BRONZE AGE POWER PLAYERS

How Hittite kings forged diplomatic ties with a shadowy Greek city-state

- Eric A, POWELL

THE NAME PIYAMARADU has faded from history, but for some 40 years in the thirteenth century B.C., he was the nemesis of three successive rulers of the Hittite Empire, a Bronze Age kingdom that once spread across much of Anatolia, or present-day Turkey. At least a dozen cuneiform tablets unearthed in the royal archive of the Hittite capital of Hattusa speak darkly of this renegade. A powerful warlord, he was a disaffected Anatolian noble who had pledged fealty to the king before turning to banditry.

According to Hittite records, he pillaged the empire's westernmost possessions with impunity, carrying out devastating raids and then retreating to the shores of the Aegean, where he remained out of the Hittite rulers' reach. At some point, King Hattusili III (reigned ca. 1267-1237 B.C.) had had enough of Piyamaradu's predatory forays and lodged a firm diplomatic request with a fellow ruler to bring the meddlesome figure to heel. He addressed this missive to the king of Ahhiyawa, a great land to the west of Anatolia. In a surviving draft of the letter, he insists that his fellow ruler capture Piyamaradu or otherwise put an end to his attacks. Hattusili III further notes that earlier requests that the king of Ahhiyawa stop Piyamaradu had gone unheeded. What was not evident to Hattusili III-but is to modern scholars-is that the king of Ahhiyawa was likely powerless to stop Piyamaradu. "The Hittite kings fundamentally misunderstood what Ahhiyawa was," says Indiana University archaeologist Nicholas Blackwell.

Twenty-eight known Hittite tablets invoke the name Ahhiyawa, which scholars are now all but certain is related to "Achaean," a term Homer uses in the epic poem the Iliad to refer to all Greeks. Most now believe that the word was used by Hittites to describe the Mycenaean city-states of Late Bronze Age Greece, which flourished from around 1600 to 1200 B.C.