An Early Trojan War?

If Ahhiyawa represents both mainland Greece and the Mycenaeans, and if the letter known as KUB XXVI 91 found at Hattusa shows that Ahhiyawa was involved somehow with Assuwa during its rebellion against the Hittites, then what can we conclude? The letter itself, and all of those relating to the Assuwa Rebellion, date to 1430 BC, some two hundred years before the generally accepted date for the Trojan War (usually placed between 1250 BC and 1175 BC).

All of the data presented above, including the Mycenaean sword with the Akkadian inscription found at Hattusa, might be simply a series of unrelated phenomena. However, they may possibly be interpreted as indicating that warriors from the Bronze Age Aegean were involved in the Assuwa Rebellion against the Hittites.

If so, it might be proposed that it was this aid that was chronicled in contemporary Hittite records and remembered rather more indistinctly in the literary traditions of later archaic and classical Greece—not as the Trojan War, but as the pre–Trojan War battles and raids in Anatolia that were also remembered and attributed to Achilles and other legendary Achaean heroes.

Scholars are now agreed that even within Homer’s Iliad there are accounts of warriors and events from the centuries predating the traditional setting of the Trojan War in 1250 BC. These include the tower shield of the warrior Ajax, a shield type that had been replaced long before the thirteenth century BC.

There are also the “silver-studded” swords (phasganon arguwelon or xiphos arguroelon) of various heroes, an expensive type of weapon that had gone out of use long before the Trojan War. And there is the story of Bellerophon, recounted in book 6 of the Iliad (lines 178–240), who is a Greek hero almost certainly of pre–Trojan War date. Proteus, king of Tiryns, sent Bellerophon from Tiryns on mainland Greece to Lycia in Anatolia. After completing three tasks and overcoming numerous additional obstacles, he was eventually awarded a kingdom in Anatolia.68

In addition, the Iliad records that long before the time of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen, and Hector—in fact during the time of Priam’s father Laomedon—the Greek hero Heracles sacked Troy. He needed only six ships (Iliad, book 5, lines 638–42): Of other sort, men say, was mighty Heracles, my father, staunch in fight, the lion-hearted, who on a time came hither [to Troy] by reason of the mares of Laomedon with but six ships and a scantier host, yet sacked the city of Ilios and made waste her streets.69

As I have said elsewhere, if one were to search for a historical event with which to link pre-Homeric traditions of Achaean warriors fighting on the Anatolian mainland, the Assuwa Rebellion, ca. 1430 BC, would stand out as one of the largest military events within northwestern Anatolia prior to the Trojan War, and as one of the few events to which the Mycenaeans (Ahhiyawans) might tentatively be linked via textual evidence such as the Hittite letter KUB XXVI 91 mentioned above.

We might well wonder, therefore, whether it was this incident that was the historical basis for the contemporary Hittite tales of Mycenaean (Ahhiyawan) warriors or mercenaries fighting in Anatolia, and which generated the stories of earlier, pre–Trojan War, military endeavors of the Achaeans on the Anatolian mainland.70 We might also wonder whether it was this impending rebellion, which the Assuwans had probably been planning for some time, that lay behind their possible overtures to Thutmose III in the late 1440s and early 1430s BC.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The well-respected art historian Helene Kantor once said: “The evidence preserved to us by the passage of time constitutes but a small fraction of that which must have once existed. Each imported vessel … represents scores of others that have perished.”

In fact, most of the goods sent back and forth were most likely either perishable—and have since disappeared—or were raw materials that were immediately converted into other objects, such as weapons and jewelry, as noted. Thus, we should probably understand that the trade between the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East during the Bronze Age took place on a scale many times larger than the picture that we currently see through the lens of archaeological excavation.

It is perhaps in this context that we should understand the Minoan-style paintings that Manfred Bietak uncovered in Thutmose III’s palace at Tell ed-Dab‘a in the Egyptian delta. While they may not necessarily have been painted at the whim of a Minoan princess, they are certainly evidence of the extent to which international contact, trade, and influences flowed around the ancient Mediterranean world during the fifteenth century BC, even as far abroad as Minoan Crete and back again.

We may sum up this century as a period that saw the rise of international connections on a sustained basis throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, from the Aegean to Mesopotamia. By this time, the Minoans and Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age Aegean were well established, as were the Hittites in Anatolia. The Hyksos had been evicted from Egypt, and the Egyptians had begun what we now call the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom period.

However, as we shall see next, this was only the beginning of what would become a “Golden Age” of internationalism and globalization during the following fourteenth century BC.

For instance, the combination of Thutmose III’s numerous years of campaigning and diplomacy, hard on the heels of Hatshepsut’s peaceful trading expeditions and military exploits of her own, took Egypt to a pinnacle of international power and prosperity that had rarely, if ever, been seen before in the country.

As a result, Egypt established itself as one of the great powers for the rest of the Late Bronze Age, along with the Hittites, Assyrians, and Kassites/Babylonians, in addition to assorted other players such as the Mitannians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, and Cypriots, more of whom we shall meet in the next chapter and following.