base would have been a colourful, jangling place.
Because we have no extant written records from within Troy itself – Schliemann’s wilful destruction of the central belly of the site may well have put paid to any chances of discovering a Trojan archive – we have to derive a detailed picture of Bronze Age life from other, contemporary sources. Troy was a vassal state of the Hittites. Socially, politically and culturally there are striking similarities between a kingdom such as Troy and the other great settlements within the Hittite empire.2 To try to understand the impact upon a foreign visitor, or captive, such as our Bronze Age Helen, of the culture of the Near East we must turn to the eloquent evidence excavated from the Hittite capital, Hattusa.
Because the Hittites kept meticulous written records of their affairs on tablets which are still emerging from the earth – more than three thousand fragments were excavated at Sapinuwa, north-east of Hattusa in 1990 – we have a strong taste of the characters any visiting aristocrat from the Greek mainland would have encountered.3 Here there were priests, priestesses and temple assistants, medical advisers, barbers, doormen, grooms, bureaucrats, scribes, sword swallowers, acrobats (there are wonderful rock carvings of ‘ladder-men’ who compete to see who can balance on a free-standing ladder for the greatest length of time),4 bagpipe, castanet and cymbal players, dancers and a phalanx of general domestic staff. In the 13th century BC – when the Hittite civilisation was at its most ebullient – the citadels would have heaved with people.
Once again, as within Mycenaean society, women are conspicuous by their presence. Criss-crossing the broad streets paved with their wide, heavy flagstones, there would have been large numbers of concubines – the naptartu – women imported to join a harem of official bed-partners. The Hittites also have a name for a ‘secondary wife’, the E-ŠER-TU (or esertu). These were consorts often imported to strengthen links with other countries and brought to the royal bed to create a dynasty of little princes and princesses.5Anatolian royal families needed official offspring to use as diplomats, or marriage fodder and as clan representatives within the kingdom or in the wider world. Priam was famous for having fifty sons, and texts from the Late Bronze Age show that Anatolian potentates did indeed seed huge families. Controlling the movement and marriages of women in the palace was the Tawananna (sovereign queen).6 This is the dynastic and social environment within which our Bronze Age Helen would have been enveloped, whether as a captive, a ‘secondary wife’ or a premier consort.
One fragmentary Hittite tablet known as the Alakšandu Treaty, tells us that the sons of concubines could succeed to the throne.7 A liberal interpretation of the text may even draw the conclusion that the Trojan prince referred to in the tablet, a man called Alaksandu, has a Greek concubine as a mother.8 As we have seen, Homer has an alternative name for Paris in the Iliad – Alexander – almost certainly a Greek form of Alaksandu. There is simply not enough evidence to draw a line connecting Alexander the prince of Homer’s Troy – a man with a taste for Greek women – and Alaksandu the Late Bronze Age prince of Wilusa, who possibly was of Greek blood, but the reference bears witness to the international nature of dynastic relations within the great royal courts of pre-history.9
Anatolian royal families, packed together in relatively isolated quarters, seem to have enjoyed familial relations worthy of any soap-opera, and oracles and texts refer to quarrels and catfights. One can just imagine the rivalry – not to mention the insurrections. One of the few texts that speaks of Trojan history describes the deposition of a king there called Walmu.10 As early as 1500 BC, the Edict of Telipinu (following the murder of the eponymous king’s wife and daughter) had tried to put an end to the wranglings and bloody power struggles of the Anatolian courts.
Who will become king after me in future, let his brothers, his sons, his in-laws, his further family members and his troops be united! Thereupon you will hold the country subdued with your might. And don’t speak as follows: ‘I will eradicate it’, for you won’t eradicate anything. On the contrary, you will only implicate yourself! Do not kill anybody of your family, it is not right.11
One woman whose intrigues and power-broking make for apposite – and diverting – reading is Puduhepa: a Hittite queen who was particularly active between 1280 and 1230 BC – the putative era of the Trojan War. We meet Puduhepa face to face in a weathered rock carving in Cappadocia, southern Turkey: the Firaktin relief. Dressed in a priestess’ robes, she pours a libation to one of the premier deities in the Hittite pantheon – the sun goddess Hepat of Arinna. This, our only surviving representation of the queen, is a fitting one. Puduhepa had started off life as a priestess, a ‘hand-maiden of Ishtar’. She had a reputation as a great beauty and the king, Hattusili III, declared that he had been compelled to marry her following a vision in a dream. Years later he writes that the goddess Ishtar has blessed them with ‘the love of husband and wife’.12 Ishtar looked after affairs of the heart in Anatolia as Aphrodite would come to in Archaic Greece and beyond.13
A man and his wife who love each other and carry their love to fulfilment: That has been decreed by you, Ishtar. He who seduces a woman and carries the seduction to fulfilment: That has been decreed by you, Ishtar.
Hurrian Hymn to Ishtar c. 14th century BC14
Deeply pious, Puduhepa energetically re-organised a number of the religious festivals in the Hittite calendar. We know of the extent of her influence because she left behind her an excellent trail – not of paper, but of stone and clay.
As with a number of female consorts of the time, Puduhepa shared a seal with her king. In October 2004, fortified with the Turkish coffee that stands as thick as soup in its cup, following a tour around the vast site of Hattusa, I went to investigate one of the few surviving imprints of this vital tool of royal bureaucracy, now sitting in the quaint Museum of Bogazkale in the modern village that abuts the archaeological site.
The seal imprint has a number of cracks and it crumbles a little at some of the edges, but it is a good size, about an inch across and fairly easy to read. In the palm of my hand, the artefact hardly registered any weight – extraordinary that this discrete, diminutive piece of mud, stamped out over three thousand years ago, has survived at all. On the clay surface it is possible to make out Puduhepa’s name in Luwian hieroglyphs and, next to her name, that of her husband. It was fairly common for Hittite queens to share a seal, and to enjoy some degree of independence from their consorts. But Puduhepa took things one stage further, she had her own seal cast.15 In complex judicial arrangements (for example, a difficult case brought before the royal court regarding ownership of sunken treasure once a ship had been attacked) it is not King Hattusili, but Queen Puduhepa who is, repeatedly, the voice of authority.16
When Puduhepa comes to be involved in the negotiations surrounding her daughter’s marriage to the King of Egypt, Rameses II, we get a real taste of her kudos. Not only does she receive from Rameses exact duplicates of the letters he sends to her husband, but then, not at all happy with the way things are proceeding, she takes the Pharaoh himself to task.
In c. 1270 BC there had been a fire in Puduhepa’s treasure house at Hattusa.17 The queen contacts Rameses to tell him that as a result, diplomatic affairs are delayed, in the immediate future she will not be able to send over one of her daughters as a bride to the Egyptian court. Rameses seems to be pushing her to advance the matter – presumably because he wants to get hold of the girl’s dowry as well as the girl. Puduhepa’s response is acerbic.
Does my brother possess nothing at all? Only if the son of the Sun-God, the son of the Storm-God, and the sea have nothing do you have nothing! Yet, my brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense. That is worthy of neither your reputation, nor your status.18
Puduhepa was confident enough to chastise one of the most powerful men on earth. Her history reminds us that in the 13th century BC, given sufficient force of character, aristocratic women could make a lasting mark on the world around them. When you turn the spotlight onto a queen such as her, it becomes apparent that this was not just an Age of Heroes but an Age of Heroines too.
As well as giving us a sense of courtly life, the texts from Hattusa are invaluable when trying to understand the central premise of Helen and Paris’ story. A vast selection deal with legal affairs and a number of these texts show that rape, abduction and adultery were live issues. Within the collection of Hittite state laws, out of 200 clauses, fourteen deal with sexual misdemeanours.19
There is an assumption in the Hittite texts that, in order to be protected by law, marriages are monogamous and that such unions brought with them material gain and material responsibilities. If a man ran off with another man’s betrothed then he (not the girl’s family) would be personally responsible for recompensing the rejected suitor with the equivalent value of the girl’s dowry.20 Generally, marriages were arranged and it was accepted that on occasion they would not work out; if there was an amicable divorce then any property would be divided equally between both husband and wife. In the case of rape though there was less equity. Although women did have redress in law, if a woman was raped in her own home then there was an assumption that she was complicit and therefore guilty.
If a man seizes a woman in the mountains (and rapes her), the man is guilty and shall die, but if he seizes her in her house, the woman is guilty and shall die. If the woman’s husband catches them (in the act) and kills them, he has committed no offence.21
Suspected rape or adultery might bring the death penalty.22 The Hittites recognised that passion could interrupt a well-planned marriage – there is ample legislation that deals with elopement. The concept of a lover is given a name, the ‘pupu’. But if you made love to another man’s wife you diced with death. Under Anatolian law, Helen’s liaison with Paris was, potentially, a capital offence. A Bronze Age Paris and his illegitimate amour would not have been surprised to hear that a vengeful husband was in pursuit, the cuckold confident that he would be justified in meting out the harshest possible punishment.