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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

 

 

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]

Paper Draft 12/06/07

Bochay I. Drum December 6, 2007 ARCH 2300 Prf. O. Harmansah

Gods of the Land of Hatti: Explorations of an Animistic State Ideology

Introductory notes:

The beginning premise for this paper came from two directions that might actually be the same. Last semester in “The City and Festival: Cult practices and architectural production in the ancient near east” I was fascinated by the notion of the City God as a central organizing principle and wrote a paper on Uruk and it’s god Inanna, and how they grew together. This semester I was struck again by the invocation in the inscriptions of kings of the gods as the agents behind monumentalized actions. I am continuing to investigate just who or what these gods were, how did they have such extensive reach and agency?

This paper is based almost exclusively on secondary and tertiary scholarly texts based on analysis of Hittite texts. What emerges from the Hittite texts is a world in which gods and all kinds of other minor divinities were active agents in every significant facet of life. The primary gods in the extensive Hittite pantheon were representative of the weather, the sun, and the productivity of soils and crops, with an immense host of minor divinities for every particular mountain, river or spring in the Anatolian landscape. There is an obvious direct correlation here between what are personified as gods with the basic elements that make life possible.

As Ron Gorny (1989) concisely writes: “Anatolia has always been a land dominated by villages and peasants, an agrarian and pastoral society in which the basic relationship is the one between human beings and the land” (79). This is the basic relationship that is capitalized and expanded upon in the expression of the Hittite state. The King is the intermediary between gods and humans. He is to organize the population into relationships with the land that make it most fruitful. The desire of the gods, it would seem, is the development of complexity within their territory. The purity and refinement necessary for the materials consumed by gods and kings is a high-energy process of separation; the refinement of metals, the meticulous cleanliness of the food. Perhaps more to the point is the development of intensive spatial segregations in the form of palaces and temples in which pure, high energy input materials are gathered. This is supported both by organization of the land of Hatti and in warring and vassalage, in which resources (including people) are sequestered to the land of Hatti, resulting in a concentration of matter and energy for the gods of Hatti.

The maintenance of the state takes place in the bureaucratization and standardization of festival and ritual; the enactment of relationships between gods and humans are codified by the scribes of the king. From the Hattian perspective (one that downplays human agency), the local landscapes, weather, etc., in the form of ‘gods’ direct the affairs of humans, promoting cultivation, intensification and complexity within their realm. This is not to argue for any kind of direct environmental determinism so much as what is apparent in the Hittite Kingdom; an intimate relationship of co-development of land and people codified and structured by the latter in the practice of religion and state functions. The Principle Deities of the Hittites were the Storm God and the Sun God. The former is often masculine and the latter feminine, but both had male and female aspects and manifestations (Bryce 2002). The tremendous importance of these deities is rather straightforward from a practical viewpoint: The sun is the universal source of all energy on earth. What makes that energy usable for living systems is the energetic medium of water, which is provided by the Storm God. These deities make up the bare constituent components of life. Additionally, the god Telippinu represents fertility.

Rural food production was the basis of the Hittite empire, and the basis of rural food production is sunlight, water, and soil fertility. The agricultural conditions of the central Anatolian plateau are described as being quite harsh, with extreme seasons and relatively small tracts of land suitable for cultivation (Bryce 2002, Gorny 1989). The primacy of gods that represent the most crucial and basic elements for food production is quite reasonable. These major deities are universal gods in their attributes, but locally specific, often even to an extremely minute degree (Bryce 2002). Thus many locales (even a Storm God of the door-bolt of the palace) may have their own specific Storm God, each fulfilling their function within their realm. In addition to these locally specific universal gods, the entire landscape of central Anatolia was riddled with divinities: “every rock, mountain, tree, spring, and river had its resident god or spirit” (Bryce 2002, 135). These personifications were not figurative entities, but real cohabitants, benefactors and dangers to the humans. Life was not a simple question of binding the functional and impersonal non-human to human will, but a complex negotiation with specific landscapes and microclimates. Life depended on the success of these relationships.

These local spirits of rivers, springs (water spirits usually identified as female, mountains as male) and trees are portrayed as being the lowest status among a divine hierarchy that descends from the central deities and through many lesser ranking deities. It is difficult to know if this hierarchy precedes the Hittite imperial hierarchy, which in its own evidence portrays some local mountain deities, for example, as servants of the Storm God, an obvious self-reinforcing ‘as above, so below’ ideology for the legitimization of the ruling hierarchy. Whatever the case may be, the tracings of centralized organization trends in central Anatolia usually begins with the stable polities that facilitated trade with the old Assyrian merchants in the early second millennium BC (Gorny 1989, Larsen 1987, Hawkins 1996). It is unfortunate that the relationship of landscape-people-gods prior to its inscription in hierarchical modes is not available to us, assuming that there is possibly such a prior. Presumably the modality of centralized control and kingship was in place or emergent in the early second millennium trading polities. In the assumption of kingship, the king acts as a mediator between the gods and the people, and his state apparatus is one of structuring and codifying the relationships that people have to the divine/the land of Hatti. It may be erroneous to explore this aspect of kingship prior to the military, but I am doing so in favor of a continuity of ideas rather than any kind of ‘chicken or egg’ speculations about the military and economic aspects of centralized organization.

The Hittite Kingship is a classic case of divine right; he is an intermediary between humans and gods. He is the deputy of the gods on earth, and also the principal human representative to the gods (Beckman 1995, Bryce 2002). The imperial organization of rural agriculture is one of optimized land use, atomized distribution of land and extensive property law. Land was intensively cultivated in small, distributed plots of ownership that was not directly contiguous (Bryce 2002). Each landowner, small or large, was responsible for giving a portion of production to the state. Large landowners had to make certain that in addition to taxes being produced by all of their land, that sufficient labour was deployed to work the land to produce the necessary taxes. This included land which he had leased to tenant farmers. It is assumed that Temple establishments, with their ownership of extensive farm and pasture lands had similar requirements for maintenance of the productivity of the land, and possibly taxation as well (Bryce 2002). The King was interested in maximum production, as this prayer delivered on behalf of King Mursili II to the god Telipinu (who was the fertility god as well as Mursuli II’s tutelary god) reminds us: “To the king, queen, princes… give them future thriving of grain, vines, fruit, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, mules, asses—together with wild animals—and of human beings!” (Beckman 1995, 530-531). This thriving was seen as to the benefit of the gods as this reproach from Mursili II indicates:

"What have you done, o Gods? You have allowed a plague to enter the land of Hatti and all of it is Dying! Now there is no-one to prepare food and drink offerings for you! No-one reaps or sows The god’s fields, for the sowers and reapers are all dead! The mill women who used to make the Bread of the gods are all dead! All the corrals and sheepfolds from which cattle and sheep were chosen for sacrifice are empty, for the cowherds and shepherds are all dead!" (Bryce 2002, 78; Beckman 1995).

The King has translated the project of the gods, from their natural manifestations, through the labour of the people, into arrangements of complexity and discrimination of goods for the abstracted god. In order for the gods to be exalted in these purified and abstract forms, they must support the people that do these conversions of matter and labour. The temple of the god is one of the loci for aggregation of material and labor. The temples were rich and large, but still subordinate to the king. They were houses for the gods, but the gods were not confined to them, nor the idols that they housed. The gods were generally out and about doing their thing, being called into the temple homes and resident idol form in order to receive worship (Bryce 2002).

Once situated within the earthly casing of an idol, usually human forms, “made of precious and semi-precious metals—gold, silver, iron, bronze—or else of wood plated with gold, silver, or tin and sometimes decorated with precious metals like lapus lazuli” (Bryce 2002, 157). The body of the god made by humans for worship is a collection of rare and refined materials that resultant from considerable organization and labor, which is then pointed back at the divine Providence that allows such fine things. When a god inhabits its image, the image is washed, anointed, and fed with the most succulent and absolutely clean food. There is a tendency of segregation, purification, an attempt to essentialize the bounty of the landscape along orderly prescriptions of ceremonial text and behavior.

Here I will attempt to bring in the importance of militarization to the maintenance of this system., starting with the notion of ‘Great King’. A great king is a king who is subject to no other king and on relatively equal footing with the other Great Kings of their age (Beckman 1995). This may be an important factor in the support of the people of the land of Hatti for the Hittite Kings. The land of Hatti was not subjugated, although it was at times occupied, from Hattusili I onwards Hittite Kings called themselves ‘Great Kings’ (Hawkins 1996). Its gods were not taken and its people and produce not siphoned off to a less local great king. From the first Hittite Great King Hattusili I, onwards, the Hittites were an empire, using military power to absorb the Gods, goods and population of other lands into the support of the land of Hatti and its gods and people. The Hittite pantheon was constantly expanding with conquered gods, whose statues were relocated from their native lands to temple in the land of Hatti: No longer could they (conquered gods) be summoned by the conquered, for the material casings into which they entered had now been removed to another land. In effecting this transfer, the conqueror showed all due respect and deference to his newly acquired gods…For their goodwill had to be secured if henceforth they were to extend their protection over, and generally act in the interest of, the land of their new worshippers” (Bryce 2002, 135).

Not only were the gods of conquered lands collected, but the typical booty of precious metals and livestock; the moveable results of energy and material resource capture and refinement from other lands, the products, as well as bodies and food of the gods. The character of success in conquest is depicted in annals of Hattusili, the first Hittite Great Kings conquests: Thereupon I marched against Zalpa and destroyed it. I took possession of its gods and I gave three wagons to the Sun Goddess of Arinna. I gave one silver bull and one silver fist (rhyton) to the temple of the Storm God. The gods that were remaining I gave to the temple of Mezulla’ (Daughter of the Sun Goddess Arinna)” (Annals, I 9-14) (Bryce 2005, 69). This reveals the use of the temples of the Storm God and others as a state receptacle: …treasuries of spoils won in battle and dedicated to the god, storerooms for the equipment and garments used in festivals and rituals, rooms where divination was carried out. There were also archive rooms containing records stored on clay tablets; the Storm Gods temple was an important repository of vassal and international treaties, its most famous item being the ‘eternal treaty’ which Hattusili (III?) drew up with Ramses II (Bryce 2002, 249). Generally booty was divided between Hittites and their military allies. The people of the conquered land called ‘transportees’ and along with other booty were divided between the king and the troops to boost the labor pool of the Land of Hatti. The share that went to the troops probably became slaves. They could be sold on the market or put to work in the employ of the soldier. In addition to contributions of booty to the temples of the Storm God and his tutelary deity, at least some of the king’s share of transportees were given land and support to begin farming, for the benefit of the Gods of Hatti (Beckman 1995).

The mobilization of the Hittite military was supported by the collection of taxes and tribute. Grain that had been gathered as tax was stored in strategic caches throughout the homeland (Beal 1995, Bryce 2002). `Other than this intensively organized material support, each phase and level of military engagement involved systematic and specific invocation of the gods. Upon induction into military service, soldiers swore oaths before the gods. Extensive divination was performed to establish the plan for the campaign season, followed by a multitude of ritual preparations.

This constant contact and reference to the gods as the organizing and motivating parties did not end at the preparatory stages: “When the army reached the enemy’s land, another ritual would be performed in which the Hittites presented a legal justification for the war to the gods, together with a number of offerings” (Beal 1995, 551). All of this is perhaps most potently expressed with the Hittite expression that the tutelary god ‘goes before’ the king in battle (Bryce 2002, Beal 1995). The gods lead at each crucial step, through complex series of codified rituals. The Hittite ‘state’ is in the codification of ritual that gives structures to relationships between human and inhuman actors (that one is for the things class students). Oracles were consulted again for peace treaties, and treaties between Polities were sworn before the gods of each land (Beal 1995, Hawkins 1998).

Trevor Bryce (2005) notes that the Proclamation of King Telipinu (circa 1525-1500) “…stresses the close link between internal stability and external military achievement” (97). It may be the case that the functioning of the territorial state apparatus is dependent upon the projection outward and its corresponding returns. The prototypical character of Hittite military conquest is expressed again by Hattusili I: “…I destroyed these lands. I took possession of their property and filled my house to the limit with it (Annals, I 16-21)” (Bryce 2005, 72). Driven by his gods, the King draws the bounty of other lands to his own.

Although there is extensive evidence of internal strife and power struggles within the royalty and elite classes, and extensive involvement of these classes with state religion, what was the relationship of the common people of the Kingdom in support of the state monarchy? Participation in military service and its potential rewards probably kept many people involved, as well as the small farmer’s involvement with state sanctioned property ownership, or at lease the possibility of upward mobility (Bryce 2002). Another common answer to the question of the maintenance of the state is the regular intensive performance of the relationships of god-state and landscape in the extensive royal festivals.

Trevor Bryce (2002) counts “Up to 165 festivals were incorporated into the official calendar, and no doubt there were many local community and rural festivals which were never recorded in a permanent form”, as well as noting that the largest collection of a single genre of texts in the archives of Hattusha is festival texts (Hawkins 1996). These texts cover every dress, word, and action in meticulous sequence for each of the officially recorded festivals. The performance of the divine is elaborately encoded, each step is documented and regulated. These festivals were a performance of the enormous productive and creative power of the Hittite state. The ideology of bounty through religious devotion performs itself through the bounty exposed in the religious devotion (Zizek 1994). It is almost as if humans were enlisted by the gods in order to refine their multiplicity, to make specific aspects of themselves apparent and directed back on themselves.

Anyway, while the strict attention to recorded detail in the performance of state festivals does reveal something like a bureaucratic state apparatus on the royal and temple levels of society, what kind of relationship or imposition does this have on the general populace? Were the relatively exclusive focal points of the festivals the cores of great peripheral celebration? How much devotion was there to the parade of the King and the Gods? Was it an actual remapping of the lines of production and control across the kingdom? While the question of the outreach of state ideology in this form is still to me unresolved, there is evidence of other micro regulation of personal magic and worship in the textual remains.

Trevor Bryce (2002) notes that the ritual actions pervaded day to day life in all strata of Hittite society, and that one way that is known is through the cataloguing of all known rituals by the royal scribes. This is a case of official state normalization of a behavioral corpus or canon. There is much Hittite law devoted to correct uses of magic and ritual as well, an interesting example being in the correct disposal of spiritually contaminated paraphernalia after any number of kind of purification rituals in which a transference of contamination occurred. Incorrect disposal of spiritual hazardous waste “could be construed as a willful act of sorcery, liable for judgement before the king’s court with possible dire consequences” (Bryce 2002, 205). Again we can see how the spiritual and physical landscapes are somewhat inseperable, and seized upon as the focal point of the Hittite monarchy’s’ state apparatus.

References:

(188) Is it reasonable to assume this ‘as above, so below’ correspondence between the elite and the grass-roots? “The state-sponsored celebrations imposed considerable demands on the kingdom’s resources, in terms of time, personnel, equipment, and consumable items” (188). A focal point for resources “Procedures had to be followed in meticulous detail, for the slightest error could invalidate the entire process” (188). “There was no doubting that their performance at the prescribed times was essential to the welfare of the kingdom. They were the most tangible expression of the people’s devotion to their gods, and in terms of the agricultural year many were strategically scheduled to maximize divine goodwill at a time when this would have the most beneficial effect. The large numbers of festivals were obviously a reflection of the large array of gods in the pantheon. There was some scope for rationalization, achieved by dedicating certain festivals to a number of gods all at once, or to all the gods at once. But some gods required exclusive attention, and it was always better to play it safe and avoid the risk of offending any of them—which might well occur if they were not given the recognition they thought was their due” (188). But to what degree was this a populist affair in which all parties were encompassed by its necessity? Compare to current state of affairs in which the infrastructure of the state provides a rich life for the citizens. “The crucial times of the agricultural year were spring, between September and November, and autmn, between mid-March and mid-June, the times respectively of the sowing and the reaping (I think that he has this backwards)…these were the periods when a number of the major festivals were celebrated. So much depended on the benevolence…” of the gods: “—the fertility of the soil, the abundance of rain, the fruitfulness of the harvest, the increase in flocks and herds and game for hunting” (188-189) Texts are full of meticulous detail, repetition: organization; inscription of action The performance is a parade of the royalty and divinity “The festivals often involved visits to many holy sites, within the capital itself, in the open countryside, and to other centres of the Hittite realm” (189). Binding the landscape. “We can imagine the processional way lined with the city’s inhabitants and foreign visitors” (189) Can we really? And if so, how impressive or prescriptive is the festival for the life conceptions and work of these spectators. Perhaps it is that everyone is connected to the royalty and that relationship, through the trickle down of land tenure, the payment of taxes and the ubiquity of military service. How is the military service organized? What is the incentive for the soldiers? If they are truly the people of the land, and they have some positive experiences with warfare, then it makes sense for them to be somewhat subscriptive to the royal ideology. Visiting the various temples: welcoming dance, ‘cultic calls’, washing, libations at the holy places with the cella, feast for the god w/ very clean food, washing again, breaking of loaves

Gods, Kings, Power and Organisation

Kings and Gods are focal points of organisation for the ancient 'state', through physical effects of their bodies, ideological prowess, and monumental domination of the landscape. From the current popular and academic western viewpoint it is very easy to dismiss deified power as a "false conciousness" on the part of superstitious, unenlightened ancients (Eagleton 1991), but material remains show that the ideology these entities express "is no baseless illusion but a solid reality, an active material force which must have at least enough cognitive content to help organize the practical lives of human beings" (Eagleton 1991). I intend to examine the role of gods and deified kings in the formulation of the sociogeographical mileu and the legitimization of centralized power and control ('state' and 'state' interests) in the Hittite kingdom.

Preliminary Bibliography:

Bryce, Trevor; 2005. The Kingdom of the Hittites. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bryce, Trevor; 2002. Life and Society in the Hittite World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eagleton, Terry; 1991. Ideology: an Introduction. New York: Verso.

Gorny, Ronald L.; 1989. “Environment, archaeology and history in Hittite Anatolia,” Biblical Archaeologist, 52: 78-96.

Hawkins, David; 1996. "The Hittites and Their Empire," in Royal Cities of the Biblical World. Westerholz, J.G. (ed.). Jerusalem : Bible Lands Museum, 69-79.

Kuhrt, Amelie; 1998. "The Old Assyrian merchants," in Trade, traders, and the ancient city. Parkins, Helen and Christopher Smith (eds). London: Routledge, 16-31.

Larsen, Mogens; 1987. "Commercial networks in the Ancient Near East," in Centre and periphery in the ancient world. Rowlands, Michael; Larsen, Mogen and Kristian Kristiansen (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 47-56.

Larsen, Mogens; 1976. The old Assyrian city-state and its colonies. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag

Larsen, Mogens Trolle; 1977. “Partnerships in the Old Assyrian trade,” in Trade in the ancient Near East. Papers presented to the XXIII Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, University of Birmington 5-9 July 1976. John David Hawkins (ed.). London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 119-145.

Novak, Mirko; 2005. "From Ashur to Nineeh: The Assyrian Town-Planning Programme," Iraq LXVI, 177-185.

Stein, Gil; 1998. “Heterogeneity, power and political economy: some current research issues in the archaeology of Old World complex societies,” Journal of Archaeological Research 6: 1-44.