The Hittites and their Past: Forms of Historical Consciousness in Hittite Anatolia

What did the Hittites know about their distant past? Unlike their peers from Mesopotamia or Egypt, Hittite kings could only look back on a relatively short history. In the introduction to his ‘proclamation’, king Telipinu (first half of the 15th century BC), ascribed the foundation of the Old Kingdom to Labarna, who reigned 5 or 6 generations before him. A century or two later, kings of the empire period could relate to a longer ancestral history. The cruciform seal of king Mursili II, listing important kings of the past, adds a king Huzziya before Labarna. Mursilis’s 13th-century grandson Tudhaliya IV estimates the time between the Old Kingdom Hantili and himself as four or five hundred years. This chapter reviews the channels by which the Hittites (re)constructed their distant past. These include, beside Historiography, genealogies and other references in historiographical texts, as well as folktales and legends that were sometimes embedded in historiographic literature. Attention is given to religious festivals in which people came into contact with history, including local mock-battles commemorating historical events, offerings to deceased members of the royal family, and veneration of the statues of deceased kings and queens within the great ‘state’ festivals. The conclusion discusses the significance of these findings for the formation and articulation of Hittite ‘identity’.