Destructions In Anatolia

In Anatolia at this time, a number of cities were also destroyed.

The Sea Peoples have traditionally been credited for the devastation on the basis of little or no evidence.

In some cases, additional excavations by subsequent excavators are now overturning long-held attributions and assumptions. For instance, at the site of Tell Atchana, ancient Alalakh, located near the modern Turkish-Syrian border, Sir Leonard Woolley thought the city of Level I had been destroyed by the Sea Peoples in 1190 BC.

However, the most recent excavations, by Aslihan Yener of the University of Chicago, have redated this level to the fourteenth century BC and indicate that the majority of the city was abandoned by 1300 BC, long before the possible encursions of the Sea Peoples.

Of those Anatolian sites that were brought to ruin just after 1200 BC, among the better known are Hattusa, the capital city of the Hittites on the interior plateau, and Troy on the western coast. In neither case, however, is it certain beyond a doubt that the destructions were wrought by the Sea Peoples.

Hattusa

It is clear that the Hittite capital city of Hattusa was destroyed and abandoned soon after the beginning of the twelfth century BC. The excavators found “ash, charred wood, mudbricks, and slag formed when mud-bricks melted from the intense heat of the conflagration.”77 However, it is not at all clear who destroyed the city. Although scholars and popularizing authors frequently blame the Sea Peoples, largely on the basis of Ramses III’s statement “No land could stand before their arms, from Khatte … ,” we actually have no idea whether “Khatte” in this case was meant as a reference to the Hittites in general or specifically to Hattusa.78

It is also not clear precisely when Hattusa fell, especially since it now seems to have been attacked sometime during Tudhaliya IV’s reign, perhaps by forces loyal to his cousin Kurunta, who may have attempted to usurp the throne.79 As the eminent University of Chicago Hittitologist Harry Hoffner, Jr., has remarked, the usual terminus ante quem for the final destruction (i.e., the date before which this must have happened) is based on the statement made by Ramses III in 1177 BC, which would probably place the destruction sometime earlier, perhaps ca. 1190–1180 BC. However, we have no real idea how accurate Ramses’s statement was.

By the 1980s, Hittitologists and other scholars were seriously suggesting that an older and better-known enemy, namely, the Kashka, who were located to the northeast of the Hittite homelands, had instead been responsible for destroying the city. This group is thought to have also sacked the city earlier, at a time just before the Battle of Qadesh in the early thirteenth century BC, when the Hittites temporarily abandoned Hattusa and moved their entire capital south for a number of years, to a region known as Tarhuntassa.81 This makes much more sense, for as James Muhly of the University of Pennsylvania once wrote, “it has always been difficult to explain how Sea Raiders [i.e., Sea Peoples] destroyed the massive fortifications … of Hattusa, located hundreds of miles from the sea in what today seems a rather isolated part of the upland plateau of central Anatolia.”

The archaeological evidence indicates that parts of Hattusa were destroyed by an intense fire, which consumed portions of both the Upper and the Lower City, as well as the royal acropolis and the fortifications. However, it has now become clear that only the public buildings were destroyed, including the palace and some of the temples, and a few of the city gates. These buildings had been emptied out, rather than looted, before being put to the torch, while the domestic quarters in both the Upper and the Lower City show no signs of destruction at all.83 A recent director of the excavations, Jürgen Seeher, suggested that the city was attacked only after it had been abandoned for some time, that the royal family had taken all of their possessions and moved elsewhere long before the final destruction.

If so, the Kashka—longtime enemies of the Hittites—are more likely than the Sea Peoples to have been responsible for the actual destruction, though it may well have taken place only after the Hittite Empire had been severely weakened through other agencies, such as drought, famine, and interruption of the international trade routes.

The same possible explanations may be given for the devastation visible at three other well-known central Anatolian sites reasonably near Hattusa: Alaca Höyük, Alishar, and Masat Höyük. All were destroyed by fire at approximately this same time, though it is unclear whether the Kashka, the Sea Peoples, or someone else entirely was responsible. Mersin and Tarsus, in southeastern Anatolia, were also destroyed, although both later recovered and were reoccupied.85 The site of Karaoglan, which lies not very far to the west of Hattusa in central Anatolia, was also destroyed at this time, with bodies found in the destruction layer, but again it is not clear who was responsible.

There is relatively little destruction farther to the west in Anatolia. In fact, the Australian scholar Trevor Bryce has noted that “the sites destroyed by fire [in Anatolia] seem to have been limited to the regions east of the Marassantiya river … there is no evidence of such a catastrophe further west. Indications from archaeological excavations are that only a small number of sites of the Hittite world were actually destroyed; the majority were simply abandoned.”

Troy The one site in the west that was destroyed by fire early in the twelfth century BC was Troy, specifically Troy VIIA, located on the western coast of Anatolia.88 Although Carl Blegen, the excavator from the University of Cincinnati, dated its destruction to ca. 1250 BC, the devastation has now been redated to 1190–1180 BC by Penelope Mountjoy, a noted expert on Mycenaean pottery.89 The inhabitants of this city simply took the remnants of Troy VIh, which was probably destroyed by an earthquake perhaps as early as 1300 BC, as discussed in detail earlier, and rebuilt the city.

Thus, the large houses originally built during Troy VI now had partitioning walls installed and several families living where there had been only one before. Blegen saw the dwellings as evidence of a city under siege, but Mountjoy suggests instead that the inhabitants were trying to recover from the earthquake, with temporary shanties erected among the ruins.90 However, the city did eventually come under siege, as shown by evidence found by both Blegen and the next excavator of Troy, Manfred Korfmann from the University of Tübingen, who dug at the site from 1988 to 2005.

Both excavators found bodies in the streets of Troy VIIA and arrow-heads embedded in the walls, and both were convinced that it had been destroyed in warfare.91 Korfmann, who also located the long-lost lower city at Troy, which all the previous excavators had missed, said at one point: “The evidence is burning and catastrophe with fire. Then there are skeletons; we found, for example, a girl, I think sixteen, seventeen years old, half buried, the feet were burned by fire…. It was a city which was besieged. It was a city which was defended, which protected itself. They lost the war and obviously they were defeated.”

However, the date of this destruction might make it difficult to argue that the Mycenaeans were responsible, as in Homer’s story of the Trojan War in the Iliad, unless the Mycenaean palaces back on the Greek mainland were being attacked and destroyed precisely because all their warriors were away fighting at Troy. In fact, Mountjoy suggests that the Sea Peoples, rather than the Mycenaeans, destroyed Troy VIIA. This would fit well with the mention of the former by Ramses III just three years later, but she presents no substantial evidence to support her hypothesis, which remains speculative.93